Tuesday, November 08, 2016
Killing them softly
Saturday, November 05, 2016
Bespoke Maayboli
A little earlier before Nihira was born, our cable TV subscription came up for renewal.The choice was quite easy; with a baby in our midst, we had no illusion of getting any free time in foreseeable future. We chucked the set-top box out of our life & disconnected the cable feed. From the day Nihira was born, we made a conscious effort to keep her screen time to bare minimum. Such is the world that we live in, a day will come in future when she will evolve into a digital zombie. But till that inevitable happens, we are determined to slow down her descent into virtual doom. For now, she is just a kid & there is whole wide world out there for her to discover.
The only time we gave her some leeway & switched the TV on ( with free to air channels ) was during the Rio2016 Olympics. It was a spectacle which we wanted her to witness & possibly develop some liking for sports. That one off exposure to TV made Nihira believe that TV is something which you watch Olympics on. Long after the games wrapped up & our TV went dead again, there are days when Nihira points to the TV and says "I want to watch Olympics" ?! Well Missy has to wait 4 long years.
One immediate offshoot of this 'screen-free-childhood' endeavour saw Nihira gravitating towards the world of books, stories & hands-on play with kids in the neighbourhood. Once in two weeks Dipali takes her down to the public library in our neighbourhood. She associates the library as a fun place & has favourite series of children's books which she never gets tired of browsing. Getting her to return the library books back, becomes a big exercise of emotional turmoil as she rarely wants to part with her favourite books.
At home, whenever she gets bored, she drags us to our bookshelf and points to her collection of books. She can't read on her own yet; but she has 2 dedicated human readers in me & Dipali at her beck & call. Thanks to hundreds of hours of our reading sessions, she can now recite nursery rhymes, bits & pieces of stories through sheer aural memory (as most kids of her age do)
Another thing which we instilled quite early with Nihira was the use of mother tongue in our day to day communication. It was a natural choice as neither me or Dipali are fluent in the Queen's language & we usually stutter & splutter along the way while conversing in English. Although the world that Nihira will grow up in ( be it Singapore or India or elsewhere ) will see less and less usage of Marathi, still the language remains a vital connection to her geographical roots. More importantly, it makes it easier for her to communicate with her grand parents. She now speaks immaculate Marathi, for her age group. Her English is still work in progress . Quite often she mixes both Marathi & English together with intriguing effect .
The other night she picked up a Marathi story book and although she can't read per se, she starting mouthing off the words as if she is reading them off the pages of the book. She read aloud -
"One day Yash said, Baag'eit yetos kaa ??" !!
She confidently rambled on in a stitched-up language of her own. I smiled silently in the background, trying not to make her conscious of the verbal khichdee she was pakav'ng all by herself. The context of the sentence was correct, the story begins with a kid asking his friend to accompany him to park. She started off with clichéd opening line from an English language story and midway through the sentence switched to perfectly worded Marathi sentence! I guess we, as her vocabulary coach are to blame by mixing our own speech with the 2 languages, without making clear distinction between the two. Not surprisingly, she emulates the same with rather dubious outcome.
On yet another occasion, she was speaking into her toy phone. After seemingly wrapping up her call, she handed me the phone saying,
"Baba, take phone. Done boll'ing"
It took me a while to register what she meant by boll'ing.
For now, we are not trying to correct her bespoke maayboli. With time, she is going to learn and fix the mistakes herself. Till that happens, she continues to fill our days with unintended laughter and much needed cheer by her peculiar brand of verbal gymnastics.
Lost in translation
Maayboli : mother-tongue
Baag'eit yetos kaa : are you coming to the park ?
Khichdee : mishmash (contextual meaning)
Pakaav'ng : cooking / conjuring (contextual meaning)
Boll'ing : speaking (definition valid only for 2 yr old demographics)
The only time we gave her some leeway & switched the TV on ( with free to air channels ) was during the Rio2016 Olympics. It was a spectacle which we wanted her to witness & possibly develop some liking for sports. That one off exposure to TV made Nihira believe that TV is something which you watch Olympics on. Long after the games wrapped up & our TV went dead again, there are days when Nihira points to the TV and says "I want to watch Olympics" ?! Well Missy has to wait 4 long years.
One immediate offshoot of this 'screen-free-childhood' endeavour saw Nihira gravitating towards the world of books, stories & hands-on play with kids in the neighbourhood. Once in two weeks Dipali takes her down to the public library in our neighbourhood. She associates the library as a fun place & has favourite series of children's books which she never gets tired of browsing. Getting her to return the library books back, becomes a big exercise of emotional turmoil as she rarely wants to part with her favourite books.
At home, whenever she gets bored, she drags us to our bookshelf and points to her collection of books. She can't read on her own yet; but she has 2 dedicated human readers in me & Dipali at her beck & call. Thanks to hundreds of hours of our reading sessions, she can now recite nursery rhymes, bits & pieces of stories through sheer aural memory (as most kids of her age do)
Another thing which we instilled quite early with Nihira was the use of mother tongue in our day to day communication. It was a natural choice as neither me or Dipali are fluent in the Queen's language & we usually stutter & splutter along the way while conversing in English. Although the world that Nihira will grow up in ( be it Singapore or India or elsewhere ) will see less and less usage of Marathi, still the language remains a vital connection to her geographical roots. More importantly, it makes it easier for her to communicate with her grand parents. She now speaks immaculate Marathi, for her age group. Her English is still work in progress . Quite often she mixes both Marathi & English together with intriguing effect .
The other night she picked up a Marathi story book and although she can't read per se, she starting mouthing off the words as if she is reading them off the pages of the book. She read aloud -
"One day Yash said, Baag'eit yetos kaa ??" !!
She confidently rambled on in a stitched-up language of her own. I smiled silently in the background, trying not to make her conscious of the verbal khichdee she was pakav'ng all by herself. The context of the sentence was correct, the story begins with a kid asking his friend to accompany him to park. She started off with clichéd opening line from an English language story and midway through the sentence switched to perfectly worded Marathi sentence! I guess we, as her vocabulary coach are to blame by mixing our own speech with the 2 languages, without making clear distinction between the two. Not surprisingly, she emulates the same with rather dubious outcome.
On yet another occasion, she was speaking into her toy phone. After seemingly wrapping up her call, she handed me the phone saying,
"Baba, take phone. Done boll'ing"
It took me a while to register what she meant by boll'ing.
For now, we are not trying to correct her bespoke maayboli. With time, she is going to learn and fix the mistakes herself. Till that happens, she continues to fill our days with unintended laughter and much needed cheer by her peculiar brand of verbal gymnastics.
Lost in translation
Maayboli : mother-tongue
Baag'eit yetos kaa : are you coming to the park ?
Khichdee : mishmash (contextual meaning)
Pakaav'ng : cooking / conjuring (contextual meaning)
Boll'ing : speaking (definition valid only for 2 yr old demographics)
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