It was 1969. Unable to pass PUC at MDT Hindu College in Tirunelveli, I felt unfit to continue my higher education. Though my high school and my college were known for exemplary teaching abilities, my English was so poor that I couldn’t construct a grammatically correct sentence with even three or four words. My distraction was my interest in film music. I deviated from academics. I was unsure if I could improve my language. But then it happened, like a silver lining in the cloud.
Thanks to the Goddess of Learning’s blessings, my postmaster friend got me a grammar book. The book had an impressive preface and was written in simple language with easily understandable definitions and well-knit chapters. All these pushed me to try and learn the language at any cost. My battle started.
What came to my mind first was an idea of buying an English daily. My choice was the Express. But I was frittering away my time at home, was unemployed and it was hardly possible to buy the paper which cost about half a rupee a day in the late sixties. Notwithstanding that, I managed to own few issues a month but not before a wordy duel with my mother over money.
Whenever I caught hold of a copy, I would lose myself in the pages of the Express. An old English-English-Tamil dictionary, though running into hundreds of pages, would accompany me.
We friends would meet in the evenings, sit on the lawn-like tank bed in our village and commence our classes. Procedural steps and easy-to-catch rules were discussed. Over the months, I started to have an idea of important grammatical rules.
We enjoyed the moments—learning new words, writing sentences of our own, changing speeches and voices, using idioms and phrases, parsing parts of speech, etc. Our days could not have been more productive—in those classes, we were the students, we were the teachers.
To us, the post office was an abode of learning. The postmaster, who was elder to me by four to five years was instrumental in instilling perseverance and team-spirit in us to achieve the target—improving our English knowledge. Writers penning various columns in the Express, nay, my English guru, helped us.
Thanks to my friends; but for them, I could not have bettered my language! Thanks to the tank bed and the post-office building that took the avatar of classrooms. Kudos, above all, to the newspaper. With its simple and flawless writings, the paper stood beside me donning the role of a grammarian and English professor. My deepest ever gratitude to the Express!
E Sethuramalingam
Email: esrlingam@gmail.com