Government of India Scholarship

LEARNING RUSSIAN LANGUAGE


I was a Research Scholar in Indian Institute of Science working for my M.Sc degree in Mechanical Engineering. I had applied for a scholarship to do Ph.D from a Canadian University. I was offered a scholarship with a condition that I must produce a letter from my professor that I have submitted my Thesis for M.Sc. Unfortunately I could not get such a letter and for no fault of mine I lost the opportunity to study in Canada.

After completing my degree I got a job in CSIR and left for Durgapur in West Bengal.CSIR encouraged us to apply for Government of India Scholarships to study abroad. Countries such as U.K, Canada, West Germany, USSR were offering scholarships to Indian Scholars to pursue Ph.D programs in their country. Children of influential people cornered scholarships to study in the West but people like me had to be contented with scholarships offered by USSR and other countries. By the time I finished my Ph.D I was glad that I went to study in Moscow.

When I went to Moscow I did not know one word of Russian Language. We were assigned to various professors depending upon what topic we wanted to specialise for Ph.D programme. Since we did not know Russian language we were asked to learn for six Month's Russian language. Hence we were directed to the Russian language faculty. One young and beautiful Russian girl was assigned to teach six students. Perhaps assigning a young and beautiful teacher was sort of incentive for us not to bunk classes. The teacher knew English well.She used to talk to us in English for few weeks and once we learnt to recognise alphabets she stopped talking to us in English and switched over to Russian. We had tutorials lasting for about six hours a day for five days in a week. Further we were loaded with enough home work to last for another four to five hours. We were put up in a hostel and your room mate is a Russian who could not speak one word of English.Hence we were forced to communicate with him in our broken Russian which also helped us to learn Russian faster.Later we learnt that he was put up with us more for spying on us than to help us to learn Russian.

We went to buy daily necessities such as bread, butter jam etc. We will pick up the article and ask the sales girl its name and write down and in this way we learnt names of commodities which were not taught to us in class room.

My Professor insisted that I must come to the faculty after Russian classes. He introduced me to the fellow scholars and workers. The workers taught me the names of tools such as wrenches. screw driver, file etc. which were not taught in the Russian class room. In addition they taught me slang language without teaching the meaning which I used in one of my Russian classes. The teacher was shocked and asked me to repeat the word which I repeated without being aware of the meaning.She asked me who taught this slang and I told her the workers in the lab. She asked me whether I knew the meaning. I said no. She let it go at that but complained to my Professor that in the company of workers I am learning vulgar language. The professor warned the workers not to teach me vulgar language. When I fully learnt the language I understood what I had uttered and was ashamed of it. But I was not to be blamed.

Russian grammar is similar to Sanskrit grammar. In Sanskrit grammar we have "ekavachana, dwivachana, and bahuvachana". In Russian Language also we have "ekavachana, dwiavchana and bahuvachana" In Sanskrit the verb changes with number and gender. Same in Russian also. Hence Indians had no difficulty in accepting that the verb changes with gender and number. But students from Vietnam, France and even U.K had a lot of difficulty to accept that verb changes with number and gender.

There are a number of words in Russian which are similar to Sanskrit words, For example, OGON in Russian is AGNI in Sanskrit, VADA in Russian is UDAKA in Sanskrit, SYESTRA in Russain is SAHODARY in Sanaskrit etc. Hence it was not difficult for Indians to accept that verb changes with gender and number.

In addition to teaching Russian, our teacher took us to Museums, Ballets and plays. Next day she would ask us to narrate in our own words what we saw. We were asked to read the news paper and narrate in our own words what we have understood.

With such rigorous training in Russian for six months we were ready to enter our faculties. But learning Russian never ended. The technical language we have to master was a different kettle of fish. Here the colleagues and professors helped us a lot and we can never forget their love and affection.