Click to play videoChinchini village (Maharashtra): A railway officer in Mumbai is bridging the gap between English and Marathi by finding common ground between the words of the two languages.
During the week, Western Railway Senior Commandant Devendra Kasar is used to people listening to him — the guards, the attention, and the salutes. He is used to attention. On the weekend, this 40-year-old gets attention of a different kind.
Every Saturday, Kasar zips off deep into rural Maharashtra, lights flashing on his car, to village schools for that is when Kasar dons the avatar of an English teacher — a unique kind of English teacher.
Kasar uses Marathi words that sound similar to English words to make English accessible to hundreds of village kids.
“There is a beautiful logic behind English words. The roots of the trees are embedded in the soil. That in Marathi is known as rutne. Hence, from rut, we get roots,” Kasar explains.
Today he has found more than 5,000 words that sound similar in English and Marathi. He takes time out to teach every weekend across 100 villages. He visits the Chinchini village in Maharashtra regularly because the school there services more than 20 villages.
They say you truly know a language when you begin to dream in it. Kasar's dream is that one day the kids in these schools will learn to dream not just in their mother tongue Marathi but also in English. He also hopes to publish his version of a Marathi-English dictionary some day.
The teaching is helping 8-year-old Gayatri Patil dream that one day she will be a computer engineer.
She says, “Everything to do with computers is in English. It is so important and thanks to sir, I think I am finally getting a grasp of the language.”
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