Skip to main content

English and Personality


“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.” Professor Higgins tells that to Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion.

“Does speaking well in English add a sparkle to one’s personality?” asks Indispire Edition 145. 


I have seen the foulest of souls speak the best of English.  And they came in the name of a religious cult and its sanctimonious morals and mores.  I have seen rustic people with no knowledge of English behave with poise and sagacity.  The opposite is true too.  All generalisations verge on falsehood and the assumption that speaking well in English can make one a sparkling personality is at best a pretty joke.  The theme is listed under “humour” at Indispire and so this post of mine is perhaps out of sync. 

Personally, I am a lover of English simply because it is the language of the world rather than that of The Bible.  More than that, it is the language which brought to me my favourite writers such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, Kazantzakis and Camus.  It is the language of the Internet and its ocean of knowledge. 



English has little to do with the sparkle of anyone’s personality.  The great secret of the sparkling personality, if I may paraphrase Shaw’s words in the same drama mentioned above, is not speaking in English or any particular language, but having the sparkle in your heart, having the same heart’s language for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in heaven where there are no third class carriages and one soul is as good as another.
Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. PurbaNovember 29, 2016 at 11:20 AM

    Sadly, it's an enabler. We still equate good education, family background to well-spoken English.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. जितेन्द्र माथुरNovember 29, 2016 at 1:51 PM

      Said right Purba Ji.

      Delete
    2. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 29, 2016 at 8:23 PM

      I agree. Our education system is to blame. Make government schools accountable and effective and see the revolution that will happen.

      Delete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरNovember 29, 2016 at 1:53 PM

    Very well said Sir. Indeed very well. I had my formal education in my mother-tongue (Hindi) but English (as a subject in my curriculum) always fascinated me. Now I love English as much as I love Hindi and I am fond of expressing myself in both these languages. All the same, English-speaking should not be equated to superiority of any kind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 29, 2016 at 8:44 PM

      I too did my entire schooling in my mother tongue. But I grew up 'consuming' more English simply because it is the global language, the language which gave me certain advantages in mu pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge is power and hence may give one an edge over some others. But sparkle? Well, that's a different matter.

      Delete
  3. sunaina sharmaNovember 29, 2016 at 4:57 PM

    Yes, the sparkler is the heart and not the language......I was waiting to read your take on the topic.....I love the language too, but don't feel that it makes you shine.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 29, 2016 at 8:45 PM

      I am quite busy these days and hence my post was written in a hurry. But glad you like the line of argument.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more