Identity

No, not featuring John Cusack. This is about me.

An observation I have made about myself is that I speak in different accent and style with different people I meet. Perhaps it's because of the environment I grew up in, being in a Bengali family settled in Trivandrum. I was exposed to people who spoke in many different styles. For instance, my father speaks good English, good Bengali and good Hindi. My mother speaks good Bengali and English, and learned all her Malayalam and most of her Hindi after marriage. Most of this rubbed off on me and my elder brother, and naturally I learned to speak like them. I went to a school full of Malayalee students and Malayalee teachers; Malayalam was a compulsory language to learn until the fifth standard, and I had no choice but to learn to speak the language. Not that I wouldn't have anyway, since people spoke it everywhere.

I had Hindi teachers in school who were Malayalees, and would speak Hindi with very strong Malayali accents, English teachers who spoke the language with effortless perfection but couldn't speak Malayalam without a north Indian accent, Malayali science teachers who spoke English with a local accent and so on. Then there were the locals who spoke Malayam with different accents depending on which part of Kerala they were from. The list could go on for ages.

Add to this all, my older brother's and my habit of mimicking real life noises while playing with toys as kids. Screech of tires as a car skids of the parapet, hiss of poisonous snakes, boom of bombs exploding; there's no limit to what a child can imagine when it's at play.

What this all led to was an ability to speak with different people in an accent which was very close to his or hers. For instance, if a mallu asked me what time it was, I'd probably say 'Zevun Thyettie', getting the accent dead right to the last roll of the tongue. If someone in Pune asked me the same question, 'sewan thurrty' automatically comes out. When I speak to my friends from Bangalore or Kerala, my sentences are invariably festooned with words like 'macha' and 'da', which are commonly used among friends of similar ages in those parts. I had spent a week in Delhi last winter while attending a cousin's marriage, and I found myself adding 'ji' at the end of my sentences while speaking with locals.

I really don't know how my accent automatically changes when I converse with people from different places. Perhaps that's how I am; perhaps at some level I begin to speak like people around me because it brings about a subconscious sense of interactive comfort; although none of it is done intentionally.

Most States in India are formed based on the language that majority of the people of that region speak. Perhaps, in this system, my being born in a State, into a family which speaks a different language has negated the necessity of having a 'linguistic identity'. Regardless of the many surprised and inquisitive eyebrows that my family and I have answered to, I take this as a boon, a gift. To be able to understand and relate to at least two regional cultures and languages in a country so culturally rich and diverse; where millions of others like me are not so fortunate to have experienced, or to be able to experience the best of different worlds.