Speaking English doesn’t come naturally to many of us. We struggle to find words, struggle to translate from our mother tongue, falter in our pronunciation, construct awkward sentences and use slang. We frequently end up making fools of ourselves without realising it. So how does one speak the language correctly? Is it even possible? Rare is the breed that speaks English flawlessly. As non-native speakers of English, even the […]

After two decades of wondering what to write on forms in the `What is your mother tongue’ column, I finally stopped apologising to myself and the world for not knowing any of my native languages and declared openly in the answer space – ‘English.’ But it is only five years ago, when I helped my closest friend Pascal set up our NGO for street children in Delhi, called Tara; that […]