Hindi… Kyon?
Hindi has been Soham’s Achilles’ Heel from the day he entered school. Knowing the fact that neither is he interested in studying Hindi, nor is he so good at it, we usually ignored how he read/wrote or how much he scored. In fact Hindi study time is actually comedy time in our house because we have a lot of fun hearing what he reads and particularly reading what he writes.
But WHY did he have to take Hindi? Why not Telugu for his first language (because we are in Telangana)? Given a choice, Soham would ask “WHY LANGUAGE” because he just doesn’t like studying languages, but then since that is not an option, Hindi it was. WHY? Because my mother (who is from Karnataka, did her schooling in Kannada medium) believed that she would be able to manage to teach him Hindi easily, compared to Telugu. Why would she have to take the responsibility of teaching him? Because according to her I don’t take his career/academics seriously enough! Not that she is one Hindi pandit or anything but hey nothing wrong in believing you are one, isn’t it? A lot of this confidence also came from her assumption that my sister who finished her Hindi Praveena (writes poems in Hindi and all!) would support her in teaching Hindi to Soham! And my sister also strongly supported her saying Hindi is easier than Telugu (grammar apparently) which is confusing because I never understood why we need to attach gender (binary) pronouns to inanimate objects and often got my maatras wrong. I mean why is a pen male and chair female? (hope I got the genders right!) However, thankfully Hindi was not my first language so I managed to not let Hindi ruin my “career”.
Nevertheless, whatever is not meant to be will never be. My sister got married and settled in Pune, now in Bengaluru and Soham ended up being as good as I am in Hindi. Online classes made it even worse where I myself am clueless what the teacher is trying to teach/ asking children to do, leave alone explain to him. Multiple instances I even called the teacher in frustration asking why she cannot explain the meaning of difficult words like Anucched, vicched etc., and she said children in 6th standard are “expected” to know these things. Why should we South Indians be so proficient in Hindi anyway, huh?
We have tried all possible ways of trying to get him interested in Hindi but he is as strong as the activists fighting against calling Hindi our National Language and refuses to learn it. I also made peace with it but my mother still has hope and probably dreams that one day she would see him reading a Premchand novel or poems written by the likes of Mythilisharan Gupt etc., so she keeps prodding me to counsel him that he should take his academics “seriously”.
So today I was having one of those so called very serious conversations with him and I said, Soham in your 10th standard, no matter how well you fare in other subjects, if you fail in Hindi then there is no point, you would still not clear your 10th, to which he answered “Amma, how many marks do you need to pass in Hindi?”. I started laughing loudly and he had a puzzled look on his face and asked again seriously “Amma tell me how many marks?” and I said maybe 40/100 to which he heaved a huge sigh of relief and said, “Aah OK, 40/100 I can manage.”
And then my mother started her routine counselling session about how he shouldn’t settle for less, must aim high, practice more etc., blah blah blah…
Note: I am not against studying languages, in fact I believe it is important to learn languages, read and appreciate literature (I myself have grown up reading Telugu and English literature). But I guess not all people are good at picking up languages, studying them and they should be let go I guess (also spare the parents please) :(
On a lighter note, I would be disappointed (because I would miss all the fun) if he stops mutilating the spellings, suddenly shifts to writing answers in Dakhni… I guess :D