I have an accent.
 
So do Brad Pitt and Queen Elizabeth. And so did Laurence Olivier and Walter Cronkite.
 
There is no person alive who does not have an accent. The way you speak a language, say English, is heavily influenced by your first language, if it is different from English. It is also influenced by where you come from, the level of education you have had, the social or economic class from which you spring, and even possibly the ethnic group to which you belong. We all have accents.
 
When people speak of a person having an accent, they mean, pejoratively, that the person has a non-standard way of speaking a language, whatever the standard is in their mind or that of their audience. Clearly the standard varies sharply. Sir Laurence, who made a great deal of money by bringing his histrionic talent to the other side of the Pacific, did not at all sound like his Queen, and the avuncular newscaster Cronkite, so beloved of Americans, read his daily bulletin in tones very different from Brad Pitt’s.
 
Yet ridicule is poured on the Tamil Indian who has come to work on a network system in Alabama on a H1B visa or the Salvadoreño who has crossed the border from Mexico questing for cleaning jobs in a New Jersey suburb. Even more ridiculous is the superior air with which a person, who has spent some time in Bristol or Boston, looks down on the average denizen of Manila or Mumbai.

​During a short break in a meeting in downtown Washington, I sidestepped into a delicatessen to order a quick sandwich. Before even the Korean server asked, I told her the type of bread, the kind of meat and the assortment of additions I wanted. She didn’t follow. When I repeated my choices, a trifle more clearly, she still did not grasp. I said, “Just make a good sandwich and give it to me, please.”
 
When I sat down to eat, I had a momentary flash of annoyance that a person, whose work is to fashion a sandwich from the ingredients in front of her, should have so much trouble following a simple order. Then I realized that, in a country where live 5o million people for whom English is a second language and in a city where the foreign-born outnumber the native-born 7 to 1, it was I, the customer, who should learn to cope with the limited linguistic skill of a low-wage server.
 
It is well-know that in the US people are discriminated against, in recruitment or in assessment of their work, if they seem to speak with an unfamiliar accent. Routinely, new immigrants are treated unfairly the moment they open their mouth, even if their looks are misleading. Even in jobs where the spoken language is not important, a prejudice against the non-native person masquerades as a bias against the non-native accent.

When I grew up in colonial India, I could understand – though not accept – the parochial preference of British rulers and their lackeys for a certain accent, but, agonizingly, it continued long after the British were ejected from the Indian shores. The tradition has continued. The extraordinary pains some seem to take to cultivate an expatriate accent belies the slipshod standard of their vocabulary and grammar. Accent is a poor predictor of language proficiency, as much as the size of one’s head, which once riveted the bogus science of phrenology, is a pathetic indicator of a person’s intelligence.
 
Of course, we want to be understood when we speak. Our intonation of words must bear a reasonable semblance to the expected sound of the words. This has become easier thanks to the internet. You can click on any word in a dictionary and hear the right sound, and you can do so in any major language. But to strive for the correct pronunciation is a far cry from the inane attempt to ape the ‘correct’ accent.

​I learned Asian languages before I left India: Bengali, Sanskrit, Pali and Hindi. Those gave me a broad range of phonetics when I went on to learn French and Spanish, while I saw my American colleagues struggle mightily with the softer sounds of d and t. I feel a curious thrill when I am mistaken for a Hispanic when I converse in Spanish.
 
I learned English in India, including some mispronunciations, but never made the slightest attempt to speak like my English colleagues. Later, I was equally loath to pick up the midwestern accent most current in the US. My effort was, as ever in every language, to learn it well, use it with elegance and precision. That effort has not ended. It never will. I admire EM Forster and EB White, but I try to write in my own way, battling to find my own idiom.
 
Getting some preferred accent I believe to be a fool’s errand, unless one works in a call center or aspires to an elevated social status. I have no desire to seem superior to anybody else. A large part of my work involved making presentations to groups, big and small, and I never experienced blank looks. Nobody complained that I was unintelligible; rather, some complimented me on my clarity. That to me was more important than being noted for an Oxbridge accent or taken for a Boston brahmin.

I was a tongue-tied child. I could speak with my father and mother and a small circle of friends. I wasn’t voluble, but I could express myself with them. Beyond that, I was struck dumb and could not speak.
 
Looking back, it seems nearly inconceivable. Much of my work in three continents has been speaking. Diplomacy entailed endless talking. My work with a UN organization meant speaking with diverse people from different countries. My jobs with two multinationals, European and American, required persuading people, negotiating with people and even lecturing people for hours. Consulting too was nothing if not copious talking, with strangers, colleagues and recalcitrant clients. This was quite a break from my childhood experience.

​My parents were social people. A long stream of people passed through our living room. Dining room too, for father was in the habit of inviting for a meal anybody interesting he met. Mother would scramble to put together a decent repast at short notice. Father would return home from a walk, a meeting or a tennis match and present us all with a new friend he had invited impromptu for dinner. It could be a judge or journalist, a pudgy businessman or a wire-thin bureaucrat, or simply a nobody who had caught father’s fancy.
 
Curiously, my parents believed in a Jeffersonian model of democracy for the family. They insisted on knowing and chatting with every one of our, the children’s, friends. Conversely, they wanted us to meet and know every one of their friends. So would soon come the turn for my brother and me to meet their guests.
 
My elder brother was glib and confident. He would say his name and readily volunteer any other tidbits the guest wanted to hear. In short, he would pass with flying colors. When came my turn to be introduced, I would suddenly find I had lost my tongue. Mother would gently suggest that I was shy and provide my name. Father would take a look at my face and provide also the name of my school and my class. I would quickly recede to a corner of the living room.
 
But father would not let go of me so easily. Come dinner time, he would place me right next to the special guest, be it an author or a musician or an actor. It was his way of getting me into the conversation. Occasionally I would find something brief to say or to ask a question. My preferred role, however, was to just sit and listen.
 
My mother then tried another ruse. I might have mentioned during dinner an interesting story I had read in the day’s newspaper. She suggested that I read it to the rest of the family after dinner. It soon became a ritual. Every night, after dinner, I or my brother read something out to the family and to any guest.
 
That is how I once read out a poem I had read and liked, Frost’s well-known The Road Less Traveled. That became my undoing. The guest might have said a word in appreciation, but my parents construed it as the highest kudo, as if for a Shakespearean actor. After that any guest that stepped into our salon had to hear me read Frost’s poem. I read it so many times that I didn’t have to read the text; I could recite from memory. My parents had gently made me into a performer.
 
A curious thing happened at the time. An uncle took me to see a Hitchcock thriller, but, we were late, and took me instead to a movie version of Richard III. I was disheartened to have missed Hitchcock and expected to be mortally bored. Imagine my surprise when Laurence Olivier began with a wicked soliloquy, delivered in an unforgettable clipped accent like a bombshell. I was electrified. And inspired. To be a performer was nothing to be laughed at.
 
It was this new realization that made me mention at the dinner table that the headmaster had announced in the school an interschool debate competition and asked for someone to represent our school. It had pleased me that several of my classmates had suggested my name, though I could not view the idea of an impromptu speech as anything but terrifying.
My parents had only to hear of the idea to ecstatically endorse it. They felt I could do it, in fact, I must do it. 

The debate was a month later. I began to feel sick with worry two weeks ahead. Literally. I prepared, as much as one can for an extemporaneous speech, but my bowel movements increased. On the day of the debate, I was a wreck, sustained only by the enthusiasm of my friends and parents. My turn came after a particularly eloquent competitor. I could barely make it to the stage. Once I stood there, though, and looked at the large audience, something of my poetry-recital mindset took over: I felt I could do it. I did it.
 
It was a genuine surprise when, at the end of the debate, the panel of judges decided that I was the best speaker. My school got the coveted prize. My friends were ecstatic. Mother tried, embarrassingly, to hug me in public; I quickly disengaged myself. Father said simply, “I knew you could do it.”
 
My speaking days had started.
 
The greatest surprise for me that special day was the comment of the panel chairman that I merited the medal because of my “natural ease” in making my presentation. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

At 22 I became an executive in a European company in Kolkata. A great surprise waited for me.
 
The company had some Italian participation, but it was really British, and it smelled like it. India had become independent fifteen years earlier, but you would not know it in our company. There were some Indian managers, even a director or two, but the top brass was British. I found it hard to watch how much the Indian executives deferred to the British.

It went beyond deference. The Indian executives diligently aped their British counterparts. They copied their sartorial style, and tried to talk like them, to the point of repeating their clichés. If they had to take a client to lunch, they would order a baked fish and a gin-tonic; if to dinner, cold meat and whisky. At home they might gobble masala dosa or paneer matar, but in public they had to present a more westernized palate. They would start taking golf lessons and quickly seek membership in the elite clubs, to consort with the cream of society – others like them. They would indeed meet others like them because most of them had been hired for companies in the same way, through ‘contacts’ or people they knew through kin or community.

I had broken into this magic circle quite by accident. The new English works director of company had realized that he had an acute dearth of managerial talent in the plant. For decades the company had promoted only from within, essentially unlettered local people. To get fresh blood, he decided to hire young trainees from universities. The director hired new graduates, before ‘contacts’ could prevail. I became the first intern to be hired. When a prized executive position opened in the headquarters, the same director also insisted that I should be anointed.
 
I was prepared to wear a jacket and a tie like the others – though I thought it ridiculous in the humid heat of Kolkata – but that was about the limit of my conformity. I was also glad to attend the parties, especially if there were some beautiful people, and have a few drinks. But for years I refused to move into a company house, because I felt I had an adequate apartment near my aging parents (eventually I moved when the company found a house near my parents). My boss, a golf champion, invited me to join his golf club and was upset when I gave him my reason for refusal: my life was already quite different from other Indians, and I didn’t want to make it any more different by playing what was considered a rich man’s game in India. I scandalized my colleagues even further by declining to buy a car, saying my home was close to the office and I preferred to walk.

Mukherjee, an old hand in our department, affectionately named me Vesuvius, saying that I was perennially spouting ideas that he called ‘seditious.’ When our elegant avuncular director said to us that, to be effective, we needed to be practical and not theoretical, I countered with a quote from Lenin, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory,” on the ground that a theory is no more than a shorthand for a lot of practice.
​
Somehow my waywardness was borne patiently over the years. I got a number of promotions and even some fancy titles. For fear of seeming pedantic, I could not tell the chairman that my eventual title was grammatically incorrect. I suspect my elevation was at least partly due to an illusion that I was highly diligent and kept long hours, diligence being a prized British virtue. The fact was I came to the office early only because I preferred walking in the cooler morning air and left late as I taught an evening class in the area. It may also have something to do with my key reports, which some thought unduly acerbic and controverted aggressively but were never successfully contradicted. The chairman, I was told, took a special interest in them.
 
One other factor I mention gingerly. I was unduly protected and encouraged by the secretaries. Though the British raj had long ended, the company had continued the curious practice of never hiring Indian women as secretaries, only Eurasian women, though they were contemptuously and incorrectly referred to as Anglo-Indians. Many of them were elderly, but three of them were memorably pretty and one worked fortunately for our director. She wittily renamed me ‘Menace’ and volubly complained that I wasted a lot of her time, but she would quietly guide me about how to handle the boss or when to spring a new report. That often saved my skin.

​I worked for the company over a decade. The market changed, the technology evolved, competition gained strength. The highly prosperous company had some hiccups. The top brass seemed ignorant or oblivious. I seemed, Cassandra-like, one of the few to see or speak the peril. My bosses did not want to hear bad news.
 
A mining corporation offered me a challenging job. I moved readily and had an exciting time. I also had a sad time seeing my erstwhile employer plummet and hit ground. A few unseeing decision makers and 10,000 unemployed workers.
 
Five years later I accidentally met a senior strategist of the parent company in London. He made the typically British remark, “We did our best.” I politely demurred. They had done their best to destroy the livelihood of loyal, hardworking men and women.
 
The last time I was in Kolkata, I saw construction workers pulling down the company’s stately edifice downtown.