It’s pandemonium in Hadapsar, Pune’s New English School. The science teacher is waging a losing battle against the word thermocline—half in Hindi, half in Marathi, with a few brave attempts in English that don’t land quite right. The class finds her pronunciation hilarious. Chaos erupts. This is supposed to be an English-medium school, with ‘supposed to’ treated more like a casual suggestion than an ironclad rule. It isn’t some hallowed institution, nor one of those private schools where blackboards have been replaced with screens. It’s a no-frills, working-class school on Pune’s outskirts. The fees are Rs500—bumped to Rs700 by the time I left in 2010. 
 

English wasn’t a priority here. My classmates and I were chawl kids—some had parents who drove rickshaws, worked post office shifts, or pulled long hours as nurses. Mine were no different, caught up in separate hospital shifts. We weren’t expected to speak English, let alone build futures around it. But with all this free time and almost no parental supervision, English had other plans for me. So did TV. 

It started with Pokémon. Every afternoon, I’d rush home, glue myself to the TV, and watch Ash Ketchum scream battle commands in Hindi. “Pikachu, main tumhe chunta hoon!” (Pikachu, I choose you) The words made sense, but the rhythm of it—the way the characters spoke, the urgency, the pauses—felt like another language entirely. And then came anime, subtitled. Suddenly, I wasn’t just watching, I was reading, syncing words with movements, filling in the gaps. 
 

Of course, my dad had no interest in my linguistic enlightenment. Every evening, he’d kick me off the TV, reclaiming his throne for Aaj Tak and whatever high-octane Bollywood movie Set Max was serving that night. But after everyone fell asleep, I was back. This time, on Star World. 
 

First, it was Lie to Me—Tim Roth spitting out clipped, confident English that I barely followed but badly wanted to. Then Bones, where forensic anthropologists talked a mile a minute about things I didn’t understand but pretended to. And then Grey’s Anatomy, which taught me that love, loss, and highly specific medical jargon could all exist in the same breath. 

Some nights, I switched to Friends. It was different. Faster. Snappier. The humour had a rhythm, a timing. Chandler’s sarcasm, Joey’s cluelessness, Phoebe’s weird brilliance—it wasn’t just English, it was a lesson in delivery. When I finally got the Internet, I doubled down. I rewatched clips of Friends, then Seinfeld, then How I Met Your Mother. Pausing. Rewinding. Absorbing. I wasn’t just learning words. I was learning how to land them. 
 

But TV didn’t just give me punchlines. It gave me something deeper. Grey’s Anatomy and Californication taught me that emotions—love, grief, self-destruction—could be articulated in ways I hadn’t heard before.  
 

Little did I know, humour wasn’t the only thing being permanently rewired in my brain. The more I consumed, the more my inner voice—once firmly Marathi (and not the posh kind, at that)—started slipping into English. Phrases I’d hear on TV lodged themselves in my head, creeping into my thoughts and, eventually, my speech. Oh f*ck. Jesus f*cking Christ. Things no one around me was saying, but somehow, they became mine. 

At first, it was just in my head. I’d stub my toe and think son of a bitch instead of aai cha gavat (often used as a mild expletive or dismissive phrase, similar to saying "What nonsense!). But soon, the thoughts bled into real life. I’d mutter What the hell under my breath in school, a little too naturally. The first time I said Jesus Christ out loud, my friend looked at me like I’d grown another head. Kaay? Konha cha Christ? (What? Whose Christ?) He had no idea what I was saying. 
 

That’s when I realised: I wasn’t just learning a language—I was switching worlds. 
 

College was somewhat the same. But now, the Hadapsar kids were replaced with the kind from every other chawl in Pune—the ones who smoked behind campus, knew all the local gang names, and somehow always had a go-to-guy for everything. I became one of them. This was an engineering college, and language took a backseat again. As long as you could decipher notes photocopied a hundred times over and survive lab exams, no one cared your English articulation skills. 

Slowly but surely, though, I kept digging at English. Not in the Wren & Martin kind of way—no diagramming sentences or learning when to use whom—but in the Sex and the City, Entourage, Californication kind of way. English that had bite. Swagger. The kind that came with cigarette smoke and regretful one-night stands. 
 

I had never paid attention to thermocline or engineering. What I had paid attention to was storytelling and language. Maybe that’s why, while my classmates were cramming formulae, I was subconsciously setting myself up for something else—something that had nothing to do with machines or circuit boards. 

Somehow, it worked. I landed my first freelance writing gig, followed by a full-time job in journalism in 2017. At this point, my world had split cleanly into two. My old engineering and school friends still called me Bhavdya (buddy, bro), while my colleagues, fresh out of media schools and big-city upbringings, called me Bro. I liked both, in a way. One anchored me, the other nudged me forward. 
 

This wasn’t just about language. It was about survival. English let me navigate a world where being polish mattered more than authenticity. Marathi anchored me to a world where nothing needed translation. Maybe the real power of language isn’t in the words we choose, but in the walls we build—or break—when we speak them. 

Words have taken me places I couldn’t have imagined back in that Hadapsar classroom. The same English that once felt like a distant world—picked up in fragments from Friends reruns and late-night Grey’s Anatomy binges—has become my livelihood. It has paid my rent, bought me time, and opened doors that once felt bolted shut. 
 

I’ve spent nights in places I’d never have dared step into as a kid. I’ve spoken to people whose names sit comfortably in headlines. And yet, in moments like these, I wonder: does the kid watching Bones at 2 am, subtitles on, ever feel out of place in a room full of polished, well-bred media elites? Do I instinctively switch between Bhavdya and Bro, depending on who I’m speaking to? 
 

Perhaps. But perhaps that isn’t a contradiction—just proof that both are real, neither needing to be erased. Maybe I’ll always move between these worlds, adjusting my words like subtitles, translating myself without losing the original script. 
 

And maybe that’s why, when I sit down to write, it never feels like work. It feels like tapping into a lifetime of stories—some mine, most borrowed, all stitched together with subtitles.