From “A Letter To My Students” by Ramnath Subramanian

To gather greatness, we must know and embrace the greatness of the past. It is essential that you give your time and mind to the classics, for they will inform the passages that brought us here, and the ones you may construct for the future.

Learn to speak and write well, so that you will stand out in a crowd not just for your thoughts and ideas, but for the panache with which you express them. Language gives one originality and culture. The best erudition may be found lacking if it walks with the crutches of picayune speech.

It is not always easy to do, but keep Truth at the center of your transactions, and as your perennial guide. Character, after all, is the true measure of a man, and nothing informs it better than adherence to the truth.

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How We Speak Is Who We Are by Ramnath Subramanian

A recent comment to one of my postings on social media was terse and monosyllabic. “Dope,” it said.

I am sufficiently in tune with modern parlance to know that the comment was a compliment, but I did not like it.

When it comes to the English language, I am a man who still likes to spend some time with Fowler’s classic reference work “Modern English Usage.”

I find the word “dope” just as puerile and pathetic as its predecessor, “bomb.”

I also take umbrage at people’s habit of abbreviating everything. I know that certain social media protocols demand brevity, but an overuse of it in the way a lush takes to his drink makes the world go dizzyingly blurred.

I wish that people would speak and write in complete sentences without taking shortcuts, and express themselves in a way that is respectful of grammar.

I also cannot accept without demur people’s habit of speaking in broken sentences and hiccups.

“I would like to say something, but … you know how it is … like, Josh was saying … it’s crazy.” This kind of rambling speech is quite common, and when responded to in kind, the pile of thoughts can be quite crooked and disconcerting.

When I was teaching I insisted that my students express themselves succinctly.

“You cannot paint a tree halfway,” I told them, “and then move across to another part of the canvas, dropping splotches of paint here and there, to paint a part of a mountain. You must define every part of the picture in an orderly fashion, and in so doing define yourself.”

English was not my first language growing up, even though both my parents were well versed in the language. At home I spoke Tamil or Malayalam, and with friends Hindi or Bengali.

However, every school-going child in India comes to a point by and by when English has to be taken seriously. When I got to that point, I was fortunate to have teachers who used the best examples in literature to model speech and writing.

I became familiar with the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, and the plays of Sheridan and Shakespeare. There was no fractured speech in any of the passages I read.

“It is not enough to speak, but you have to give thought to your speech,” said one of my English teachers, Mr. Biswas. “And those thoughts that color your speech must draw the water from the well of literary giants and masterly thinkers.”

I know that high-school English teachers are teaching students literature, but are they teaching them passion for literature?

To know a line from Shakespeare is something, but to know how it sails away as a meteor in the sky to a brilliance is quite another matter.

The job of education is not just to impart knowledge, but also to create refinement.

Of silver speech it must be said that the silver belongs to both its content and its style.

The well and fully educated man knows that the architecture of his bearing and being is colored just as much by his mind as with the things he holds in his hand.

The words we write and speak must carry a light, — and new light, if we are to make a mark in the world.

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