My passions, interests and thoughts

    Along the lines of the previous topic that we discussed, I felt that it is the need of the hour to share my thoughts on language learning at Indian schools across the board...or need I say across various boards!. The boards that I am referring to are those of education in India varying from CBSC to international board and stateboard. While there are many other education boards out there, since our current topic deals with imposition of Hindi language at school level by the Central government as a compulsory subject. We need to understand that the moment the Central government ventures to make Hindi a compulsory subject for school children across various boards and different states in India, the implicit idea is their wish to somehow get Tamilians to learn Hindi and start using Hindi from school level, since the possibility of language learning across all cultures drops significantly as people age. It is one thing if people choose Hindi of their own volition in which case t...

         Anyone who knows me personally would be aware that I am someone who loves learning languages and am a polyglot of European languages, so I am not opposed to learning languages and for a linguist, he/she would still consider learning any language out of plain curiosity, if not out of passion because much of the groundwork for language learning at the level of his/her brain has already been laid. Still, if someone were to walk up to me and tell me that I MUST learn a language just because more people in his/her part of our country India speak it and also if I learn it, I would simply make his/her life easier during trips to South India or when staying here for work or study purposes, irrespective of whether I am interested in the said language or not, I would consider him/her to be a moron. Many foreigners coming to India unfortunately think that Hindi is our national language, if they have not done their research about India properly. Unfortunately, this...

    We live in an epoch when there are constant technological advances, we see huge strides in the development of software and devices that implement AI to make our lives simpler - or that is what we are being told. Although AI does have its advantages, one of the key areas where so many gullible people, especially from anglophone countries like the UK, US (anglophone monolinguals), Australia, New Zealand, Canada (especially non-French speaking Canadians) are being lulled or deluded into believing is that linguistics or language learning, is actually an exercise in futility...or is it?     Our brain is quite unique, its functionalities go beyond the understanding of human efforts to comprehend it fully. Even in this current day and age, when people would claim that the brain's functions have been fully understood because of advances in nuclear medicine and scanning devices like functional MRI among others, nobody, not even the most adept of researchers can claim that...

          How many of us remember the first toy car that our folks got us as kids?, that first experience that leaves behind an evergreen and ever lingering, sweet memory of times past!, for some it may be a Hotwheels car, for others it may be a Matchbox car or one of any other brand. I have such memories from my childhood days when my Dad and Mom got me Hotwheels cars and those memories are suave and fresh in my memory, as if it were yesterday!. Those were the days when Hotwheels were made in India by Funskool India under licence by Mattel and they were all metal!, and hardly cost Rs/ 50 a piece.      I still have those cars at home, although I must admit that I need to take them out from wherever we have stored them, usually in some cardboard boxes. Then, there was a lull in my Hotwheels collection hobby till the year 2013-2014 when I saw a Hotwheels Lamborghini Veneno on Ebay and I wanted it badly. Thankfully, they had "cash on delivery" option...