I sounded rich, but was really quite poor growing up...

 Life can be very confusing when you are growing up poor, but sound like you are rich, simply because you had a good education, were exposed to proper spoken English at home, and picked up a reading habit from your family.

 

I guess it all started when I was sent to my grandma's house during weekdays as both parents were working, and there wasn’t anyone to look after poor lil me. So I was enrolled in Pinto's nursery where Pinto teacher, a statusque Catholic ma'am would gather all us tiny tots around in her massive living room around her Grand Piano and she would play the tunes and sing our favourite nursery rhymes. If one of us was especially good that week she would even let us sit at the end of the piano stool and plonk one key in time with the tune she played. Of course each one of us messed that up, but we were all so proud of ourselves that day!

 

Then came primary school, which was a bit of a bother for a younger child particularly when the elder sister was the teacher's pet and academically gifted so everything one did was weighed against their performance at the same level, something unfortunately I could never hope to match up to. Thankfully as she is 8 years my senior, she passed out of the school and entered college while I was still navigating my path from uniform short pants (until standard 5) to uniform long pants (after standard 5).

 

Next came my Diploma in Industrial electronics engineering at the manufacturing giant Larsen & Toubro's in-house Diploma institute for the children of its enormous workforce. Here I sat alongside children of employees from far-off lands in India like Kansbahal in the North East corner, the deep southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and some obligatory Sikh children from the Northern parts of India. Once again, my spoken English was usually better than the rest of the class, save a few South Indian classmates who quickly became good friends and we created the clique of poor but sounding rich blokes, once again in safety shoes and uniform pants after standard 10.

 

Then the obligatory Bachelors in Engineering from Mumbai University, where a bunch of us Diplima holders entered at the end of year 1 and narrowly scraped through the semester exams to get into year 2. Here again, my spoken and written English was usually better than the other inmates, for whom I would routinely write apology letters for various misdemeanors that were carried out with gay abandon while serving our term at that lovely penitentiary.

 

Then we graduated, and got jobs, my first lasted 4 months (got bored of building gimmicky e-learning videos in Flash actionscript) then the next lasted 6 years as a Java developer. Here my spoken English gave me the advantage I needed, as my counterparts and customers were in the London and England offices, and my better than usual command over their language was appreciated and led me to leadership roles faster than the rest.

 

But command over a language can only take you that far, you have to put in the work in other areas to be truly respected as a valuable member of any team. So we all did that, and still do it, day after day, grinding away at those pesky bugs, performance improvements, project plans, status reports, dashboards and everything else that corporate slavery deems necessary. Is it worth it? Yes and No in equal parts. I am able to sit at my macbook on a Monday evening putting these thoughts down into a blog partially because said corporate slavery paid me for the house, the computer and the very electricity that powers it and the internet wireless connection in my home. No, because I really wanted to become an M.A in English Literature, studying the works of great English poets and authors, which sounded grand and rich but that idea was soon scuttled when my father, a very wise man, told me the M.A would not put bread on the dinner table every night. Sounding rich while actually being quite poor may seem a romantic idea, but leave that for those dusty Dostoevsky epics, I don't recommend you trying it in real life. It isn't as much fun as you may think it is.