As promised this post would be about my "intersection" with English :)
Those who know me must have "derived" or "calculated" about my command over the English language.
I wasn't as "negative" with the most common language of the world as I am at "t=0". In fact, I started my schooling in a state board school and therefore I couldn't manage equally good marks in English too. But then English or for that matter any language was more like a Social Science subject where we were only expected to rattafy those standard answers from the digest and puke in the exam!
My encounters started when I switched to a CBSE school; there I realized two things -
• My 1 + 1 = 2 is very good
• My ABCD is screwed.
What started as simple integration problem eventually turned to a partial differential (defect) in me. And my loves for the language become stronger as I grew old (or should I say young). By the time I realized that the "limit is tending to zero", I had passed 12th standard and the "probability" of getting it back was equal to getting both heads and tails in a single toss of an "unbiased" coin !
Not that I had lost time during college but then the "relative velocity" drifted me away from the thought of improving my English. The "universal set U" only had 10% students from English medium school and hence I was hovering around the 95%ile mark in terms of proficiency over the language.
Again at "t=graduation" I dropped to somewhere around 40!!!
By the time I joined TCS, I was at a stage where I started blaming the language and its propagators for creating so much hype about "English". I made myself believe and even preached the usage of English or any language as a means of communication. At the same time I made sure that I restrict myself to the usage .00001% of English vocabulary I had command over, and at the same time minimizing any grammatical mistakes. I would also make a confession here; I still frame the sentence in Hindi and then try to convert it in English.... Not word to word but with "95% confidence level" in an "integer" form.
Some of my achievements or accolades received are -
1. I once said a statement - "Balaji you check the front, I will take care of the back".... I meant frisking a colleague but the others thought otherwise.
2. "I have to get my girl friend married next year" ... I meant "I am marrying her next year".
3. I still don't understand what is the exact difference between effect, affect and all those similar sounding confusing words.
4. I managed to score a 18%ile in CAT 2007 Verbal Section, Actually my SimCAT scores had a perfectly normal distribution with zero excessive kurtosis (40+- 35%ile)
5. I still don’t understand what’s the difference between "I and X" and "X and I" or "X and Me"
6. I still don’t watch English Movies or listen to English Songs simply because of the fact that I cannot comprehend such accent “biased” language.
Just because I am making all the confessions, it doesn't mean I regret being a dha or paidal in English...
Some of the conversation I have encountered are -
A friend once said, I was just "thinking aloud" - bole to zorse soch rahi thi
Another one once said, Stay out of my fucking business - Mere *^^$(# dhande se dur raho
If you want to read some more (not original) follow this link.
So now what??? As I said I have accepted my limitations and hence I am living with it, but I do make sure that whenever I hear a new word I try and remember the meaning and usage of the same. That ways I am improving at snail's pace and my friends enjoy the five minute humour.
P.S I have tried showcasing my Math skills by deliberately using substitutes which are mathematically similar (in quotes). Not that I am a mathematics genius, but I am decent I feel.
~Aniruddha
