Of "PHONY" accents..

Just yesterday, I was talking to Deep about my accent and if he thought I was "putting on" one.... It was just a random thought and I wanted to get his opinion on it....His response to it was that, while it certainly blended with the way everyone else in the country talks, it kind of stands out when I talk to a fellow country-man (or woman) with the same roll in my R's and twirl in my L's. He said people like to hear you talk the way they do, else, it is difficult to bond with them...He also went on to say that our brothers and sisters from India would stay away from me for the simple reason that they think of me as a "wannabe" American.

Needless to say, I found this utterly hard to digest! Seriously, people stop mixing with you just because you talk the way locals do? So, I am supposed to change my accent, the way I speak normally for the sake of being accepted by a community?

Several people may argue that for someone who was born and brought up in a country like mine, this way of speaking is certainly not normal. That may be true. But, I have stayed in this country long enough and worked around locals longer enough for me to consider this as the normal way of speaking. While the way I say some words are typically British in nature, most of my vocabulary is now markedly American. Why or where it changed to being this way is hard to pinpoint, but I may have started to "put on" (or, in normal terms, adopt) an American accent when I began working in an all-American workplace about 5 years ago. And, there has been no looking back. Slowly, my way of talking has progressively become Americanized to an extent that I don't switch back and forth between accents.

I have come across older people who have lived here for the past 30 odd years, but whose accents remain untarnished and "purely" Indian. I am amazed by this phenomenon. I do not know the reason why their accents have not changed even after living here for so long. Maybe, they made a conscious effort to maintain their Indian identity. Or, maybe, somehow, they just did not pick up the accent. Or, maybe, they make it a point to speak English minimally, only as required, while speaking their respective Indian languages for the rest of the time (which I do not do). I don't know why or how this came to happen.

But, I do know that I do not purposely "put on" an accent and that this is normal by my standards. I am sorry that I do not talk like most of my country men out here, but I don't see why people need to judge me based on my accent. As far as I am concerned, if they refuse to accept me the way I choose to be, maybe, that is not the community I want to be belong to, either.