West meets south

My collegue David Blackmore is a unique personality. You and I have the compulsion of learning English. We strived hard to learn that for our bread (dosa) n butter (chatni).

Though he is born in Wales, he grew interest in Asian languages. He speaks Tamil, Sanskrit and a very good Hindi. He studied all these languages in Singapore and Malaysia. When asked why not in India? He said it’s not a good place to learn these languages. Though I speak Hindi in broken pieces, his Hindi is like the Ramayana serial, grammatical and clear.

He says that Sanskrit is a very good language and the words in Sanskrit are seen in Italian, Spanish and many European languages. I can see my colleagues feel shy to talk to him in Hindi because theirs’ is not good Hindi. He watches Hindi movies and what he cannot digest is the songs and it’s a laughter whenever a hero and a heroine sing at each other in there romantic moods.

Hey listen! He is not only inquisitive of Indian languages, but also politics. He says he grew interest in Indian politics when he heard about Lallu Prasad Yadav from his Bihari girl friend.

Like Europeans, he does not drink only the coffee decoction, but also with some sugar and milk like us. He says he has always had Asian friends, but could not forget one Tamilian named Shankar. Shankar was his classmate in school but without a reason he went and complained to the teachers that David is a homosexual and from then he keeps a ruler scale of distance with tamilians alone.

Last one week, he was after me with a ‘Tamil Illakanam’ book asking me to teach him ‘Illakanam’. I blushed saying it is actually very easy and changed the conversation Jus like Dat!!!