Glass houses

As I was beginning to learn the Kannada alphabet, I found it both difficult and confusing, as is mostly the case with any new thing you try. Letters like ಒ (o) and ಜ (ja) that have no connection between them looked similar, as if they were vowel variants of the same consonant. Similar to this were ಘ (gha) and ಫ (pha), just to name one more pair. When I looked at the Tamil alphabet to see how it was doing, I realized that it has many such pairs too - ஏ (ae) and ர (ra), ள (la) and ன (na), etc. Hindi was no exception, for example इ (i) and ड (da), घ (gha) and ध (dha); I'm sure English has such pairs too.

A Tamil friend who went for a six-month German class before his six-week Germany trip made fun of me for roaming around with a Kannada book. I asked him why hasn't he learnt Kannada these six years in Karnataka, of course with a jovial tone. I would've been happy had he told me he was lazy or didn't find time or found it difficult or felt it was not needed; I know we don't have infinite time and energy. But his answer was "Come on, I can't learn this jalebi, all letters look the same". I told him "Believe me, Tamil is no better and its letter இ (i) is the most complex letter I've ever known and most closely resembles a jalebi." I felt like receiving a slap myself, for I was no different some time ago. Now I learn and forget, refresh and remember - but I'm ashamed that I can't speak Kannada fluently even after these many years in Bangalore.

Through this post I want to tell myself that when we live in a glass house, it's sometimes ok to throw stones at others if we have good intentions; that is like our parents advising us to become doctors and engineers, even though they're not one themselves. Sometimes we even tend to slip though we take extreme care to preach what we believe and follow what we preach, which is also perfectly fine; we're all just humans. But I think many times we ridiculously fall prey to our own contempt and either trivialize things we don't believe in or get biased by people we are more bothered about. I think with thousands of years of humankind, it's time for us to not just accommodate, but also appreciate each other. Wait a second, are we even accommodating yet?