Public Speaking in English

*Disclaimer: You won’t learn anything about public speaking in English from this blog.

Public Speaking is an art that can be learned. I definitely have improved over the years although I am by no means good at it. But every step is another step and it’s all good so I’m not complaining.

I learned public speaking at school. My first experience of it was back in Sacred Heart School Lunglei where they always made students handle Morning Assembly – a poem, bible reading, praying, etc. It taught us how to address an audience. It also taught me Ozymandias by P B Shelley which I still can recite to this day. Neat.

I never volunteered but over the course of my school life, there were multiple occasions where I stood in front of a bunch of people and spoke. A lot of it was gospel. As bad in public speaking as I was, I was chapel-in-charge at one point and I even played guitar in public then. The cringe. Or as church members would say, the Lord is never short of instruments (will make do if He can’t find one!).

I was extremely nervous the first time I spoke in Mizo in public. And it was a lecture, of all things. I was championing New Pension Scheme at the time and Bernie, Sawmtea and I had divided the course into three parts. I was hilariously bad at it but I was also leader so I couldn’t exactly not perform. Sometimes I’d start a sentence and not know how to end it and would just stand silently, heart thundering. I was bad at it in English and I had training in it; I had zero training in Mizo. Ugh. That was a bad experience. But I grew from it and I suppose I am grateful for it.

More opportunities developed for Mizo public speaking for me in time. I even publicly translated for my old DC Dr Aggarwal sometimes which was always a challenge because as a science guy, he often used science-y words. And we have very few science words in Mizo. You talk about photosynthesis and Mizo is stumped. We came up with a system where he prepared his speech beforehand or he told me the general gist and I’d mentally search for appropriate Mizo words. Anyhoo. I guess it worked. No one complained. Either that, or nobody listened.

As I was gaining confidence in Mizo public speaking, suddenly this week I found myself thrust into English public speech again. I rolled my eyes and my sleeves and performed. Because as much as it disconcerted me to speak in English after years of Mizo speaking again, I came into an epiphany which was that it didn’t matter all that much. Possibly 90% of the time, if people do comment on you, they’d comment on your accent. Not your grammar, not your material. And comments on accent I can deal with.

English is not my native language. I can only imitate what I’ve heard. And what I’ve heard and mimicked is a hotpot of choice accents – Kerala nuns, North Indians, UK and US films and of course, my own mother tongue. So yes, it was always going to be a jumble of all of these swirled together. And I won’t pronounce some words properly which is still okay because I’ve learned words in books – like quay. Not until the 2012 Doctor Who ep. The Angels Take Manhattan did I realise it was pronounced more like Key than Kway! Or that yatch does not require the ch to be pronounced because it’s not sounded out anyway. And that’s English words; in Irish, it becomes even more complicated like how in the world is Eoghan pronounced Owen, or Siobhan pronounced as She-von? I learned all these pronunciations from the screen, mind. So however and in whatever context I use them have to be influenced by what I’ve heard. My accent is therefore the least of my concerns and least cause of anxiety.

I always say you should not be too worried about English and how good or bad you are at it. It is good to improve because it very much is the medium through which a lot of us have experienced the wider world. Any gain in traction can only lead to better understanding and appreciation of literature, the arts and the sciences. Possibly commerce too. But otherwise, it is still a colonial hangover to judge people on how well they know the language.

Bottom line is people probably aren’t paying that much attention to you very much anyway so it’s OK!

The Royal We And God’s Pronoun

Mal min sawm turin van khuaan ro a rel, is a lyric I have known since forever. We do sing it every year multiple times around November and December after all.

However, one Delhi December got me interested in the song in a new way. One of our leaders Pu Lalchuangliana gave a little sermon over how it was supposed to be read as: Mal min sawm turin van Khua-an ro a rel. Capital K for Khua. As in state. As in the royal We, a nosism, a pluralis magistatis. Khua here would mean the state as much as its monarch, each referring to and representing the other. I don’t know if it is true or not, but I found it interesting.

A majority of my interest was less spiritual than it was socio-historical. Perhaps anthropological. Or maybe linguistic. Or simply just inability to turn off the Sociology nerd in me.

In any case, it made me think about Emilé Durkheim saying how society is more than the sum of its parts. Simply put, when you abstract society to such high levels, it becomes bigger than the very people who comprise of it. It begins to become an Entity unto itself. (He argued society is basically god for a tribal society, abstracted as it is to idealized image, with the ability to penalize and reward its members. That’s also basically how you say Man created God in his own image, in a subversion of the Genesis statement. Perhaps also in a Nietzcschean POV, how God is dead, because we killed him. Possible, if we had indeed birthed him. Reminiscent also of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Ah but I digress. That is a different topic.) Administratively, mob mentality.

In a charming American comedy-drama film called Flipped, a young girl is told by her father: some people could be more or less than the sum of their parts. I understood it as to mean that some people cannot simply be broken down to their parts, like their flesh, bones and sinew; they are more (as is the society); meanwhile and unfortunately, some people are so devoid of character and/or morality that they are not worth or do not even make up the sum of their physical selves broken down to their parts.

In any case, Pu Chuanga’s comment sparked my interest in nosism in the Mizo language. We do use it continually, which is not a surprise seeing as how absorbed into society as we are. Once I became employed, I realised that nosism also applied to the Office and the Head of it. Some of the best leaders I’ve served with have accepted credit with the plural We, but have often shouldered blame and responsibility on the singular I. I think that is commendable and encouraging. Leadership is a very difficult role. Not many get it right. Some people just end up very narcissistic and playing to ego and status in the end. Because inferiority complex just does not go away simply because you got money and status, does it? I don’t know. In my experience  somehow some of the richest and most powerful people remain seriously under-confident. They constantly need to prove themselves. Must be exhausting. The lord knows it is exhausting to serve with or under them.

Or, you know, Pu Chuanga could be wrong. It could be that nosism plays no role in this song. It could be that the existing line: Mal min sawm turin van khuaan ro a rel, is perfectly correct. The English translation remains pretty much the same anyway. But I feel like if it is not the capital Khua that applies here, I am guessing ro a rel should be ro A rel? Because this pronoun a/A is referring to God. No? Or is that grammar just for English?

Genuinely asking.

Tourism, Death and Food

Srinagar brings to mind one very specific food for me. A street food. I think it was mutton, marinated and dry-roasted on charcoal so the flavour was just full. To this was added a tangy radish pickle and the whole thing wrapped in a cold rumali roti. Ah, slice of heaven.

We were there for a Sociology seminar at Kashmir University although I doubt if anyone went for the Sociology. Srinagar trumped Sociology. It was always going to have to be that way. Everyone knew that.

There were other foods that were simply big-time memory-makers – saffron tea with dried nuts in it served on nice china from a huge pot that had a little charcoal oven inside it, for example. Or apple plucked right from the tree, red and powder white from the cold, which if you bit into it, juice flowed down to your elbows. Or mini apples. It was also where I found out that you could simply open an apple barehand if you had the strength and/or the knack for it; scared me shitless first time someone on the market opened one that way. Then there was Gosht. Gushtaba. But the street food though…

Srinagar really deserves to be called Paradise On Earth; it was that beautiful. We visited old forts and gardens. On one of them, I climbed over to the very edge of the fort and someone took a photo. I do not like this picture because now it gives me palpitations. At one time in your life, you are just dumb enough to think the world is rigged in your favour and you’re never going to die. I think that was mine.

My mum scolded me soundly for it when I went home.

This scolding happened again when a few years later, I got the chance to visit the Grand Canyon. I went on some local bus or the other. A couple of old Chinese lady tourists kept thinking I was Chinese, I think, because they kept following me and talking to me. When I shook them off my tail, I met a couple who asked me if I was Indian. A little surprised, I said yes, I was. But then they started conversing with me and something clicked; I had to say I was Indian by way of the country India. We had a good laugh. The girl of the couple told me about a Cherokee god and dreamcatchers. A man on the ride back thought I was Mexican and assumed he couldn’t converse with me because he didn’t know Mexican; I never corrected him. I have watched too many American crime shows.

Food wise, it was not the best. We ate some shredded beef or turkey thing that was sweet. I do not care for sweet meat.

The scolding happened because I asked one of the guards at the Canyon if I could swing my legs off the edge and if he could take a picture of it. He said yes, and he did. And another guard scolded the both of us for it saying I could have died. And I suppose that was when it occurred to me that I still thought the world was rigged in my favour. My mother was not happy with the picture. She scolded me again when I returned home.

Later still, at Dungtlang when I climbed on Lianchhiari Lunglen Tlang in my puan, I knew mum was going to have palpitations again. But I was older and a little more world-weary by this time; I didn’t climb all the way to the edge. I do however wonder if maybe I still think the world is generally rigged in my favour sometimes. It’s not a bad way to be, although perhaps not the most recommended. Just a smidge foolhardy.

Food wise, at Dungtlang, I had sweet milk tea that was a little weak for my taste. I think people should normalize red tea; you can’t go wrong with red tea at least but there are too many ways to not make good sweet milk tea. Another rant for another time.

Lola Swift

One Saturday, the 11th of November, 2023, my family waved our dad off to Mamit where he would spend the weekend on a Kohhran Pavalai programme with Revd. Maruata. Since mum would be sleeping alone, I decided I’d keep her company and sleep next to her. I invited my cat Nix along and the both of us slept in with Mother (read in Shakespearean English).

I hadn’t used a mosquito net in so long that I was very surprised when I saw their bed had a mosquito net installed. And utilised. I thought it was highly redundant since we don’t have mosquitoes, but I shrugged it off with a: hey, well, not my zoo.

When I climbed into bed, I noticed a weird shaped hole in the net. Large enough for a cat’s head, in fact. Which as you would know, lowkey defeats the purpose of a mosquito net. As in if there is a hole big enough to fit a cat (because if a cat can fit its head in a hole, more often than not, it will be able to fit its entire body into it as well), it is more than big enough for a mosquito. You might as well hang a Welcome Sign for mosquitoes – or moths – on the net because hello, big hole here!

In the morning, I asked mum if she knew there was a giant hole in their mosquito net. My mother’s face grew quite sad and resigned. She said: Yes, Scary Cat did it. When asked details, dad would eventually say: Simpuli is stupid, she ate our mosquito net. (Not just chewed a hole through, mind; my dramatic dad swears the tuxedo cat ate their mosquito net.) Scary Cat is Simpuli is our tuxedo cat is a cat named Lola Swift but nobody calls her that because she is a very simple creature but very fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

Apparently there was a time my parents kept chasing her out of their room because they didn’t want her fur leftovers. But she was just as determined as they were to claim their room as hers as well. If they chased her out three times, she’d return thirty times. If there was a window open, or a door left ajar, Simpuli was there in their room (sometimes hunting – and catching them too, feckin’! – birds on their porch). If one of my parents took a nap on their bed, Simpuli was there sleeping on top of them. After some time, you could catch one of them grumbling but fluffing up old blankets for Simpuli to take her catnaps on. Every time you caught them at it, they’d make it a point to dramatically and loudly tell us off about cats and dogs leaving fur everywhere and that being an embarrassment when we had visitors. But over time, they gave up and accepted fur as necessary evil for having companions so cute you can’t be mad if they chewed up your mosquito net!

So here it was. A cat shaped hole in my parent’s mosquito net that does nothing for the utility or the aesthethics of a mosquito net. But all of us creatures of habit, my parents would always let down their net even with the hole in it. Perhaps they add a line in their bedtime prayer to not let mosquitos in, I don’t know. And Simpuli would climb in through it some nights so she can lay on top of them and sleep through the night with them.

It is what it is.

Images

There is a framed photo that is always displayed prominently in my house. It features my parents on their wedding day. But it’s been doctored, so much so that they have been lifted off of the church premises and superimposed on a faded pink rose that is itself somehow superimposed atop a random lake. So to sum up, it is a picture of a couple standing on a rose in the middle of a lake. Perhaps not very realistic and even romantically, not the most idealistic of aesthetics.

There is a story behind this picture. At one point in our family history, we lived in West Kidwai Nagar in New Delhi in one of the government residence quarters. Sarojini Nagar was only a few minutes walking distance from the house. So we were often there. We always ended up with cheap clothes and cheap everything that is characteristic of visiting one too many flea markets but that is another story for another day.

Sarojini Nagar market also had a shop called Paul’s Photo Studio. In the days when we still had to take pictures on specialized machines called cameras and then produce the reel to developers like cavemen, we often visited Paul’s. One day, my father was talking to the man behind the counter. The man was enthusiastically telling him about the wonders of Photoshop and how he could touch up old pictures, colour the B&W ones, remove age spots off of prints and whatever else. This was how we ended up with a lot of our old pictures retaken by Paul’s. My father often looked for good photos filled with memories to “re-snap”. We have a bunch of those, like a nice coloured picture of my grandmother, and two very random ones of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham – three framed photos, by the way, that are also always displayed in our home.

One of the Whatever Elses that Paul’s boasted of was the ability to recreate photos in such a way as to make them magical. And fantastical. And all levels of wonderful artistic mastery. He convinced my father that if he could get his hands on his wedding picture, he would have a very satisfied client in his hands. My father, for all his cynicism, is also an eternal optimist and always been naively superstitious and believing. So that is how we ended up with my parents on their wedding day, standing on top of a random pink rose on top of a random lake. Aside from the ridiculousness of the concept art, it’s not even good Photoshop.

Dad sent my sister and I to go pick it up one day. We laughed so hard it offended him. Them, actually – Paul’s photo genius artist and my father, both. But what was done was done. Not only was the photo printed, but it had also been framed with the option of it hanging off of a wall or standing on a flat surface. We refuse to bury such a treasure. Hence the prominent display.

It often makes me smile. In these, the days of easy recording and editing on smartphones, we have not visited a studio – Paul’s or otherwise – in a long time. And today, in this carefully curated world of IG aesthetics, your impossibly long legs and noses that have disappeared from being too heavily filtered, not to mention Kardashian beauty standards that have come home to our pages superimposed on our faces, this photo is a testament to remind me that not everything I see in a photo is real.

And that not all edits are desirable.

An Angry Worker Bee Am I

It is a truth universally acknowledged, isn’t it, that stress is not a contributor to productivity. I’ve realized in the past month just how true this was.

October had been long nights and endless working hours where after a time, I couldn’t tell days apart and only referred to days as today, yesterday and tomorrow. Schedules began to only have temporal and spatial values as in I registered I had to be in DC Conference Hall at 1PM tomorrow but I had no inkling as to what I must be there for.

At some point, I semi-freaked. I was angry all the time. I wanted to rant and rave. I wanted to break something. I didn’t act on these impulses though, and I thought I was the bee’s knees for it.

Fortunately for me, the tide turned. My furious rage dissipated. I didn’t feel quite so tired and aching. I was laughing again. Even my acne break-out stopped spreading and began to heal slowly. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it was this started because work-wise, the pace was building up all the time, culminating into a fever pitch around the last fortnight of October. But I think a huge contributing factor was the people I was working with.

I like to think I am a good person but I would be the first to admit that I have never really been a nice one. Which is ironic because in the face of not knowing how to label me kindly, a lot of people have called me nice. Perhaps I am a better actor than I give myself credit for. Aside from niceness, another thing I have never really been is even-tempered.

But my bosses while I was helping to sort out Postal Ballots in Aizawl? Different makes and models.

One night a few nights before poll, we were sitting and drinking tea after a particularly trying and haranguing day. From early morning till the sun went down, we had been accosted nonstop by people who wanted to blame the sins of the world on our team. They didn’t shout back and it was frustrating me but I hadn’t wanted to be the bitch who screamed at people while her bosses were silent, so I had even removed myself from the space during the day. Reviewing the day’s progress after dinner and during that tea I mentioned earlier, one of them (by now visibly disturbed with hair like the Potters’) said: I think I almost yelled at some of the people today. The other mused: Same; but I think I should give myself the night. If I am still angry tomorrow, I think my anger would be justified.

In perfect seriousness.

I frowned at my tea and thought to myself: who even are you people?!

You know the outcome of it though? I could work in peace. And when I worked, I hope I was productive. I have a lot of lessons to learn, I know, but it’s not one I think will take immediate effect. Over time, I hope I can reach some level of their zen. Not all though. They say artists need to be a little mad. And I like writing. A lot of my writing is fueled by anger and hate, processed as comedy. Maybe I’ll hope to keep that spark. But the viciousness? Well, I sort of like that too. Maybe the temper can go. I don’t think I’ll miss it. My anger spoils my day as much as it spoils the people I snap at and perhaps as much as it also spoils my reputation.

Speaking of, I can’t wait for Reputation (Taylor’s Version). I am sure the aesthetic would be gorg on a sweatshirt. Or a tiny tee.

Anyhoo. I digress. I just meant to say physical duress is sometimes a must. Especially for a government servant in India during Elections. But when the mental stress level is absent, it is a marvel what your body is capable of. It just keeps going! Amazing artwork. It’s like Psalms said: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.