My fondest memories of my formative years, restricted to the immediate family, are of the intense discussions and debates encompassing both issues as well as people related to us. For the lack of a better handle, I will call it the Daad Debate Club (Daad being the name of my native village).
The context to this is my father’s dreamer disposition and the concomitant wheels under his feet. I had attended 10 different schools by the time I finished my schooling. There was no certainty as to where we would end up in the coming year. Childhood is the age for resilience and optimism. We took it in our stride and looked upon each translocation as a new adventure. However, the constant movement entailed the cost of not being able to form and sustain meaningful relationships with other people around us. As a compensation mechanism, we grew even closer to each other, to the extent that other relationships became extraneous in the scheme of things.
I acquired my taste for literature from my father (not surprising, considering that both my parents were lecturers in English), as well as raconteurship and vitriolic sarcasm. From my mother, I inherited the multiple gifts of chatacter study, caricature, irreverence and repartee. My brother inherited my mother’s habit of judging and labelling people. My sister, at that time, hated controversy, so she was always the moderator in every discussion. Needless to say, I was always the Devil’s Advocate.
In such circumstances, one had to use words based on their specificity, and marshal one’s facts to construct an irrefutable arguement, at the risk of handing an inch of advantage to the adversary (I use the term advisedly, as causes were espoused with great passion).
The only equivalent to this domestic arrangement is movingly depicted in the circumstances of the Deb’s household in the fictionalised biography of Eugene Debs, arguably the most inspiring trade union leader of all time, by Irving Stone titled “Enemy In The House”. A must read, in case you have not.
My language felicity is directly correlatable to those endless discussions, stretching into the wee hours of the morning.
It cannot be pure happenstance that 3 siblings with disparate dispositions, unique experiences and variegated life circumstances have reached a point of convergence on most of the significant issues in life.
Was acquiring linguistic abilities the ground-work for domains requiring more rigid discipline, structure and application?
In case you have liked this post, then also visit http://www.amitabhdhillon.com. He’s the youngest of the three of us, and, by far, the most accomplished blogger. I would especially recommend his latest post titled Good Wood.
