India is possibly the only country in the world where we’re judged for our English… by other Indians. Pronunciation is the calling card that’s waved in every room to signal a superior command of the language. Convent school English. International school English. CBSE board English. Vernacular school English. Caste and class divides are somewhat subtler in workplaces today, but they’re far crueller for being more insidious.
When Bhinoy was growing up, these divides were about as subtle as a poke in the eye. Convent schools like the one Bhinoy went to were aspirational to parents determined to give their children the shot they never had. He grew up in the suburbs of Pune, in a Malayali household that had carried all of Kerala within its walls. His parents spoke no English, and what he learnt came from school and from the reading he did on his own. He was a voracious reader who fell in love with the language, believing that speaking it well meant using the cadence of the classics he loved. So he did, only to have his peers laugh in his face at his flowery prose. This little boy, who read alone, gave his background away as soon as he opened his mouth.
He calls it “the stigma of the English language.” And it was his whole purpose behind starting TLC. The laughter never spared him, so he decided to build a whole company around it.
problem child
By his own accounts, Bhinoy was “an unrepentant troublemaker.” Corporal punishment may be banned in schools today, but back in the eighties, it was a cure-all for “difficult children”. Most teachers gave up on Bhinoy before they even started. Bhinoy, too, had come to expect nothing else. Then along came this teacher who’d heard of him from his class teacher. Out of the blue one day, she handed him a sixteen-line prayer to recite at assembly and asked him to memorise it. Bhinoy had no intention of learning it. Four days before assembly, he stood in front of her, waiting for the scolding or the cane. Instead, she held his face and asked him if something was wrong. “My dear boy,” she said, “I put a lot of faith in you. Why don’t you know your lines?” Bhinoy was so taken aback that he no longer wanted to disappoint her.
He learned the whole thing and delivered it flawlessly at the assembly. But it’s what came after that stayed with him. She sought him out the next day. “I judged you too quickly,” she said. “I should have worked with you first.” He still remembers the rain that morning, petrichor wafting through the open windows.
His father wanted Bhinoy to be an engineer, something his own circumstances hadn’t allowed. For his father, success was measured in money, because that was what his own childhood had withheld and his adulthood had demanded. When a short story Bhinoy wrote on a whim was shortlisted for a published collection, his mum cried with joy, and his dad asked how much it paid. “He was pleased, I guess, he just didn’t see the point of a thing without a number attached.” He softened toward the end, but whether he was ever proud of Bhinoy has never been settled. Bhinoy thinks his father was underwhelmed by his achievements, and he’s not sure he’s come far enough to count.
the long way around
The work he does today is 23 years in the making, and when it came to him, it came sideways.
He was a software engineer first, a good one, he says, after a start that nearly finished him. He failed four papers in the first year of his undergrad degree, the first time failure entered his life. He thinks it was the beatdown he needed. A reminder that things that came easily to other people cost him effort. He graduated with distinction and spent the better part of a decade writing code before he left to build his own company. It tanked, taking all his savings with it. Everything he had earned since graduating. His marriage unravelled in the same stretch.
Then in 2012, a cousin who ran a small certification institute asked for a favour. He wanted Bhinoy to mentor six youngsters from Latur, a city in Marathwada, Eastern Maharashtra. These were sincere young lads with impeccable attendance and good scores, but not one of them had been able to get through an interview. They knew the answers, but froze. The problem, Bhinoy quickly realised, was not knowledge or English. Something else was holding them at the throat. He went in for two hours and stayed a week, and inside a month, five of them had jobs.
Bhinoy says he realised there was something there as that first week unfolded. He doesn’t pretend to know what it was, just remembers the feeling as something visceral. Like hair standing on the nape of your neck. The same feeling he’d get from dance, which he’d taken up seriously in the broke and broken years, and which held him up when little else did. He decided it was worth a shot, this mentoring thing, and went all in. He called the company Teresa’s Learning Centre, TLC for short. In the early days, there’d be months of no work; his parents panicked, but he refused to, taking it one day at a time. It was something his teacher used to say – something he understood only years later, as you do with things teachers hand you. He’s let it wash over all of his life. When he treks, he never looks at the top of the mountain.
mind your language…
The six new graduates from Latur were the first of thousands. Young people who could do the work but came apart in interviews or in front of clients. Who believed that not having English as their first language barred them from the room. Bhinoy worked with them to identify fear, not grammar, as the barrier holding them back. He showed them how speaking five languages badly is better proof of smarts than speaking just one well. The visible story is communication training. The structural one is helping people survive being seen.
Bhinoy deliberately makes himself vulnerable in these rooms. He was twenty before he tried to speak Marathi properly, and he got it wrong straight away. Me gele, he would say, the verb bending the wrong way, the gender slipping, and the room would catch it the way a room catches a wrong note. Yet he stands in front of packed rooms and speaks confidently in Marathi, if only as an example that a mistake isn’t the end. Clear the distraction, and the person gets heard.
…and so much else
If you look at TLC’s website, it sells assertive communication and better customer experience – outcomes that the L&D head can take back to stakeholders. “Oh, that’s not all we do today,” Bhinoy says with the rueful chuckle of an overworked founder. 70 per cent of what TLC does today is bespoke. Programmes include everything from sales and management capability-building to closing the skill set gap across roles and departments, from entry-level to senior management, from purchasing to sales.
What TLC also does is something he’s careful not to name because most employers think it should be innate. Every tool in his arsenal is in service of building confidence. “During a pitch, the impact of confidence is going to be on the business that comes up, but indirectly.”
He remembers how, in the early days, he waited for feedback from every session, the way you wait for an exam result. Ninety per cent excellent. It proved nothing, and he knew it proved nothing. It just told a man who had been taken apart that he could put himself back together.
teachers and engineers
Bhinoy dislikes slides with a vengeance. For years, his whole pitch was that he was a trainer who shunned PowerPoint. His sessions are immersive and hark back to the classrooms he took the most from. Like his geography teacher, who brought in a Bavarian costume, aprons and all. Or his chemistry teacher, who turned ionic compounds into a contest and then sat back and watched them go. The body learns what the body is made to do. So his rooms run on games and argument, Mafia, Hangman, the Disney Model (Dreamer, Realist, Critic), people made to speak over one another. He himself talks for under a third of the time. What comes about is rarely about grammar. A young participant, needled in a game by another participant until she broke, came back later having worked out why she had spent the whole game trailing the person manipulating her. Bhinoy isn’t a therapist, but the room does that sometimes and he’s learnt to stand back and let it happen.
His colleagues saw the method before they could name it. He points you in a direction and then sets you free. Anneshwa Chakraborty came to TLC straight out of college with no experience and stayed three years. “He will hit people right at the solar plexus,” she says. He does not care whether the question makes you uncomfortable. And then, because both things are true at once: “inside, he is a coconut.”
The IDP certification lets him bring engineering into L&D: assessment and development centres, pre- and post-measurement, competency mapping, and the data of whether a needle actually moved. He’s currently building an AI voice-practice tool so people can rehearse speaking aloud. In sales calls, he listens more than he speaks. Clients invariably start with symptoms, and he nudges them, asking questions until the real need surfaces. Several have said the quiet part aloud: “The way you spoke to me, teach me how to do that.”
There are lines he refuses to cross. A company once wanted a training without the assessment that comes before it. He turned the work down. Without the assessment, he could not show what had moved, and a session like that is only hours billed. Falak, his financial consultant, says quality is the one thing he will not negotiate on.
the name on the door
His forties have taught him what the broke years couldn’t: that nothing is in his hands. All he can do is give it his best. He’s stopped chasing the sense of being vividly alive and made his peace with the ordinary day, where nothing happens, and it’s allowed to be enough. He has stopped making plans for the company; there is no exit strategy, just a vague hope of a partner one day and a baton handed to someone who loves it as much as he does. He takes recognition when it comes; it tells him, he says, that he is on the right track. His father wanted him to go beyond. He has decided that beyond means being seen, and not being big.
What he wants for himself is stranger, and he knows it. A Padma Shri, which he says, half joking, he would happily pay for. Or two Oscars, one for acting and one for writing.
There is more he means to do and hasn’t. A programme he built to teach schoolchildren the things the syllabus forgets, how to change a tyre, how to file a return, finished and unsold because he is “lazy”, and because the cynic in him wakes whenever the idealist gets going.
He is no saint about any of it, and would tell you so first. He keeps a private ledger of everyone who ever shot him down, and he has an Oscar speech ready in which he thanks none of them and tells them exactly where to go. He builds these small castles of comeuppance on long drives and laughs to himself at the wheel. He never does a thing about them. In the room, he is gentle with people who would not survive the speech. The speech stays in his head, where he also keeps the boy who got hurt and never got even, and there is something almost tender in the distance between the line he rehearses and the thing he actually does: help.
His company is called Teresa’s Learning Centre. He named it for the teacher who held his face in her hands and told him she was sorry she had judged him too quickly.
