A small insignificant start

After proposing the FMI idea (Fifty Meters Initiative), I nearly lost interest in blogging. It was as if everytime I came up with enough thoughts to write about something, my alter ego would come in front of me asking me to follow at least my own idea, if not somebody else's. Post the FMI blog, my only contribution to the blogging world has been to highlight an article on Macaulay which I chanced upon during my various reading excursions.

Well, as life would have it, I relocated back to India by the end of November 08 (the month I wrote on FMI). After getting the initial relocation hiccups out of the way, I finally settled in a Bangalore locality, not very far from my office (my number one criteria while looking for a house). Within a few weeks, I established good contact with the security guards of my apartment. Some verbal investigation gave me a fairly good picture of their background, their families and the nature of their jobs. 

Then I threw a bouncer at them - were they interested  in studying anything? Did they know anyone in their circle who were interested in studying anything? This was an unusual question for them. They are fairly used to questions about water, garbage disposal, power backup etc from the tenants but not on such lines. So, they (there are 2 of them) got a little confused, unsure of my motives they were shying away from any answer. After explaining that I could take weekend classes for anybody who may be interested pro bono, they promised to get back to me after checking with their friends/relatives.

Next week (or probably week after that), one of the guards rang our bell with three strangers. I tried to visually study them. 2 of them seemed quite shy and 1 fairly outspoken. I probed on their backgrounds and it turned out that 2 of them were security guards (for a different apartment) and 1 worked in a hotel. After some discussion, they all showed interest in learning English. I thought I could do it. So, we had a deal. We figured out a place in our apartment where we could sit together and start our journey.

Today, it has been around 10 weeks of our little experiment. We have classes every Saturday and Sunday in the forenoon. Initially, when we started, I had to talk most of the time in Hindi to explain the things. As Hindi is not their mother tongue (theirs is Oriyya), it used to get funny some times. But now, we have made enough progress to speak only English during our classes. I consider this as a good achievement for them. It has been very hard for my pupils - I have a short temper and am still trying improve my patience. But I am learning with them with every class. By the way, these days only 2 of them are coming. The third one realized that progress in our class was quite slow (he is a graduate) to suit his needs. He wants to prepare for some public sector exams and has asked for some help at the right time, to which I readily agreed. 

Attending the weekly classes regularly is a challenge for these guards as they continually have night shits and sometimes 24 hour shifts so that the other can get a day-off (talk to a security guard to understand what I mean). But still, these students have been remarkably consistent. I hope all this toil to learn English helps them in some way. We are still a far off from our goal of being able to read an English newspaper easily but we are making steady progress. Probably in a few more months, we should be in some shape.  I am eagerly looking forward to see how this journey unfolds.