When a cat tries to bark...

26 years....I've been taught how to mold and twist my tongue so as to speak what I always assumed to be the funniest and the toughest language in the world, English. Boot – Boots, tooth – tooths….oops, teeth. Then came the fact that I was born in India, lived on Indian food and breathed Indian air and so my tongue went through another roller coaster ride picking up Hindi. I studied in a boarding school in North Bengal tucked away in the Himalayas; English is what we breathed out of compulsion. At a very early age though, my father decided to move to Nepal (he is a teacher); a new country, new culture and new people obviously meant a new language. I remember playing with kids even though I had no clue what they were talking about. Under the rack again, I had to pick up the language and did so pretty quick. Schooling done and dusted, I moved to Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal for college. A culture biased, hustling and bustling city recognized non-Bengalis as aliens; if not speaking then at least understanding Bengali thus became a survival weapon for me against the localities. A few years later, mid 2010 to be precise, I moved to Pune to lead an Asia Pacific team handling some work for Dell. Chinese, I thought is my next challenge and so it all began….

A few websites, a couple of phone calls, a form filled and I found myself in a classroom in Symbiosis Institute of Foreign and Indian Languages (SIFIL) with a man in front of the class asking me “Why Chinese?”. Good question, I told myself. It took me a few weeks to figure out what I had signed up for. I thought I’d learn alphabets of a new language, flaunt it in front of my friends and read Chinese websites and newspapers. Alas, it was a short dream. Chinese, I came to understand, had no alphabets; every word was a new word (called Characters) and there were close to 55 thousand characters. “A native Chinese knows 8 thousand characters” barked my professor, “so don’t think this is going to be easy, you have to work hard”. “How difficult can this be?” I asked myself with a grin of over confidence and bucket full of ego. I had my answer in the next few weeks. “Ba”, which as an Indian I’d pronounce with a ‘b’ is now pronounced as “pa” which means father, the number eight, target and is also a modal particle depending on how it is pronounced. ‘didi’ which means elder sister for any Indian is now pronounced ‘titi’ which means younger brother!! “Nope, this is not what I asked for” I grumbled at myself. This is way more difficult than I ever anticipated. “I’ll remember the words”, I convinced myself soon and it won’t be long before I start speaking and writing Chinese. English grammar is like eating bread and butter for me; my heart however shattered like a clay vase on a marble floor when I came to know that Chinese had its own grammar. Unlike English, the preposition has to come before the verb and the adverb has to come before the verb, precise time words have to come in the beginning or immediately after the subject and the bigger time always precedes the smaller time. Phew!! Where is this all used? Another planet!! I was exhausted before the show even began.

What followed was the ride of my life. I have never felt my tongue take such shapes, never knew that the amount of air that I exhale while pronouncing a word would change its meaning and rather sadly never knew that my name would be pronounced tanthan and my country would be called Yindu. What would Mahatma Gandhi think if the president of China shook hands with him and said ‘Ni hao Kandi’ (that’s how Gandhi is pronounced in Chinese).

The ride is still on and while most of you are still snoring at 9 am on a Sunday morning; Rohit, Pragya and me are in Hanyu land. Battered, bruised, ripped and half buried in the agony of learning a new language, it indeed, at times, makes me feel like a cat trying to bark.