Tag Archives: Life

Languages

Posted on by
Reply

Language: The ability to acquire and use a complex system of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system.

Human beings, unless living in a completely isolated environment use language innately – when a parent coos to their baby, they are laying the foundation for the language they are native speakers of in the baby.

Most people (around 40% of the world’s population) are very fluent in a single language, usually called their mother tongue, many are bi-lingual (around 43% of the world’s population) which means they are fluent in two languages, usually English and their mother tongue, few are tri-lingual (around 13% of the world’s population), very few people are multi-lingual (around 3% of the world’s population) meaning they can speak four languages fluently and miniscule percent of the world population (less than 1%) can be called polygots or someone who can speak several languages fluently.

Most people in Singapore are bi lingual, speaking two languages with ease, English and their mother tongue, depending on what that is. Growing up, I guess most people around me were tri or multi-lingual – knowing English, Hindi, their mother tongues and to some extent the state language of Marathi. Although notionally my mother tongue is Tamil, the languages I think and dream are English and Hindi as these two were the languages we used all the time – in school, outside and even at home. My paternal grandfather, a product of the British education system, insisted I and my sister speak English to him and the English had to be grammatically correct. For a very long time, I could not speak to him in any other language other than English and it was only a few years before his death, we started speaking to him in other languages, specifically Tamil. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, used to speak to us in Tamil, which to this date is not too fluent for both me and my sister. My parents, used to speak to us in a mixture of languages – both English and Tamil.

When we started school, it was frowned upon to speak any other language other than English in school and so this started a life-long love for the language. Like I mentioned earlier, I think, feel and even dream in English, so can this be called my native language?
Living in culturally diverse city like Bombay meant that you had to speak another language to engage with others – this usually was Hindi and with neighbours belonging to the Northern part of India, it meant my Hindi also achieved that level of fluency. Friends also cemented this level of fluency and thus I can comfortably claim to be bi-lingual, maybe tri-lingual (can I be that if I can’t read or write Tamil?).

Other languages I have a passing level of fluency to are Marathi (my home state language), French (this was my third language in school and college), Malayalam (from neighbours) and Kannada (my grandparents moved to Bangalore when I was in elementary school and yearly holidays to the city ensured I learnt a bit of the language).

Yesterday morning while S was driving me to work, the local Tamil radio channel was on. During the morning show, one of the DJs was, using the wrong way to pronounce a certain alphabet. Now this is going to be difficult to show here – there’s a letter which is a very guttural Y, but many people can’t speak it as it should be spoken and instead pronounce it as an L, which is wrong. This DJ, on national radio was continuously pronouncing words with this letter wrong. I am surprised that for a country which prides itself on it’s national bi-lingual policy allows someone to get away to speaking wrong on air like this. Also surprising is that till date, no one has come forward to correct this person as I am sure many eminent speakers of the language are probably tuning into the station!

OK, here’s a bit of language trivia – Do you know which the most widely spoken languages in the world are? By the number of speakers in descending order you have:

  1. Mandarin Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Hindi
  5. Arabic
  6. Portuguese
  7. Bengali
  8. Russian
  9. Japanese
  10. Punjabi

No big surprises there to see Chinese at the top and 60% of the top 10 languages are from Asia!

Luck: Chance or simply opening your mind?

Posted on by
Reply

The past few weeks, if you may have noticed, I have been moaning quite a bit.

Usually when things don’t go the way we want them to go, we attribute it to luck. So what is luck? Luck is defined as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than one’s own actions” or “the chance to find or acquire”.

I’ve been also, by sheer chance, reading a book called “Luck: The Essential Guide” by Deborah Aaronson, which as the blurb tells ‘is filled with everything you need to live a luckier life….information, advice, or if you just have to knock on wood”. I was probably drawn to the book because I was moaning about my lack of luck and borrowed the book.
So what exactly is luck? Different cultures view it differently from perceiving it as a matter of random chance to attributing it to faith or superstition.

In Hinduism, luck is said to bestowed by the Gods and if properly propitiated, Lakshmi, the Goddess of money, wealth and fortune, will bestow her blessings on you and so, the individual becomes lucky in business and commerce.

Many cultures have lucky clothing, items to be worn on the body and even directions to face to become lucky. In the Chinese culture, Mahjong players and gamblers especially, are said to be extremely very superstitious when it comes to being lucky. Most of us are guilty of this at some point of time or the other.

I remember when I was young, during cricket matches, especially those between India and Pakistan, if someone made a particular movement or sat in a particular pose or location when an important wicket of the opposing team was got, they were made to do the same till the end of the match! It was hilarious watching otherwise grown, rational and smart people behave like this – but then cricket in India is akin to a religion, albeit one that the entire country believes in!

In Singapore when something happens in public, be it good or bad like an accident or if someone narrowly escaped something, then people usually look for four numbers associated with the incident – number plates of a car or numbers associated with an address for example to be used while buying 4D, which is a local lottery system. I’ve seen many people religiously buy this lottery every single day, sometimes winning, but at the end of the day, I’d like to believe the house always wins. To be honest though, I’ve been quite tempted to put some money at the annual draw which takes place during Chinese New Year and in which the first prize can be in millions….

Some people seem luckier than others. I remember reading once about the winner of a mega lottery who won the same lottery more than once! What could the odds be of such an occurrence, something like probably one in a million I guess!

Can luck be learnt? Lucky people consistently encounter lucky chance opportunities whereas unlucky people consistently miss them. One reason it has been said that lucky people are less stressed and more relaxed, hence are more able to see everything around them – both the expected as well as the unexpected. People who consider themselves unlucky are so focused on looking for something specific or are so caught up in their lives that they don’t have time to stop to smell the roses, which leads them to having missed opportunities.

An article I read had four principles via which lucky people generated their luck. Lucky people are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, they are more outgoing and less loathe to break routines, they make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, they create self-fulfilling prophecies by positive expectations and lastly they adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

So there you have it – how to change your life and it’s actually quite simple. Open your mind to serendipity and when the chance to do something new or different comes your way, grab it with both hands. Who knows, your luck and perhaps your life may change at that point!

As for me, I too need to take my own advice and keep an open mind……

Massages and reflexology: Painful, but oh, so worth it!

Posted on by
7

Wearing heels almost the whole day means that at the end of the day, you have aching feet!

I started doing foot reflexology on a whim some time last year when I used to take GG to ballet. I used to have an hour to kill and in the mall next to her class, I chanced upon this chain which did foot reflexology and massages. I did foot reflexology a couple of times and was hooked – I paid up for a package and since then have been enjoying it on and off!

After GG stopped ballet, I also stopped going to the shop, till one day a couple of months back, my foot was paining so badly, I decided to see if there was a store nearby which does this – I lucked out and found the same chain close to my workplace and since then almost once a week (sometimes twice a week), either after work or during my lunch hour, I go and get either a foot massage or a shoulder massage.

So what is foot reflexology? I am not sure if this form of alternative medicine is popular out of Southeast Asia, but here, you see them everywhere! Foot Reflexology involves application of pressure to the feet with specific thumb, finger and hand techniques with the oil of a lotion. This technique claim that various areas of the feet correspond to the different organs in the body and by pressing and kneading these points in the feet, remove blockages in the different parts of the body.

The massages for the back and neck do not involve lotions, but only kneading, pressing and massaging on your neck/back using a towel as a shield. These also tend to be quite painful, but given that pretty much everyone is on a computer at work, muscles become rather stiff. I try to do a neck massage once a week to remove the kincks in my shoulder

The masseuse, even the old aunty-type masseuses have such strong hands, that at times it’s even painful, but oh, so good once it’s done…

While having my massages, I have the most random thoughts. Here are some of them….

Yesterday while having a shoulder massage, I was wondering if I should write a book set in Southeast Asia, where the murderer is this old auntyish lady who is a masseuse and who murders people who have wronged her by giving them massages so strong that it triggers some parts of their body to malfunctions and so some hours later they die and the police and detectives are baffled at these murders and no one comes close to finding it out until this old sinseh (a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner) figures it all out! Now that the plot is here, if anyone writes the book, you know where to find me to send me the share of the royalty 🙂

Another time, I felt I was having an out-of-body experience, something akin to floating around till I came crashing down when the massage ended 😦

TGIF

Posted on by
Reply

This whole week, I’ve been in a funk. It’s 80% work related and another 20% stress over GG & BB’s exams.

Please feel free to not read today’s post as its mostly a rant and also I want to get it off my chest. I’ve found that writing it down helps me do this the best otherwise I tend to brood about it all day long and screw up my days and nights.

OK, here’s my 80% rant. If you remember I applied for the internal job and within a few days the recruiter’s assistant got in touch for a phone interview with my current boss. Then two days later she called me to cancel saying since he is traveling they will reschedule it this week when N, my boss is in town. I waited and even started work on something to show him during the interview. This week i waited for the assistant, lets call her J to confirm the interview date and time since i knew N will be in office this week.

When nothing came by till Wednesday, I reached out to J to check. I was told N is busy and she will get back to me. I know N is busy – interviewing people for the role, both physical and phone interviews!. In fact he also spoke to me in passing about that saying we need to talk. But this was after i told him that J had cancelled the phone interview. From what I understood, N was interviewing people via phone the week my interview was supposed to have been done.

Now i really don’t know what to do – am I not in the consideration at all? Or i am in the race, but since N has seen what I am capable of, he would prefer to screen the others for a first round? This is so confusing and I hate to feel like this!

I am OK if I am out of the consideration totally, but would have appreciated if someone told me that so i don’t build any expectations. This is not like other interviews where you don’t hear from companies (although how long does it take someone to drop the applicant a one liner about the status of their application is beyond me) but since this is the place I work with, I will ultimately know who the successful candidate is and will be working with him/her in the near future!

I’m trying to be positive, but somehow this week has been difficult. Thank Goodness today is Friday. I can’t wait for the week to end. Monday is a new week and hopefully a more positive week for me.

Thank You

Posted on by
Reply

I just got notified by WordPress that I have hit a century where followers are concerned!

A huge “Thank You” to each one of you for thinking that I am a good enough writer that you spend time daily reading what I write (I hope :-))

I promise to write more, write regularly and interesting content! However, if there is anything you wish me to write specifically about, do let me know in the comments section….