Nishtha Balagopal

Hi! I am Nishtha, currently starting my B1 level in German and doing N3 level in Japanese. I am a lover of languages and fluent in English, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, a bit of French and Sanskrit. After having done my graduation and part post graduation in Economics, I chose to write for a newspaper covering Education, Teens and Spirituality.  While I loved writing I missed my languages and went back to studying them. I am also pursuing a PGDM in Management. I hope to enhance my writing, research and language skills while contributing to the cause of development and productivity.

 I love to read, breathe and talk about books. I can dance Bharatnatyam and sing in Carnatic style. I am also an active member of an NGO. 

I believe ‘ A pen is mightier than a sword’ so give me a pen and I will write about the world for each and everyone to read.

CAREER GOALS

They said science is for smart people, commerce for the average and humanities for the dumb. It has taken me a steep climb to make people look at social sciences differently. This is more so with respect to learning languages.  Choosing to study Economics and English literature gave me a good combination of studying a technical as well as a creative field. My love for languages started early and I was pretty fluent in English, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, a smattering of Sanskrit un petit peu of French. This pushed me to learn a foreign language and I choose a pretty challenging one at that:‘Japanese”. Learning Japanese was like a dream, as cliché as it may sound. I got selected as an exchange student to Japan and that was an experience of a lifetime. Fast-forwarding this story, I threw Japanese out of the window for a few years until this revelation hit me a few years later that I couldn’t give up something I love. I was working as a feature writer for DNA newspaper and at the time working on an article about the impact of learning foreign languages. This shook me and brought me back to my long lost love of languages. While doing my PG Diploma in Financial Management, I chose to study Japanese and German as a field of study.

Having given the saga of my life, I now come to the point of what do I want to do with my life. I have had the experience of translating from Tamil to English for a national award-winning film as well as a book. Translation and interpretation would give me a better hold of the language and help me become a better writer either for content or feature writing. A clear focus on writing using the languages I have learnt with English is where I see my life ahead, I would like to chart out a plan wherein I could contribute to content writing as well as research with my experience as a journalist. I have learnt classical dance, music and languages. Coupled with this, I do have the ability to discuss a varied array of things from Quantum Science to the Oscars thanks to my crazy passion for reading and research.  This has helped me develop a base for things to write and talk about as well as broaden my ideas. This would help companies and brands have someone with a Bird’s eye view of things as well as knowledge about my core subjects. This Internship would help me build my content writing and research skills, which would help in market research as well as branding of the company.  Content is the king in this electronic world where everything is determined by what Google throws at you. And for a company to have a favourable or positive impression, it all comes down to the content backed by research. I would like to blend my love for languages with that of writing and research contributing it to a meaningful and productive cause.

While I do that, I would also like to teach these languages so I can do what I love until a ripe old age and after retirement.

Nishtha Balagopal is a Summer Intern 2018 at Modlingua