The Guy With the Weird Accent

When I was in my First Year in college, there was with me a guy named Rohit. He came from some small town somewhere, I forget which one exactly. The reason I knew him was because he was one of the guitarists in the college band, and I hung around with those people a lot. (Like any good groupie would!)

Now, Rohit didn’t speak much English. In fact, he couldn’t speak much English. He almost always spoke Hindi, with some Marathi and a smattering of English words thrown in. This, of course, meant that the two of us didn’t communicate much, and for a year we shared a ‘nod-in-acknowledgment-of-the-other’ relationship.

A year passed. I moved on the Second Year. He didn’t. I don’t know whether it was because he didn’t study enough or because he lacked the necessary English skills, but he didn’t clear his First Year exams. This meant he had to drop a year and give the exams again before he could proceed to the Second Year. With plenty of guitarists around, the band didn’t miss him much.

A year later, Rohit was back. Outwardly, he’d changed little. The tight, faded jeans and loose T-shirt were still the same. The stubbly look and the hollow cheeks hadn’t gone anywhere either. Nor had his skills with the guitar.

Then he opened his mouth to speak and my jaw dropped! He spoke in English! That wasn’t the biggest surprise! He spoke in English with a foreign accent! I asked him how that had come about. It was a simple story really.

When he found out that he was going to have a year free on his hands, he, like everyone else dropping a year does, sought employment in a call center. And they’d obviously put him through the necessary voice training and taught him how to speak with the accent. And since that was the way he had learned to speak English and that was practically the only English he had spoken in his life, it had stuck. Hence now he spoke English with the accent!

There were two other noteworthy points about the entire story. Firstly, the English he now spoke wasn’t anything close to perfect. There were still quite a few mistakes in it. But it was with a foreign accent!

And finally, the accent that he spoke in seemed rather queer to all of us. So we asked him which country the call center he was working in belonged to. And that’s when the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. It turned out that he’d worked in three call centers during the one year absence - one American, one British and one Australian! Poor guy!