A Language Learnt Between Classrooms and Airwaves: How My Father Learnt English in One Year

Until 4th grade, my father didn’t know a single word of English.

He lived in Nepal and attended school in India, studying entirely in the Hindi medium. “Even maths,” he told me. “Ganit. All the multiplication tables—I learnt everything in Hindi.” English was not a second language, or even a distant aspiration. It simply did not exist in his classroom.

That changed abruptly when his family moved to Bhubaneswar, and he was admitted to a convent school, Stuart School. He was in the 4th grade, but still couldn’t speak English.

“The first thing that happened,” he said, “was the bullies.” They quickly realised he couldn’t understand the language everyone else spoke. In a school where English was not just a subject but a social currency, that difference mattered. The first English word he remembers learning was not from a textbook.

“It was ‘bastard’,” he said. “So I went home and asked, what is the meaning of bastard?”

His parents, my Dadu and Thami, were shaken. They wondered whether they had made the wrong decision altogether. Is this what he’s going to learn on day one? They asked themselves. 

What followed, however, was not the familiar story of quiet withdrawal or permanent disadvantage, of letting the bullies win. Instead, it was a story shaped by one teacher.

Her name was Mrs Acharya.

“She groomed me,” my father said, using the word deliberately. Not taught, but mechanically groomed. She worked on his pronunciation, his confidence, and his willingness to speak. Within a year, he wasn’t just coping in English. He was excelling.

So much so that he began performing in English radio plays for All India Radio.

This was a time before private FM channels, before Spotify, before podcasts. “There was only one radio channel for the entire country,” he said. On Saturday afternoons, his plays were broadcast nationwide. His father recorded them at home. These were full productions—scripted, rehearsed, and performed entirely in English.

“I used to go to the All India Radio studio,” he said. “Proper recording there. Full play.”

The transformation is almost implausible: a boy who couldn’t speak a word of English until grade 4, performing English radio dramas heard across the country within a year. But that is precisely why the story matters.

It is not a story about talent appearing overnight. It is a story about access—about how language can exclude, but also how a single educator can reverse that exclusion entirely. It is a reminder that English, in India, is not just a language. It is power, mobility, and sometimes survival. This is something that we know across the globe, to tap into the vast network of opportunities, being familiar with the English language is vital; as much as we would not want it to erase our cultural identity, and say there is “one global language”, English is the closest we have to one communicative challenge that unites the world. 

And occasionally, if you’re lucky, it’s also a Saturday afternoon voice on the radio—recorded carefully by a father who once worried he had chosen the wrong school.

This story also acts as a stark reminder of the importance of teachers in the lives of the youth, without Mrs. Acharya may have never been as fluent as he is in English, which may have limited the nature of global opportunities that he was able to access in his life; being part of the first flow of college graduates to go the United States and work for large multinational corporations. Teachers shape us into who we become, often deciding the subjects we like and those that we hate, which is why Dr Radhakrishnan's birthday, as Teacher's Day, is an annual reminder of how teachers quite literally hold the fate of the future in their hands.