Mind your language

As bilinguals and trilinguals Indians have a distinct advantage overseas as well as within India about the language the choose to express themselves. The choice is of course largely determined by who you are talking to, what you want to disucss and whom you want to exclude out ofthe coversation. Say you want to badmouth Mumbai in a crowded bus and you are travelling with you can easily break into Bengali with your bengali speaking friend and rest assured that no one else will understand and respond adversely. In London, you can easily break into Hindi with most Indians leaving the sahibs to look perplexed. In Delhi you can start talking in Tamil and in Chennai in Punjabi. In Bihar you can safely break into English!
This was my wisdom for many years, having grown up among Begalis, Punjabis, Sindhis and Hindi speaking friends. But that gradually began to change as a result of some rude and some pleasant surprises as I became older.
The first experience was a shock... Standing in the admmission queue at New Delhi's JNU, I freshly from Calcutta broke into Bengali with my mates from Calcutta and started criticising not in very charitable language. Until I was told by the student standing behind told me in crisp Bengali that he was a Tamil but could speak Bengali like a native....I as chastised.
The second incident actually did not happen because I was forewarned. This was in a place called School of Oriental and African Studies in London University where I studied for 4 years. I was forewarned by seniors not to use any Indian languages especially to criticise teachers. Apparently between them, the SOAS teachers, most of them British, knew all the Indian and African languages.... I soon go the proof when I met Rachel Dwyer, a teacher, who knew more about hindi movies that half the mumbaikars put together.
But once on a vacation with friends in a really really remote village of Scotand near the Edzell castle on a hiking expedition all by ourselves, we broke into chaste hindi and was being very uncharitable to the "stupidity" and miserliness of the Scots. On the jungle track very far and out of ear shot we say two very old ladies approaching us. We had not expected to see any human being in those parts let alone two old ladies who could speak chaste Hindi since they had spent much of their childhood in what was then the Central Provinces of India. The older of the two hugged us and said Indians were like her "jigar a tukda". A very embarrassing moment avoided since being advanced in years and quite far away she had not heard our views about Scots.
The last incident happened two months back at a large business conference that we had organsed. Three speakers dropped out at the last moment, and I was left with the worst speaker of the session and the much respected and very senior session moderator and was desperately looking at picking up some good speakers from the delegates as the ultimate effort to save the day. The session moderator was the head of a very large company and a Tamil. He could see the tension on my face and gently tapped my shoulder and said in chaste bengali"Chinta Koro Na Sob Thik Hoye Jaabe" [don't worry everything will be alright]. Those were the most comforting words I have heard recently. Thanks to his confidence booster we did manage to have a very good session and end the conference very successfully.
I now have stopped doing bilaterals in a crowd and stopped taking advantage of language and do really mind my laguage.