Changes are the order of life

“Changes are the order of life”

This is a quote my 8th grade English teacher, K.C John, had written on the blackboard.

English has always fascinated me. I don’t speak just as well as I write. It has always been like that.

While studying in Bombay, we kids always spoke in Hindi with each other. Then we moved to Bangalore and  my brother and I studied at Baldwin's. It was a very reputed school and actually I think that is where I picked up speaking in English. You know how as kids we would adapt to a language. Even with spending a summer in Kerala, I would start speaking Malayalam.

Back to my 8th grade story,I had joined my brother’s school in Kerala. St. Mary’s. It was just after my second stint at Mumbai. Naturally it took a while to adapt to both English and Malayalam. St. Mary”s was a “Gulfan school”. My 11th grade Commerce stream class only had children who had come back from the Gulf. By 9th and 10th, I got so acquainted in Malayalam that I was always speaking it. I was living with my grandparents then, plus friends at school, I gradually started speaking only Malayalam. 

In 11th grade, this set of boys from Dubai and Bahrain, they used to make fun of my English. One day I went home and cried and my grandfather introduced me to the Editorial section of the daily newspaper, “The Hindu”. That is where I fell in love with writing.

Then I moved to college in Bangalore. There again, fresh from my stint in Kerala, I again started finding it difficult to speak English. I studied in a girl’s college. There the girls didn’t just laugh but actually started bullying me. All my friends in my hostel would speak Hindi, so I didn’t have a problem there. I happened to be friends again with 11th grade boys from the Gulf and they would also laugh at me. So after college, I continued staying in Bangalore with my mom. My father had passed away, so it was just the two of us. But now since I spoke English from my college, I didn’t find it difficult to speak English at my work place, because basically I “knew” English as my foundation, I only had problems communicating! I have scored higher than all those boys’ combined scores in English in my boards.

So after college, I used to keep BBC, and I would emulate how they are speaking, the enunciations, diacritics and all!

This is where my obsession with English started, later on in life I have irritated people with English spellings, grammar and pronunciations. But my intention was to only teach them so that they don’t repeat it somewhere else and get laughed at, because I know that feeling to well.

Now after my recent mini stroke, I find it difficult to find words and spellings etc. Yesterday I asked my mother the spelling of “absence”, because I could not find my son’s absence information form.

The other day I couldn’t remember if “discontinue” ended with u or e. 

When my Pappa was between jobs for a brief period in Saudi, I wrote a letter to him writing “Changes are the order of life” and he faxed a note over at the tours and travels called Olympia. No subject line, “just this: “Chakki, you are the best thing that happened to me in life! And I really mean it!” I got that note because the uncle there guessed it’s me. Because it was written in English.

Now you know why my blog’s name is “Say it like you mean it”! I know my brain’s gradually deteriorating, I’m diagnosed with speech ataxia as a residual from my stroke, Speech ataxia according to google is this: Speech ataxia usually refers to ataxic dysarthria, a speech disorder caused by problems in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps coordinate movement. 

So is my mental health deteriorating too, and the only thing that keeps me going is knowing for a fact that changes are the order of life, because I might forget people, names and memories but I’m alive until I’m breathing. I will fight this too and emerge stronger!

I’m sorry lately most of my blogs have been depressing. Here’s to positive vibes!