yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

Learning languages together This piece finds place in the Deccan Herald . Thanks to the team there. Thanks are due to colleagues for being together during the journey, the questions, and sharing not only confusions but also memories.  Thanks Richa for the comment on the draft.  Some time back we initiated capacity building sessions for teachers at our school. These sessions focus on English and Hindi; languages.   10 out of the 15 teachers at the school teach languages; they are the participants. Our school is located in peri-urban eastern Uttar Pradesh; these teachers converse in Bhojpuri. Today, while it is not easy to pinpoint what has worked and what has not gone right, it is not difficult either to discern the positive energy these sessions have or the learning they enable. Looking back and gleaning through the journey is fun; we have experienced more learning, more surprises than we had bargained for.   Sessions. Together the 11 of us walked the langua...

Language conundrum This piece appears in The Hindu . Thanks to the team there. Can two languages walk the road together – hold each other’s hands and grow? Can we begin with our schools? Two colleagues recently went for some workshops. The organisations they applied to sent not only the application forms but also the follow-up emails in multiple languages. The entire communication was in two languages — English and Hindi. This set me thinking. Is this the way out of the Hindi-English conundrum? We are part of a Hindi-medium school in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and like many other schools in the landscape, we are grappling with the conundrum. Over the years we have either pitched one language against the other or as an alternative to the other, and, as a corollary, have been left struggling at both. I talk about Hindi, but I would hazard a guess that the scenario is not very different with other regional languages and dialects as well. In other words, ‘Hindi’ can well be replaced with ‘regi...

  Few months with your creations Thank you for teaching me Hindi over these past months. Many evenings I recite your poems aloud – for mumi and I – after, of course, reading them multiple times. Despite your poems conveying so much they contained few words that I had to seek the dictionary for. This despite my abysmal levels of awareness in Hindi. You helped remove my fear of the language. Emboldened me to go deeper. This way you enabled me to take up another journey with Hindi. A language I love to converse in but for long time have been wary of the written form. As I write I recall going for Gujarati instead of Hindi during school days as well. You made me realise that poetry could be simply written. That poetry can be close to life, life around us, and not just an intellectual pursuit. Poetry was not only about love, epics, flowers, loss but also about day to day lives. Lives of people around us, trees, and others. Lives perhaps not much talked about. This simplicity made...