الجهل يهدم بيت العز والكرم... How to raise a future reader

How many languages does your child speak?
Being the kind who jabbered in three languages before I was out of my diapers, learning a language wasnt something I really thought about. We heard languages all around us, living in a metropolitan city like Mumbai and had, at various points in our life, neighbours who were Gujarati, Maharashtrians, Tamilians, UPites, and Bengalis. Naturally, I grew up picking up bits and pieces of every language, and strangely enough could understand most languages and speak a few sentences of each, but wasnt too fluent in Hindi, despite the fact that it was a language I watched news (Doordarshan era child, yup, dinosaur me!) and movies primarily in Hindi as well as the Ramayan, Mahabharat, Hum Log and Buniyaad serials in Hindi. At home, my father's native tongue was Hindi/Urdu and my mother's English, and by default we spoke English. I struggled a bit to polish my Hindi when I got married, because I needed to communicate with my mother in law on a day to day basis in Hindi, and I'm ashamed to say my Hindi was very Anglicised. I solved this by watching Doordarshan news every single day. And didnt really give much thought to language development and picking up languages until I had the brat. Who refused to speak, and had us running helter skelter getting assessments, and opinions from neurologists, and speech therapists and psychologists and infinite others I cant recall right now. The child was not speaking, and the one piece of consistent advice I got from the development psychologists and the speech therapists was that we should expose him to one language for him to pick up speech. Because I got this advice from specialists, I took it seriously. I even tried to implement it. I've already written about the Baby Einstein DVDs and the other speech development DVDs I was suggested I use to get his language skills up and going. Implementing a one language exposure was easier said than done. I also didnt agree. Wouldnt exposing him to multiple languages make language easier for him? I wasnt a trained professional but I reckoned that hearing a language constantly puts it into your head in a way that learning it formally doesnt.
So the brat grew, getting exposed to Hindi, English, Marathi, Bengali. He was in a multilingual home. I spoke with him in English, the grandmother in Hindi, the maids in Marathi, as did the neighbours. He replied back to the best of his ability, and made up his own language for a while, with a smattering of words from different languages before finally, now, at the age of six, having no language confusion at all.
Today the brat speaks fluent English and Hindi, and can think in both languages, which makes them both his native language. He understands Marathi and Bengali, thanks to my maids, and is slowly but surely picking up Kumaoni from his grandmother. He is amazingly good at Hindi which he has just begun as a subject in first grade, despite the fact that he missed out almost two months at school (July and August) due to constant hospitalisations and ill health, and that was when Hindi was being introduced to the children. He shifts between both languages easily, in conversation. And not for a second now, would you ever imagine this was a child with a speech delay, and zero language development at appropriate milestones.
Read this at utbt's blog. She has done an interesting study on language development in child, and conducted an exhaustive poll to come to her conclusions.
How many languages does your child speak, and do you ensure that you try to expose your child to multiple languages? This could be interesting.