I prepare teachers, build learning products, and research what works in Pakistan’s classrooms.

This power and prestige differential wasn’t of course just limited to Punjabi and Urdu. All sorts of stereotypes were perpetuated by speakers of one language about speakers of another. For instance, some thought that Pashto, which is another major language, was a harsh and jarring tongue. One of the jokes that they used to make, one that embarrasses me to my core as I recollect it tonight, went like this, “If you take a handful of pebbles, put them all in a jar, and then shake the jar, the sound that results is the sound of Pashto.” To this day, I hate myself for having once laughed on such derogatory jokes.

It is very likely that many of the speakers of these regional languages would have viewed my privilege with a lot resentment, especially when language and accent can be a huge barrier to social mobility. And yet, at another level, another exchange between resentment and snobbery was happening, one in which the role of resenter was switched. I, with my preference for Urdu, used to view the English-speaking elite of my country with the same indignation as a Paindu would view me with; in return, I feared being judged with the same snobbish and elitist mindset that I viewed the Paindu with. My relative lack of proficiency in speaking English, even though I went to an English-medium school, always made me insecure in front of the rich kids in the town, who grew up soaked in the Anglicized culture of the powerful elite.

Fast forward to eight months ago, when I came to live, for the first time ever in my life, to an English-speaking country. By now, I was already a changed man in many respects. I had already begun, some four or five years ago, the critical internal work of correcting my biases and cultivating an appreciation for linguistic diversity in myself. I had also by now grown a lot in terms of the “cultural capital” associated with knowing English. In all these years, I had made a good number of friends from the Anglophile elite, had received all of my sixteen years of education in English, had even watched a sizeable number of English films and had a playlist of English songs on my phone (though I could never get the lyrics just by listening). And yet, my first experience of living here in the United States, and having to communicate, for the major portions of my days, in a language that was still foreign to me, left me defeated most of the times. There was so much that I knew but could not clearly articulate, so much I felt but could not truly express. I couldn’t even get the jokes that my classmates cracked. I felt so dumb. The first few weeks were emotionally exhausting; I was homesick most of the time, always craved to converse in Urdu with any person who remotely knew it, and when at the end of each day I finally got to talk to my roommate in Urdu, it was always such a relief. It was during this unsettling experience that I started appreciating a quote from Nelson Mandela that I had read a long time ago, and which is also the inspiration for the title of this talk. The quote went like this: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” Oh boy, I felt so happy when someone spoke to me in my language. Forget speaking, even when someone just expressed a desire to know more about my language, I felt that my identity was being valued. I could finally know what being a linguistic minority feels like, and how hard it is when you’re thrown into a linguistic environment that you’re not used to. Well, actually, no, I still could not truly know. I still could not truly know because I wasn’t made fun of or looked down upon because of my lack of command over English, or my imperfect or inconsistent accent; I didn’t face the derision that a Paindu has to go through.

Anyhow, the months progressed, I became more and more comfortable, in fact, I started loving my time here; but the experience of those early weeks at HGSE has stayed with me. I have spent most of my time here either thinking about language, taking courses related to language, learning a new language, or simply marveling at scenes of people laughing and chatting in Spanish or Korean or Arabic or Mandarin. Over the past eight months, I have become fascinated with the subject of language, especially the important educational dimension of it. Some of the courses that I have taken here at HGSE have grounded me in the attitude that linguistic diversity in educational settings is a resource and not a problem. And I continue to wonder what took me so long to realize this. Surely it was privilege: privilege blinds us to the most obvious, the most basic of realities. I had to go through the discomfort myself to be able to empathize better. In this respect, and in many other respects too, my experience here at HGSE has been a lesson in humility.

During the last semester, a couple of my Indian friends here at HGSE have been kind enough to teach me how to read and write in their beautiful language Hindi, a process that I have thoroughly enjoyed. This experience of learning a new language encouraged me to go for more, so I enrolled in a Farsi language course this semester; again, I am absolutely loving it! I don’t know what the future holds, but I have a strong feeling that my time here at HGSE has put me on a path of exploring the beautiful world of languages. This summer, I am going to Istanbul for an Arabic language program. And I hope that after returning back to Pakistan, I can finally begin to learn at least some of the many beautiful languages of my people. Or if I cannot do that, I hope that, at the very least, I can play my part in helping kids learn and express in the language that speaks to their heart and to help them see the beauty and value in other languages and other perspectives, something that took me so long to learn.