Kalpana Raghuraman

I was born to South-Indian parents who were first generation migrants in the Netherlands. 
My father, appa, was a chemical engineer who travelled a lot. My mother, amma, was one of the first ones to start an Indian dance school. And my elder brother Anand was always there, showing me the ropes of how to deal with the outside world that was so different from Indian home life. My amma mostly spoke Tamil at home, my appa spoke Tamil and English, and my brother and I mostly spoke Dutch together. So I was raised with 3 languages all twisted into each other where I don’t think I speak any of these three languages ‘perfectly’ well. Somehow there are words I only know in one language, other words I know in two or three, and some I don’t know in … any! Life as a trilingual however was a greater gif