Do you know what its like being caught between many worlds? Let me tell you first hand that its not very nice!! I'm talking about worlds of UK english and US english.
I, as an Indian, am caught in a peculiar situation here. All my life right since pre-school I've been schooled in the queen's english. At the same time when the St. Mary's School was trying to grill into me the 'prim-and-propah' queen's english, I was busy picking up all kinds of American slangs from American tv and movies! Add to that the fact that my language also consists of the quintissential Mumbai slang which is quite sticky itself and voila.. you have an unfortunate mixture of english, english and english!! Oh and did I mention the fact that now I have also picked up the sms slang which is basically half the letters off of each word??
English is kind of the only language spoken all across India. We do have our naitonal language hindi and about 100 other regional languages, but the national language is not spoken in some parts like the south of India and people from other parts of India don't understand the regional language so the only means of communication then becomes english. What this means is there are various dialects of english spoken within India. And depending on where you've been vaccationing lately you pick up some of that too!
Then when you are sitting and cracking your head over an exam paper, it becomes really difficult to not let your various slangs and accents interfere with the queen's english so you don't loose marks over that! The most difficlut slang to avoid is by far the sms slang.. when I am writing 35 pages in my answer sheet in two and a half hours, it is really tempting to write 'u' instead of you and 'ur' instead of your! I swear I have to bite my hand to stop from doing it!! And I write 'color' here but I have to write 'colour' in my exams! Heck, I even have to get myself to write 'colour' in my upcoming GRE test for postraduate application to US universities. Thats just strange!! Why can't they acept 'color'?! Don't ask me..
You SCers are lucky in that you only have to read my unfortunate mixture of language and not hear it! Man, are you lucky!! Can you imagine an accent that bounces somewhere between the Indian and the American and the UK and the Mumbai accent? And its not just me, its an entire generation of Indians!! Add to that the fact that my browser is set to American english when I frequently type in the Uk english spellings!! And then I spend another annoying couple of minutes correcting all the spellings to American english because I can't stand those red underlines! I have now turned all my browser settings off. Genius, right?
Bah!!!!
