Honesty

Honestly, I didn’t expect this would ever happen to me. I’m not bragging. This could happen to any of you. And you’d even be proud of that. I am not. I am not proud of this fact one bit.

I have studied in Tamil medium until high school and after that switched to English Medium in College. In school and also in college I wrote one-liners, and occasional one-page poems in Tamil and even had the guts to participate in poetry competitions in Tamil. I was always proud of my Tamil Grammar and was even able to point out several mistakes in our magazines. I was able to appreciate a good Poetry book (non-Sangham literature) in Tamil. In the first summer in college we went to an Industry and we were asked to converse in English by the Plant Manager. Not a single word crossed my throat, and could never speak. In the end, when the Manager almost gave up, a friend of mine spoke valiantly and we were all asked to leave the premises, not because we were so bad, but because it was the last day of the training.

I’m giving you such a long story because it has all changed. Yesterday, we had a lovely thanksgiving dinner, and I was planning to write a Tamil Blog article about the tradition of Thanksgiving, what we’d planned to do, what I cooked for the dinner and why. I stared at the computer for a few hours (with youtube and some Chemistry gaps, of course), typed in a few sentences and looked in disgust how awful the sentence formation and the entire blog was. Now, I have come to a conclusion. Officially, I can’t write fluently in Tamil. It’s awful. I could publish this ~300 word blog in under 20 mins, although badly. I’m going to post it and if I found this equally bad in a day or two, well, I’ll admit I can’t write at all.

Good luck to y’all. Hope you’re not as bad in your first language as I am.