'My kid knows her mother tongue, and four more'

At the other end of the mother tongue debate are people like Anindita Mitra, SDM, Ropar (Punjab) and her husband Dr S Karunaraju, Punjab's commissioner for NREGA. Their daughter Sanghamitra at just four-and-a-halfyears knows five languages — Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Hindi and English. The child speaks in Telugu with her father, who's from Andhra Pradesh, and in Bengali with her mother.As both parents are civil servants posted in Punjab, she speaks Punjabi too. The parents have, of course, taught her Hindi and English.
"I wanted my child to learn our mother languages too,'' says Mitra. "It is our regional languages that bind us strongly to our cultures, and if we don't teach it to our next generation we cut them away from our culture. I wanted my child to be a multilingual child. We'll be happy if she can learn other languages. Unlike us adults, children have huge capacities to get hold of language at a tender age. Parents should take advantage of that and introduce their kids to various Indian languages.''
Not stopping at that, the couple too learnt each other's mother tongue. Asked how she feels when she converses in all these five languages, Sanghamitra, says, "Onek bhalo (very nice, in Bengali)."