I Contemplated Making this Title an Amalgam of All the Languages I know Words in, but Decided Against it Coz I Know People Who Know Those Languages

I grew up with Tagore, grew into Marquez and lost myself in Rumi. I've always wanted to read them in the languages they thought, but the only one for whom I've gone the extra mile for so far has been Marquez. Jo hablo un poco espanol, pero muy poco.

Having lived about 90% of my life in Madras, the languages I am perfectly fluent in have remained English and Tamil, possibly in that order. After three miserable years of first-standard-level Hindi which only taught me how to read and write in Hindi, it was only in the past four years or so that I found myself exposed to the language...thanks to theatre group colleagues who would start speaking in Hindi when they wanted to shut me up, an Afghan and a Pakistani roommate who would constantly talk in Urdu, and a move to Delhi.

But it dawned on me suddenly that languages I didn't understand could wring emotions in me I didn't know existed. Gitanjali was one of the works that made me realise my own religious leanings. I read it, of course, in English, but for the past few months, I've been listening almost everyday to Tomar Binai Gaan Chilo, and Pankaj Mullick's rendering of Ami Tomari Sange brings me to tears every single time, although I still haven't figured out which of the songs in Gitanjali's English version it corresponds to.

The same goes for the song Baghdad by Kazem Al Saher. I know about ten Arabic words, and yet the song makes me yearn for Baghdad in the old days, before 2003, as if it were my own hometown. When Russian operas throw you into Moscow, Italian operas turn you into a Sicilian, Bengali songs stir the chords in you that turn your thoughts to God, Spanish songs have you pillion riding with Che Guevara through Argentina, Arabic songs make you Iraqi and Persian poetry has you running from Shiraz to Tehran, I wonder what quality music has that transcends all language barriers.

Sometimes, I wonder whether the phrase "language barrier" should even exist. When you think how often it happens that you break into your native language with someone you're close to, without it occurring to you that they don't speak it, maybe the phrase should not exist. One of my best friends is Iranian, and I remember our struggling to film a sequence outside a bar. People would walk right across the camera just when the sequence was almost over. She turned to me and screamed, "oye baba, ajab adamiyaha!!!" And I understood she was saying, "dear God, what weird people!!!" A few days later, I broke into "illa, Mahsa, idhai ippadi pidi!", which she understood to mean, "no, Mahsa, hold the camera this way."

It also makes you think about what the language of thought is. You struggle to express things you feel at times, and none of the languages you know seem to convey quite enough. I like to think there is a layer to the cosmos where thoughts can be transmitted without requiring a medium...where the past, present and future melt into a universal consciousness, and people don't need language to communicate either amongst each other or within themselves. They are scattered moments in time, but each one of them is precious.