There is a sentence I have heard in Hindi more times than I can count, in a hundred different towns, from a hundred different people, always with the same specific shame in the voice:
"Sir, meri English weak hai."
And almost every single time, the person saying it is not weak at anything. They have topped exams. They run a business. They can explain a complicated idea to their team in Hindi without pausing once. But the moment English enters the room, they shrink — as if one skill has the power to erase everything else they know.
Here's the mix-up. Somewhere along the way, in Indian classrooms, English got quietly promoted from "a subject" to "a judge." Get it wrong, and it doesn't just mark your English wrong. It marks you — your intelligence, your class, your future — as somehow less.
That is not true, and it was never true. English is a skill. Nothing more. It sits in the same category as riding a bicycle, using a spreadsheet, or driving a car. You can be brilliant and still wobble on a bicycle the first ten times. Nobody watches a beginner cyclist fall and concludes, "This person lacks intelligence."
But that is exactly what we do to ourselves in English. We fall once and conclude something about our whole mind.
I have a Master's degree in English Literature. I have read more English novels than most people in the room I speak to. And I still remember standing in front of a customer as a waiter, completely unable to find the word I needed, feeling my ears go hot. Knowing literature and performing under pressure are two different skills. One is stored knowledge. The other is a trained reflex, built through repetition, like a muscle.
You don't build a muscle by feeling ashamed of it. You build it by using it, slightly uncomfortably, again and again, until the discomfort shrinks.
So the next time that sentence comes to your mind — "meri English weak hai" — try replacing the last two words. Not "I am weak." Say: "this specific skill needs more reps." One sentence keeps you frozen. The other one gives you something to actually do on Monday morning.