I once corrected our mother’s English. Rudely. I am still ashamed of it.
She had used the word “image” instead of “imagine” in a sentence. I made her feel small for it. I remember the cringe on my face like it was something to be ashamed of. Hers, not mine.
Fast forward to when I was 20, deep in my poetry meetup phase. The club had organised an evening with a Spanish poet. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember a single line of his poetry.
But I remember him using the exact same word, “image” instead of “imagine,” and the whole room of twenty people collectively going “oh.”
That soft, involuntary sound of being charmed.
Same word. Two completely different reactions. The only thing that changed was who was speaking it.
That contrast has never left me.
For a certain generation of Indians, English fluency became a proxy for intelligence. It wasn’t just a language. It was a class signal. A caste signal, sometimes. Speaking it well meant you had access, education, upward mobility. Speaking it “wrong” meant the opposite.
So we didn’t just learn English. We learned to rank people by how well they spoke it.
Including our own mothers.
The cruel part is what it did to us in the process. It created a split inside an entire generation. Fluent enough in English to be embarrassed by our families, but not so removed from them that it didn’t quietly destroy something. A lot of urban Indians in their 30s live in that gap. Too anglicised to feel fully rooted. Too Indian to feel fully at home in the spaces English was supposed to unlock.
The correction I made as a child wasn’t just about grammar. It was the first moment I chose an outside standard over my own people.
Here’s what I didn’t understand then, and only started to understand much later.
When you repeatedly correct or dismiss how your parents speak, you aren’t just embarrassing them in that moment. You are slowly making them smaller in your own head. You start to unconsciously discount what they say because of how they say it. And then one day you realise you stopped really listening to them, not because they had nothing to offer, but because you were trained to hear their language as error.
My mother had things to say. She still does. About partition, about moving cities, about surviving things I will never have to survive. But she said them in Gujarati, or in imperfect English, and I had been carefully taught that imperfect English meant a lesser thought.
The Spanish poet got a room full of “oh” for the same mistake because he came with legitimacy already attached. European, artistic, foreign. My mother came with dinner to cook and a mortgage to worry about.
That’s not a grammar story. That’s a power story.
This is why I do what I do with Purple Pencil Project. Not because I had a strategy. Not because I spotted a gap in a market.
Because I have been in that room, being charmed by a foreign poet’s “mistake,” and I have also been that child, making my mother feel small for the same one. And the distance between those two moments is exactly the distance I am trying to collapse.
Every story we tell in an Indian language, every writer we platform who works in their mother tongue, every reader who writes to us and says “I didn’t know this was allowed” is one small correction to that original correction.
We were taught that the stories worth telling were the ones already being told loudly. In certain languages. By certain people. With a certain kind of legitimacy attached.
I’m 32 now and I’m still unlearning that.
But at least now I know what I’m unlearning.