When confidence pays...

We asked our readers to share their parents' successful career stories. Here we feature Trina Talukdar's entry on how her mother's career as a teacher went from strength to strength in the face of substantial odds.

This story starts with my mother pronouncing 'ton' as rhyming with 'dawn' rather than 'done' in front of a class full of snobbish 14-year-olds. They laughed behind her back, but in front of me, like they had laughed when she pronouned 'wood' as 'ood'. I had gone home and tried teaching her to say the words correctly for hours. But words palatised a certain way for nearly 30 years of your life stay that way -- with a vengeance.

My mother didn't sweat over it. She gave up trying to pronounce the letter 'w' and, the next day, instead of taking a science class, she told us a story. She was born in a family that had migrated to Kolkata from Bangladesh during the riots. And suddenly their own mother tongue had became alien to them. 'Pani' had to be changed to 'jol' and they had to stop saying 'laban' and start saying 'nun'. She went to a Bengali medium school where she had to relearn her own mother tongue. Picking up a foreign language left behind by the colonisers was quite out of the question.

Her father was with the Kolkata police when the Naxals were heaving havoc. Everyday, he would lock his wife and three children indoors and go off to work, not knowing if they would see each other alive at the end of the day. Gills of fish, which people don't even feed their pet cats nowadays, used to be their staple food. Yes, life was tough. But Mamma was tougher.

With her mispronounced 'w's and 'v's, she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry, and a doctorate in plastics and rubber techonology with a full scholarship, plus a stipend. She married a man in the hospitality industry, who had to entertain uber-sophisticated socialites with all their arrogance and superficiality displayed in full glory.

And it is here, for the first time, that my mother stumbled with her wrong stress-unstress patterns of the English language. However, even after being victim to sniggering and tell-tale looks everytime she said 'bayolawgy' instead of 'biology', or hesitated over the meaning of 'faculty', she did not quietly recede into one corner and brood over her deficiency.

She was confident she knew the composition of the alloys these people ate out of, and the matrix structure of the fibres that they were clothed in better than anyone else in the room, so then why should she be quiet? Instead, she heard, she observed and she learnt that 'chocolate' was to be pronounced with a stress on the first syllable only, and that 'femme fatale' was a compliment to a lady looking ravishing enough to have the heart of any man she wanted.

So what if every now and then her tongue slipped and she mispronounced a word? She was never afraid to speak. "And it doesn't matter really, does it? I am here to teach you chemistry and as long as I don't give you the wrong atomic number for carbon, we should be fine," my mother ended her story. And no one ever laughed again.

She has moved on from teaching a class of teenagers who didn't know any better, to being a lecturer in an engineering college and is fast moving towards professorship. Mamma knew what she was good at, and what she was not she strived to be good at, but she was never afraid.

I am so proud of you, and I love you 'tawns', Mammam!

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My mother, the entrepreneur

Do you have a story to tell about how one of your parents established a successful career for themselves? We invite our readers to share their parents' career stories with us, so youngsters may draw inspiration from them.

Mail your entries to us at howimadeit@rediffmail.com, along with your parent's full name, his/ her age, area of work, contact details, and a scanned photograph of him/ her. We will feature the best stories on rediff.com!