Every course teaches you how to ask for things. Almost none teaches the four hardest social acts in any language: apologising, refusing, disagreeing and complaining. They are hard because each one threatens the other person, and every culture has built elaborate machinery for softening them. Get the machinery wrong and you can be perfectly grammatical and still cause real damage. So this class is pragmatics rather than grammar — how to do difficult things gently in Malayalam. Apologising. The word is ക്ഷമിക്കണം (kshamikkanam) — forgive me, pardon me. And immediately a warning, because this is exactly where English speakers go wrong. ക്ഷമിക്കണം is much heavier than the English sorry. English uses sorry as a lubricant — we say it when we bump a chair, when we did not hear, when we squeeze past someone. Use ക്ഷമിക്കണം that way in Kerala and you will sound as though something serious has happened. Malayalam has lighter tools for the small moments, and this class gives you all of them, graded from a brush past in a corridor to a genuine wrong that needs repairing. In this class: • ക്ഷമിക്കണം and the lighter apologies English speakers should be using instead • How to refuse an invitation without giving offence — and why a flat no is rarely the answer • Disagreeing with someone older or senior, and keeping the relationship intact • Complaining in a shop or a restaurant so that the problem gets fixed Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.