My experiments with lingua Français

Till 8th standard, I was spluttering and gasping in my mother tongue Tamil, mugging the poetry and vomiting it, in exams. In between all this, was getting tutored (tortured) by mom, who is a tough one when it concerns Tamil and paavakaai(bitter gourd).

All that couplets and pentalets gave me nightmares – dreaming of valuvar and avaiyaar paati holding me to ransom and letting me go only, if I told their tongue twisting poetry in a thiyagaraja baagwathar style. The Tamil madame kept on catching me, since I was good at other subjects and Tamil being my waterloo, she berated me at least twice in front of the whole class.

I wracked my brains, fueled by idlis and spicy groundnut chutney and decided that I got to choose either Hindi or French. I was anyway learning Hindi from a tutorial under Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha. Some fella told me that to do IAS, I got to know Hindi, as I might be posted in BIMARU states and the politicians will only speak in Hindi.

To escape all this, I told my dad on the sly, about the greatness of French and the need for the people around the world to learn French and the increasing opportunities for Indian engineers in France (wanted to be a engineer badly), but didn’t tell him that French needed no mugging and pretty easy too.

I reveled in French for four yrs, with added gusto and frolic. It was fun to read with all that cartoons. Read about a family - father and his daughter Sophie and his son in law- had them for 2 yrs. The grammar somewhat got me befuddled as usual – passé resonte and passé compose – left me decomposed. But as usual, mugging did wonders but this one was of small scale compared to Tamil grammar. I impressed my relatives by pouting some French words mixed with bhojpuri accent and they looked at me with awe.

Joined medical college, foreign languages were not the norm of the day. Ragging saw me all doughy and bluey and every darned senior knew that I wallowed in French in my higher secondary school.

We used to have condolence meetings, whenever any creatures passed away in our hostel’s vicinity. One catfish died, which had resided in our men’s hostel pond for the past 4 months and the lowly brethren – we - were summoned to hold one of that sort. All the folks who knew any language proficiently were beckoned and the seniors held the fish in one of our turkey towels and started the meeting with one senior giving a message in much easy language – da angrezi.

I was called to give a dynamic twist to all these benevolent proceedings with my lingua Français. I used a simple technique to solve the urgency of the hour. Used all nouns of French with an oi or re or ou and gave a twist with a nasal twang like the keralite and that saved my day and skin too.

There used to be lot of medical terms in French and I had fun asking people to pronounce rendezvous, peau d’orange and café au lait etc., for which ppl used to pronounce like rendessvoose etc and me used to go on chuckly spree. Remember folks something called karma – it caught up with me in form of a phirengee.

So far so good I thought, but came a Swedish gal who threw spanner into my works. She was a exchange student from Upsala university, Sweden and she had grades in French and I tried wishing her by saying bonjour mademoiselle - which was truncated at the earliest lisp of mine and also gave her few fits of laughter and her first entertainment in Indian soil too. : (((

And to add some salt to the insult, was my friend who told me not to speak in French, as she was not impressed anyway with my pranks and French not gonna do any wonders to change that fixed notion of hers. Had a déjà vu feeling.

Presently whispering French words occasionally with some caution only – all for my redeemer from Tamil and my past time for all these twelve years.

Even now, if I come across French words in some literary works – remember the joies de vivre I had avec lingua Français. :)))