'I Was Taught To Forget My Own Language': Keralite's Powerful Realisation About School Days Sparks Debate On Social Media

School memories are often painted in shades of nostalgia and joy – echoes of simpler, happier times. In a rare turn, a 30-year-old man’s reflection on his school days has sparked an emotional realisation – he is not fluent in his mother tongue. Recalling the times he was punished for speaking his mother tongue, he explains that he never truly learned the language through literature or formal education – but learned it in fragments, through guesses and everyday conversations.

In a heartfelt Reddit post, the man shared that after 12 years of schooling in Kerala, he was never taught in his own mother tongue. Speaking Malayalam often earned him punishment, leaving him disconnected from his own language. In a video, he shares, “I studied in a Kendriya

Vidyalaya (KV) school in Kerala for all 12 years of my schooling. In all these 12 years, I was never taught my own mother tongue, my own language, Malayalam – not how to read it, not how to write it. In fact, I remember this very clearly in class 7, if we spoke in Malayalam in school, we were punished. We had to write a hundred times, ‘I will not speak in Malayalam’. Line after line, page after page, until the sentence stopped feeling like a punishment and started becoming a belief through repetition, till the language felt like something to be ashamed of, and I carry that. When you are separated from your mother tongue, you are not just losing words, you are losing a way of touching the world, a way of touching your soil.”

At 30, he realises he still cannot read the poems and stories of his land. “I cannot open a Malayalam book and let it breathe into me. I still haven’t read Madhavikutty or Basheer (Vaikom Muhammad Basheer) or K.R Meera in Malayalam. I cannot feel the weight of the sentence, the way it was meant to be felt. There’s a whole world of literature that exists beyond my reach, but written by my own people. It is close enough to recognise but far enough not to enter. Sometime, I hear other Keralites speak about a line, a poem, a writer and it feels like they are remembering something I was never allowed to have.”

“I am standing outside a house that was always mine, but I do not have the key. Like hearing birds of your land but not knowing their names. Like watching the rain but not knowing the word for the smell of wet earth in your language. Like belonging to a place but not fully able to understand what it is staying back to you. You become a foreigner in your own land. And the grief and pain of this is severe because your mother tongue is the thread that connects you to the soil. It is the soul of the land,” he expresses.

The man, visibly pained, admits he feels a twinge of envy watching others read or write Malayalam with ease. He realises that he was taught to move away from something that was already his – ‘slowly’, ‘gently’, and ‘systematically’. Sharing the video, he captioned, “Some dumb parents are even proud to say that their kids don’t speak mother tongue.”

His revelation sparked a wave of mixed reaction across social media. While some related to his experience and hoped for a change in the system, others suggested that parents should actively encourage speaking and learning their mother tongue at home. A Reddit user commented, “The whole system in some schools where they fined or get punished for speaking in Malayalam is the most redundant thing.” Another user shared, “KVs are known for following CBSE unfortunately. CBSE has a rule of two language policy across India. Even my friends who went to KV don’t know Marathi (mother tongue), knew only Hindi and English, whereas I studied in state board, we had second language Marathi compulsory and Hindi optional.”

Meanwhile, another section of social media emphasized the importance of parents speaking and nurturing the mother tongue at home. A social media user wrote, “My kid goes to a German school. We speak Malayalam to home. She is learning to write Malayalam also. So I would say it is a choice. The parents can choose to teach kids Malayalam if they want where ever they are.” Another wrote, “It’s the parent’s fault, simply. They could’ve taught him Malayalam at home. I grew up outside India but my parents insisted that I learn Malayalam and encouraged me to read books and newspapers in Malayalam. Probably the parents of the guy in the video were such who thought that learning English makes them superior than knowing one’s mother tongue.”