“Enne ezhuthiniruthiyathu appayaanu”, loosely translates to ‘my dad initiated me into learning & literature’. The lone Malayalam sentence in an hour long discourse in English. My dearest friend was expressing her gratitude in the final lap of her doctoral research on English literature. I couldn’t help but notice the irony. That one sentence in Malayalam contained more weight and meaning than her entire presentation and thesis in English. It conveyed the singular truth of gratitude in a daughter’s soul straight to the heart of a proud father. The eloquence of that one utterance silenced everything else.

Such is the power of words – thrives in subtlety and reigns with simplicity. In a different lifetime, this wouldn’t even have struck as irony to me. I would be more impressed by the sheer depth of the research and the grandeur of Beckettian discourse, than the tail end of a ‘vote of thanks’. But it hit me different today. I was and still am an aficionado of words and language. A ‘new’ word excites me more than it should (sadly?). A random one-liner on a tee-shirt makes me ponder longer than it deserves. And I genuinely believe all of these collectively make me the person I am – from a confused kid who used to read dictionary for fun to an adult who toys with the idea of a career in literature with no real efforts whatsoever! Somewhere along the way, I have silently given up being the grammar nazi and ‘learn a new word everyday’ kid. Perhaps it’s because it’s very tiring in a professional setting to ‘politely’ correct people. Perhaps it’s also because the Gen Z ‘aura farming’ is killing my vibe. Or perhaps it’s simply the fact that most of my personal conversations including the ones with this PhD holder friend defy grammar and the very structure of the language. The abrupt drop of an auxiliary verb, unintentional but unedited typos, and abundance of ellipsis – that’s how a normal conversation looks like these days. And I’ve more than made peace with it. It somehow connects me with the person more than a structured sentence. Honestly, this is not a surprising revelation. It should have been the de facto understanding. But for someone who has placed equal weightage on the beauty of a language and the essence of its conversations, this feels like an ‘upgrade’ that needs to be acknowledged.

Tamil, Malayalam, English, Hindi, Sanskrit – name it and I have my essays ready on how I relish each of its beauty – the nuances, the brevity, the flow, the interpretation of its literature. Then again, without any of those structure, I am all ears for a conversation filled with candour, gentle pauses, flowing thoughts and eloquent silences. While I don’t prefer one over the other, I will be swept off my feet with the perfect balance of both. I’m glad such perfect balances also exist in my life – the well-punctuated, properly capitalised, typo-edited versions filled with candid expressions!