A few months back we had the lovely company of Pratiks and Anikets as honored guests with us in Hyderabad bringing with them a whiff of Bengal and KGP.
All of us conversed in English which is the mother tongue of none of us.
Mrs Aniket & I discovered that Wodehouse novels are our Soothing Pills. And we happen to love Ukridge. So I went to town displaying my intimate knowledge of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, pronouncing Featherstonehaugh in all his glory as:
"Feather-stone-haa!".
Mrs Aniket corrected my pronunciation as: "Fanshaw".
She did well. I liked the short pronunciation.
Just now I Googled for it and found this hilarious entry:
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....The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonehaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: "feather-stun-haw", "feerston-shaw", "feston-haw", "feeson-hay" or (for those in a hurry) "fan-shaw"......http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070403125424AALq2ye
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Mrs Aniket must have learned her English from a Convent School in the early 1990s; I learned it in the early 1950s in my Village School.Youth of nowadays (like readers of this blog...yes...there ARE some!) just cannot imagine how gloriously we learned our English: it used to be taught in Telugu, our Mother Tongue (except by my HM Father in School Leaving Class XI).
In the early 1950s the youngsters in our sprawling State of AP capable of speaking a single sentence of flawless English (however they mispronounce it) could be counted on the fingers of our Arch-Archer Ekalavya (the chap who had his right thumb cut off by his Online-Guru...SOME Gurus in Hamara Bharat Mahan...).
The trouble we had in our Village School with English was twofold:
1. Its spelling: It is not a phonetic script. Unlike German and most Indian languages, you write something and read it something else...like my Featherstonehaugh.
2. German and our Mother Tongues, unlike English, have scant respect for our verbs: we shove them towards the end of sentences. With the ghastly result that when asked to translate from Telugu to English most of us wrote:
"I yesterday Calcutta to went"
and get zero marks. Only one student had the gumption to get up and quarrel with our Teacher that he was writing English in Poetic Order.
One of my schoolmates, a child prodigy in Math, scored 100% in Math and sundry other subjects but got 23% in English and failed grievously in his SSLC. In subsequent attempts in MSMs (March-September-March) he kept up and improved his scores in all subjects but his marks in English dwindled in a rapidly-converging-series to ZERO...a Case of Acute Allergy. He gave up after seven attempts and became a District Player in Chess and Cricket...a weird combo. (His name is Susarla Srinivasa Sastry...all Sastrys are weird..).
But I was lucky.
English is in our genes and my good Father taught me English from my age 4 and saw to it that good story books in English are at my fingertips. Whenever possible, he used to make me sit in his English Class of my elder sister two years senior to me. Once, he threw a question to the Class: "Tell me a sentence with 'after' used as an adjective instead of adverb, expecting the answer: "The cat ran after the mouse". The whole Class of us Village Kids fell silent, but since I read those Story Books, I stood up and replied: "The Cathedral is named after St Paul". He fell silent for a couple of seconds and asked me to Sit Down.
Thereafter he never asked me to sit in Senior's Classes since, I guess, it was not prudent to antagonize Senior Students.
Now I am sure that the number of English-Speaking Youth in our AP seeking jobs in BPOs sprouting all over, after a 3-month Voice Training in Hyderabad, far exceeds the number of English-Speaking Youth in England, where my medico nephew serving for long in their NHS says proficiency in Punjabi and Gujerati is compulsory for Doctors...proving Parshuram prescient in his Ulat-Puran written almost a century ago.
In our SSLC English Text-Book we had a wonderful Lesson by the famous Historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar titled: "Why should we learn English?". I just fell in love with it and got it by heart without any intention to do so. I attempted a Question on that lesson (we had Choice) in my SSLC Exams and got a State First score of 85% when the State Average was hovering around 15% (Village Schools mostly). I would have loved to meet RCM during my Bengal life-term, but unfortunately he passed away in 1980; the Rest of Bengal asking: "Why should we learn that wretched English?"
I am sorry for Bengal:
They abolished English from her Village Schools for over 30 years!
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1 comment:
Aniket writes:
"The "Fanshaw" was not something my wife learnt in school. We found it in the introduction to a Wodehouse omnibus. Otherwise we had no way of imagining how "Featherstonehaugh" would be pronounced by the British."
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