Linguaphobia

I am terrible at languages. It's the truth. As I love telling anyone who will listen, I was born in Chennai, did my primary schooling in Pune, secondary schooling in Bangalore, engineering in Tamil Nadu, am basically a Malayali and have lived for six months in Haryana. The number of languages which I can speak very fluently - 1.5. The 0.5 factor arises from my ability to speak Hindi respectably. The 1 factor arises from my complete confidence in speaking the English language.

It's not an achievement I'm extremely thrilled about or phenomenally proud of. It just happens to be so. It's a fact that I'm terrible at languages and that's it! As simple as that.

It quite irritates me that this world speaks so many different languages and my mouth just refuses to contort itself into the myriad ways required for each language.

Also, if one thinks about it, a language simply requires another person to have a phenomenal memory. Every word in the Englsih language could have a corresponding other word in another language. It's like taking the Oxford dictionary and multiplying it by two. I've gotten myself to roundabout half the Oxford dictionary in 23 years of existence. To expect me to double that number (effectively) in any amount of time less than 10 years is ridiculous. It simply is impossible! And the fact of the matter is that I haven't stayed in a single city for more than 10 years. May that be my humble and feeble excuse.

And this may be a good time to pay my respects to all those who speak more than 1.5 languages.