Kallola

Emirates Parent Plus. November 2010. The vagaries of the English language have always been fodder for much entertainment. While non-native speakers continue to cook its broth most relentlessly, only those who have had personal experience with the in-house battering of this phonetically challenged dialect, mother tongue, or not, can understand that the murder spree of Queen’s English is a heritage that is as old as the very origins of its speakers. History not-withstanding, the scope for sheer variety underscores the speaking fraternity of its faithfuls, where strong accents make for individual languages in their own right. So while there is the Geordie or the Brummie from its lands’s own, we heb our own ramifications, that stand proud, as far as the empire stretched then and as rampant as its influence has spread since. Compounded by phonetic similarities between words among these languages, while they hold no semantic parity, the results of their combinations become epics in th...

Writing came to me because of my mother. She was always in the limelight, compering events and organising them. Watching her, I started doing the same with my dolls. I would orate to them, teach them alphabets and recite my own four-line poems. I can’t really pin-point when writing became my own hobby. What I do know is that it gives me a release. There is a sense of finality when I put my thoughts down on paper. The moment they are manifest in ink, my thoughts cease to be mere cranial processes. They become my expressions. I like that. Two years of copywriting taught me, to an extent, the craft of succinct writing. Considering an average ad. space of 40cc where even nine words of copy were nine too many, crisp writing was really a mode of survival. Such training however left me quite inept at writing anything longer than 100 words. Even at this moment, I find myself straining to stretch my sentences, adding more thoughts and at the same time trying to avoid verbosity and putting y...