English

Coleridge said " Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests." I for one can't agree more.
Some time back was going through the answer copy of this cousin of mine (history paper)which brought back all the memories of school days.Now history is one subject that most of us despise.My cousin is no different.I for one did not exactly hate the subject but did not like the way it was taught.A lot of emphasis was put on unnecessary things(when did someone die? give the exact dates,who cares man)A lot of other things like strategy,decision making and its implications,social trends,understanding of human actions never seemed to be on the radar of the history teacher.This irks me a lot just like it did then.

Thus i never studied for the exams atleast for those monthly tests but still came out with flying colours.The secret as Coleridge mentioned was language.I will explain how.Say suppose you had to say one king attacked another and one of them won the battle.A truly classic way of saying that would be something like this:

"The king sent his platoon of trained,legalised human slaughterers across the border.This sudden charge of the killing machines took the state by surprise.Before they could wake up from their sleep they found themselves sent to sleep forever."

No need for the details,if you want to further spice it up add some commentary about the scenic battle ground and all the gory scenes aka 300 style.Now my beloved history teacher never had a good grasp of language and thought i was one of the real intellectual types.So without much ado I landed up getting the highest marks all the time.

I specifically remember Mrs Biswas( my english teacher )who threatened to fail me if i did not stop writing the way i did.I would not say hairstyle,instead i had to say coiffure.I would not say old man or even greying man instead i had to say methuselah(this is one word which even a lot of english teachers are not able to fathom at first glance)

In college too this tool of using the language creatively has helped me infinite number of times.One subject in particular was MIS.Now though i had not bought the book before the first class test i did know something about the subject( thanks to Business world and other magazines that i have been following since i don't know when )That paper was so full of quotes that i was sure of flunking that exam. Instead came out with the highest.( something like 47-48 out of 50 that too when half the class had failed after studying )One quote which i still remember in particular was "Information is like sand in the beach house,it gets in anywhere and everywhere."

So i guess learning language is not all that bad,as made out by some of the quant jocks.Infact it has stood me in good stead in difficult times in exams,debates,one to one interactions and at workplace.

Say you had to say you are a vegetarian,what would you say? i am a veggie.Nah does not sound nice.How about saying i do not eat fish,flesh or fowl.What if you are pissed of with the btm traffic and all the pollution in the world.Simple, i live in a tiny,overpopulate,suburb of the universe called earth.:)


Last but not the least " The tongue is but three inches long, yet it can kill a man six feet high."

Cheers !!!
I speak two languages, Body and English.