At a time when Indians are losing touch with their mother tongue, expats in the city are experiencing the joy of picking up new languages.
For a couple of hours every day, the study at this flat in Waterfront, Kalyaninagar turns into a melting pot of sorts. Every day some words of Portuguese, Russian, German, Finnish, Korean, and Italian find their translations in Hindi (and sometimes English) into some notebooks.
With each passing day, some expats become more confident about their stay, and survival, in Pune. Thanks to their language teacher, Ujwala Gokarn, their vocabulary now goes beyond namaste, shukriya, and achha.
They have become adept in haggling with the autowalahs, explaining their bais (maids) what zucchinis and avocadoes are, and also navigating their way reading the signboards. As a by-product of the IT and industrial development in the city, the expat influx is on the rise.
Gokarn has been helping them cope better with the pressures of a new city by teaching them Hindi and English through Happy Hour Class, for the past three years. A qualified teacher with more than 25 years of experience to her credit, Gokarn started teaching expats with a single student, three years ago.
Word of mouth publicity led to more students, and today, a wall in her study features a big collage of pictures of her students so far. At present, she is teaching Hindi and English to nine students.
“English is a life-saving skill for most of us. But the real surprise is the expats’ inclination to learn Hindi,” she says.
Brazilian Silvia Casanova likes the devnagari script. Apart from enjoying the thrill of learning a new language, Silvia is in love with the script. Learning Hindi has enabled her to get a deeper understanding of Indian culture, says Silvia, who has recently taken to reading books on Indian culture and festivals in Hindi. It is things like these that Gokarn finds interesting as a teacher.
“Answering their queries, I get to learn so much about my own culture. It’s very charming to see them use words like shuddha satvik bhojan,” says Gokarn whose interest in languages can be called hereditary. Her late father, SD Wagh, was a scholar in Hindi, English, Marathi, Sanskrit and German, apart from being editor of the popular Pune daily, Maharashtra Herald. Different sets of students require different skills and Gokarn relies on reinventing her teaching abilities.
“Sometimes it becomes quite challenging to teach students who are Brazilian, or Korean. In such cases, I don’t know their language, they don’t know mine, or even English. So there’s no meeting point,” she says, adding that this leads her to learn languages like Portuguese. For school-going children, she often makes teaching fun by using crossword puzzles, story books, the globe and so on. No wonder her anecdotes have stories like that of Enrico, a Brazilian boy, who was initially very shy and hesitant.
“One day he told me, ‘Teacher I don’t want to write today, I just want to talk to you. Now, I can speak English,” recounts Gokarn.
Testimonials like that of a Korean student’s mother dot her study.
The handwritten note on a postcard thanks Ujwala in broken English, albeit ‘straight from the heart’. But her ‘favourite moment’ is when students from various nationalities sing the Indian national anthem, that they learn in school. “It’s so sweet to hear them sing Jana Gana Mana, sometimes with wrong words, but the right emotions,” says she.
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