What beautiful English we speak!

It's a question many of us are asked often enough when we go to Britain or the US: 'Such good English, such beautiful... Where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where were you educated?' There's a moment when you have the impish desire to reply, 'Oh, Oxford/Harvard,' those great English-enunciation and vocabulary workshops. But, then, embarrassment on behalf of your questioner kicks in, and you reply that your English was homegrown - as in, picked up and honed here in India. You wonder whether you should go into the nitty-gritty of explaining the proliferation of English-medium schools in metropolitan India. But then you realise your meeting is not about postcolonial language assimilation, but about more immediate matters at hand. So, you continue with your British or American, in English - unless you're more comfortable with a non-English language and have a competent translator at hand to showcase a new 'power dynamics'.

Don Trump's 'Wow, you speak English so well!' moment with Liberian president Joseph Boakai had the same one-way traffic of frisson and response of a polite internal eye-roll. Perhaps, one day, we'll be suitably blase when a monolinguist British PM or American president goes a few words beyond 'Namaste' and 'Vivekamunand', and we don't squeal with delight that a Westerner can speak a non-English Indian language.