Esperanto

May15, 2009.
Now that I am a contributing member to KQED (our local NPR station), I can write about my own "driving" and "driveway" moments that occur when I drive the short 5 minutes to work. I heard Joe Biden speak today, while I was idling at one of 12 lights on the way to work. He was at Esperanza, a military family community near south LA, talking about benefits that will become available to families of active soldiers and veterans.

The name rattled my old brain, and the name "Esperanto" popped up. As it is, there is a population density of 1 per ten million or so who might read this blog. Among those good souls, I doubt if 1% of that esteemed crowd would know what Esperanto means. Wikipedia says the following:

Esperanto (help·info) is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world.^[2] Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means "one who hopes" in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.^[3]

Now why would I know that? More than 20 years ago, when I was in high school, I had an English teacher who took his job very very seriously. As the name Lloyd Gonzales would suggest he was, as people would have called him, an Anglo-Indian. Political correctness would beg to differ of course. We were being very presumptive, pegging him as one. He might very much have been a vanilla-flavor Christian. Nevertheless, he had a unique way of teaching the language. Quite contrary to the style of wheezing Tamilians who had been my teachers until that point, who "s"s and "m"s were pronounced "yes" and "yum", he had the clipped British accent which made every student perk up and pay attention. That he had jokes and anecdotes mixed in lessons, only made the hour more interesting. That these non-curricular diversions had been tried out and perfected to varying degrees of success on classes of bygone years, did not occur to us until later. On one such fine sunny day as it is today, he asked "Does anyone know the name of the universal language?". At that time, I prided myself on being the best in quiz and general knowledge. I had few dog-eared books of Britannica encyclopedia. This was not the age of the Google search engine. If I heard "Does anyone know.." or "What is..." uttered anywhere within earshot, my ears perked up like a beagle's! But I was stumped on this one. The answer was, as you could have guess by now, Esperanto.

A decade or so later, I walked into my lab in GM where a Romanian and an American colleague were in a heated argument about something. As soon as I walked in, the Romanian gentleman turned to me, face red, and asked, "Bhaskar! What is the universal language?". History had prepared me ( a la "Slumdog Millionaire") for this very day. I smiled to myself, and said "Why Esperanto of course!". The one piece of knowledge that I thought would never come in handy at any point in my life was about to be put to use. I was going to use it, and enhance my stature in the group as wise and learned. Just a week earlier, I had used the word "Sanctum Sanctorum" in a meeting, to blank stares from most and guffaws of appreciation from a few European managers!!
Obviously smiled that someone other than him knew this, he turned to his adversary and said, "See!! Even Bhaskar knows this. English is NOT the universal language, Esperanto is! I told you..."
The moment of pride vanished without a trace. I was doomed to be the asian dude who knows a thing or two.