Once upon a time a young man hated English, and then one day…

There was a time when I hated the language of English twice as much as I despised mathematics. I chose to study in a Tamil medium school though my father, who was a Tamil pundit, had insisted that I should study in an English medium school. I could not remember the spellings of even simple English words. The construction of even a single sentence was a herculean task for me. A friend of my father, a Tamil zealot who used to visit our house, often added fuel to the fire of my aversion to English by lecturing about the need to do away with English. “You should follow your father’s footsteps and become a teacher of our great language. We were liberated from the British but remain slaves to their language.”

Then a new English teacher named Balakrishnan walked into my school — and my life. He himself was young, hardly 25 years of age, and fresh from college.

On the very first day he removed the prejudice I had nursed until then against this wonderful language. Though young and seemingly inexperienced, he could cast a spell on the entire class. Everyone willingly surrendered the ears to him. What was bitter became sweeter than the sweetest. From the last bench where I used to sit and day-dream, I moved to the front bench during his class alone. To make a person love a thing which he hated earlier is not an easy task. Names such as Wordsworth and R.L. Stevenson had meant nothing to me before he became our English teacher. His predecessor had failed to create any interest for English in our hearts. His voice and his insensitive, wooden face used to drive us mad. We disliked him, and disliked English also along with him.

“You cannot write and speak without reading,” said Mr. Balakrishnan one day. He asked me to read Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (1948). He told me to read Somerset Maugham’s novels, he advised me to read R.K. Narayan’s works, which had a native fragrance, and recommended strongly that I read The Hindu daily. I became a member of British Council Library in Madras, a virtual goldmine of books. I read Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Liza of Lambeth and The Moon and Six Pence a dozen times each. When I asked Mr. Balakrishnan about the extent to which he was satisfied with my proficiency in English, he said: “Now you start writing letters to the Editor of The Hindu.”

I wrote letter after letter to the Letters to the Editor column of The Hindu about this and about that. Those days there was no computer. I wrote and rewrote several times with pen, got it typed and retyped at typewriting institutes and sent them by post. Nowadays you have software to take care of spellings and grammar to a large extent. Those days I could not write anything without keeping a Concise Oxford dictionary open by my side.

In three months I wrote about 30 letters, but none of them was published. “Don’t give up. Keep writing. The more you write the more you can write,” were the words of encouragement from Mr. Balakrishan.

He was right. One fine morning when I opened The Hindu and went to the editorial page, there stood out to my surprise my letter about the relation between one’s memory power and the matters one is deeply involved/interested in. “You cannot forget things/incidents you love,” I had concluded. When I saw my name in print, my heart leaped. I felt like the winner of a bumper prize.

I took the copy of the newspaper to school and showed my letter to Mr. Balakrishnan. “Well done. Keep it up,” he said and patted me. Other teachers who came to know of my ‘achievement’ also congratulated me. This happened in the late-1960s. So much water passed under bridge since then. Mr. Balakrishnan died prematurely even before he reached his 30s.

As for me, I kept on writing to the letters section, whether or not they were readily accepted for publication. Only one out of say 50 clicked and that was enough for me. Now at the age of 64, I remain a humble student.

mr.m.r.anand@gmail.com