From Hindustani at Heathrow to Edinburgh's vanilla ice cream—a tale of discovery

livemint.com:

Arranged Marriage, he said in an interview that he had always thought that Punjabi was India’s first language, until he landed in India and found out otherwise. Now, something opposite happened to me when I landed at the Heathrow Airport in London in July, knowing fully well that English was the first language of the people living in the United Kingdom. But the only language I could hear around me at Heathrow was Hindustani—the lingua franca of the people of North India and Pakistan.

The feeling did not leave me during my first couple of days in London, and wherever I went I could hear only Hindustani. Of course, as any idiot can possibly tell you, Hindustani isn’t the lingua franca of the British. People in the UK speak English—or at least something that sounds like English to us Indian ears.

Pretty soon I started registering other sounds as well—Telugu, Tamil, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam—the Indian languages came first, and were followed by French and Italian, the only European languages that I can recognize. Nonetheless, by the time my two weeks in the UK had come to an end, sounds from a whole host of languages had made it to my ears. Of course, I have no ability of mapping a sound to a language.

So, what happened here? I was limited by my experience. My ears are primarily used to picking up the Hindustani sound and some amount of Marathi. As soon as I hit London, my ears picked up all the Hindustani and drowned out everything else.

It took me a few days to get over this limitation, only to make me realise all over again how limiting our limited experiences from which we try and make sense of our lived lives can actually turn out to be. An old lesson was learnt all over again. ***** Dear reader, if you are the kind