Everytime I talk to someone in person they seem amused with my speech. Now I'm not saying I'm the best speaker there is, because I do indeed stammer and need to make quite an effort to speak. But they say that whenever I speak my confidence comes in view naturally, (they did mention about... no, modesty keeps me from saying it) even though I'm probably one of those "most shy blokes" out there.
But what they're most amused by is my accent. I'm a Sindhi, but I don't have their accent. I was born in Bengal, but I don't have their accent either. I've lived most of my life among the Marathas, but I don't have their accents either. Neither the Islamic one despite having a Muslim mentor. Rather, being in the shadow of a childhood friend from overseas who lived in my neighborhood morphed the way I speak (his father was from Boston, always for sea voyages), then with some richer blokes who made frequent trips to Asia affected me, and then the frequent relatives from Australia who I spent my time with, and finally my good friends Harry and his family / friends from Scotland who's dialects weighed even more heavily than any one else. What helped was the fact that I usually spoke in English only with these folks; with the rest, I spoke in Hindi.
And everytime I speak with someone in English they're baffled; they either judge whether I have an American accent, or a European, or an Australian, or they just can't seem to make up their minds -- but the fact is, there still is plenty of Indian tint in the manner I speak. But it was today, when my friend (who's birthday we were celebrating) asked me about it that I finally admitted:
"Never in this world will you find a man who has an accent like mine."
