Angrez chale gaye...

R,

Pro travel tip - fly on a Tuesday night and you'll have a near-empty flight. I'd three free seats to my right (with an aisle), and one free to my left. Oho. So great. I sat down comfortably and watched ten movies back to back, only occasionally interrupted by a screaming baby. Every flight has at least one, even the ones that leave on a Tuesday night.

Here's the weird thing - I didn't hear a single Indian parent on the flight talk to their kid in any language other than English. How did that happen? I get that the kid lives in Canada/Britain since it was a Toronto-London flight, but can English really be the language you talk to them and your spouse in ALL the time? It's kind of depressing, and all kinds of limiting. English doesn't have plum descriptions like 'tu baingain hai ki anda hai re' or 'podaaaanga' or 'plum,' for that matter. How can you ever fully express yourself?

It just feels like you'd instinctively respond in your mother tongue when surprised/angry... like in that Birbal story where the priest who speaks 14 languages with the fluency of a native screams out in Telugu when woken suddenly in the night with thorns (it may have been a Tenali Raman story, and it may have been some other language, but the point's the same)... but nope, even when a kid threw his spoon of food at his mum, she just said, "We don't do that, sweetie." 

!!!

Whaaaaat?

She didn't say it with the distinctive twang of someone who'd grown up abroad either. Is it just more socially acceptable to talk English in public, especially when you're outside India? Should that even matter one way or the other? 

I worry that could be us - not because we don't speak our mother tongues without caring who's listening, but because we have different native languages. Maybe I'll talk to our kid in Tamil, and you can talk to him in Kannada, and we'll both toss in some Hindi and some Telugu and a bucketload of English. It may confuse the poor thing (especially given my Telugu sucks), but I think it'd be preferable to only speaking English.

A.