I'm a very lucky man. In more ways than one, but the one I've really come to recognize as the most potent is my knowledge of the many languages I've had the pleasure of knowing. I'm able to speak up to six or seven, but one at a time, three have been native for me.
Malayalam, you could say, was my first love. We have a history longer than most marital affairs today can claim, and we parted good friends. We should perhaps have not parted at all, but we had to, and much as I wish we could stay friends, I'd be wrong in saying that I still have as much command over it as I've ever had.
Hindi and me, we've had a short affair. We barely knew each other, yet we had a good time.
Both of them lost, due to the increasing influence of English, the one that seems my eternal companion.
Yet I am forever happy to have known them, simply because I could realize how varied the thoughts of men are, coming from different parts of the world. I believe men are at their most transparent when they philosophize, which is perhaps why the ways of truly philosophizing varies so widely between languages. I have listened to ghazals, musings of great poets such as Vayalar, and though there is as much of a gulf between them as there is between the works of Wordworth and Bob Dylan, I count myself lucky to have been apprentices to the words of great men. To read them, and realize that all has not been said, to read them and to marvel... at beauty. For someone I do not know once said, 'Its hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world'.
But this post would be incomplete without my bellyaching and complaining about the way things have become. I do not live in the past, yet it does not take insight or even eyesight to realize what we have turned into. Inconsequential creatures, our gazes are as brief as our appetites for knowledge, and we while away our time 'tweeting' or emoting while words fall back to the apples they came from, at least those of us with them anyway.
Lost, are we?
Malayalam, you could say, was my first love. We have a history longer than most marital affairs today can claim, and we parted good friends. We should perhaps have not parted at all, but we had to, and much as I wish we could stay friends, I'd be wrong in saying that I still have as much command over it as I've ever had.
Hindi and me, we've had a short affair. We barely knew each other, yet we had a good time.
Both of them lost, due to the increasing influence of English, the one that seems my eternal companion.
Yet I am forever happy to have known them, simply because I could realize how varied the thoughts of men are, coming from different parts of the world. I believe men are at their most transparent when they philosophize, which is perhaps why the ways of truly philosophizing varies so widely between languages. I have listened to ghazals, musings of great poets such as Vayalar, and though there is as much of a gulf between them as there is between the works of Wordworth and Bob Dylan, I count myself lucky to have been apprentices to the words of great men. To read them, and realize that all has not been said, to read them and to marvel... at beauty. For someone I do not know once said, 'Its hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world'.
But this post would be incomplete without my bellyaching and complaining about the way things have become. I do not live in the past, yet it does not take insight or even eyesight to realize what we have turned into. Inconsequential creatures, our gazes are as brief as our appetites for knowledge, and we while away our time 'tweeting' or emoting while words fall back to the apples they came from, at least those of us with them anyway.
Lost, are we?
