Suresh Menon: Talking my language

We’ve got so used to speaking to our cameras, our computers, our music boxes – all of which we can do by simply talking to our phones – that the idea of talking to our pets or to our cars (neither of which has been incorporated into the mobile phone yet) may not cause much surprise. After all, most people who have dogs at home speak to them as if they were children about to start school, while many recent surveys have shown that car owners speak to their vehicles in a tone their spouses get to hear only on special occasions.

To learn a new language is impressive enough, but to learn it so quickly is startling. The cat doesn’t answer back in any of these languages, but who knows? All I can say is, watch this space.

The family’s hope is that by talking kindly to the car, we can convert it from an embarrassingly small, gentle vehicle into one of those huge road hogs intent on showing everybody who the boss is. A nice thought, but I have a gut feeling it won’t work.

Sometimes I think the cat talks to the car too (again, not enough research here). The car’s bonnet is one of its favourite resting places and this cat talk is out of range of Punjabi or Malayalam. But they get along well, the cat and the car, separated after all only by a beating heart and a single letter of the alphabet.



Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world but later decided to leave it as it is.