The Man Who Forgot His Mother Tongue

After twenty-five years in Silicon Valley, Arjun Raman, a celebrated linguistics professor known for building AI models that preserve endangered languages, returns to his native Tamil Nadu for the first time since leaving India. But when he steps off the plane, he realizes something horrifying — he can no longer understand or speak Tamil, his mother tongue. Not even a single word. What begins as an amusing cultural disconnection soon turns into an existential unraveling. Every attempt to reconnect — with his aging mother, his estranged brother, the songs of his childhood, even temple chants — ends in silence. The irony is cruel: a man who gave his life to saving languages has lost his own. Everything changes when Arjun meets Meenakshi, a spirited village girl who speaks only Tamil and no English at all. Through her broken gestures, folk songs, and stories passed through generations, Arjun begins to relearn not just the lost words, but the rhythm of belonging — discovering how language is not just sound, but memory, culture, and love. As his mother's memory fades with Alzheimer's and his own identity fractures between two worlds, Arjun must face the ultimate question: Can a man truly belong to a place if he has forgotten how to speak its soul? "The Man Who Forgot His Mother Tongue" is a haunting, poetic exploration of exile, memory, and the price of forgetting who you are — a story that speaks to every Indian who has ever left home, and to every home that has waited for their return.