Nanny 911: Parles vous Mandarin?

Whenever any bright young child visits our home in Pune, my father never ceases to remind its parents to expose their kids to as many languages as they can. It seems like a lesson he learnt after I was grown-up beyond redemption. I am not an extraordinary polyglot by Indian standards at all. I speak Marathi, Hindi, English and some German. My mother can speak some Gujarati and Telugu as well, thanks to her friends in school but clearly she made no attempt to rub the skill onto me. Ofcourse first-timer parents aren't terribly experienced and technically I should be thankful they were smart enough to make up for the lack of experience. :-)(As you can see I didn't have anywhere else to go with that last sentence. So it was practically extracted out of me at gun-point.)

I used to be "padik" (habitually joblessly present) at a Kannada neighbour's house as a kid, but found myself struggling with "Neer Beku" (Water please) on childhood jaunts to Bangalore. Also the most useful phrase in Telugu that one has to know is "Po Amma!" (Shooo woman) used to drive off beggars on our way to Tirupati. That's the sum and total of my Dravidian language skills. I should write a Travel book for Indians someday, given my extensive language skills. ;-)

Be that as it may, American parents seem to have taken quite a fancy to the idea of teaching their kids many languages early in their childhood.(This is probably relegated to the richest few.) What's more some are fighting hard to find a nanny who can teach their kids Mandarin. The BBC has an interesting news-story about nannies who can speak Chinese, and how some of them make $20,000 more than other nannies... about $70,000 at times. I am beginning to think I should learn Mandarin and switch jobs now. I could go into stock-market investing full-time with the odd flourish of "Shishyani"(Thank you) at the kid during the day.

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