Writing Tamil. No, wait, Hindi really.

Now that we are in Tamil Nadu, I feel the need to learn to read/write Tamil. I talk about this to my kids as well -- I ask them if they want to learn to read Tamil too. Aparna shows no interest but Abhi says he wants to write Hindi. Okay. That doesn't quite follow from the earlier conversation but nature has no straight lines and I have learned to not be surprised with this child.
Abhi says, "First, teach me the Hindi alphabet."

I reply, "I don't know the full alphabet but I can show you how to write words."

Perhaps because the older brother is interested, Aparna is now interested as well.  So I sit down, flanked on either side by a kid, and start to write some words they know. Since both of them speak Hindi we are not attempting to read/write it while at the same time trying to learn the language, which is a different order of beast altogether.
I write, "आम" and "Aam", "अभिनव " and "Abhinav", "कुत्ता" and "kutta", "भूत" and "bhooth", and so on. Along the way we make frequent stops to talk about "matras" (diacritics) or the process of attaching vowels to the consonants. Soon we have a small collection of words, with a significant number of vowels, consonants and matras. We now begin to construct new words from old. Either one of them volunteers a word, or I suggest one to write. One of them suggests "shit", so we write "टट्टी" and "tatti", and as I sound it out they both laugh. No surprises there, scatological explorations are always funny. We continue like this for about forty minutes and then it is time for bed.

The next day Abhi wakes up with an idea. He has been working on a comic strip, and now he wants to write it in two languages. As he constructs the strip, his new idea is to leave all the speech bubbles blank. He wants to make a xerox copy of the strip and come back and fill in the speech bubbles, English in one copy and Hindi in the other. The copying will come later. For now he numbers the speech bubbles and on a separate piece of paper writes his dialog, first in English and then keeps coming to me for help with writing the Hindi version.
Some of the things he writes:
"Meanwhile..." and "इस बीच...",
"Ha! I am here." and "हा!, मैं आ गया ।",
and so on.

So now he has another reason to learn to write Hindi.


- Dev