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Hindi Gotthila– Confessions of an Hindi illiterate

A few weeks back, I was in Chennai to visit my sister. When I opened the newspaper, Uber Eats had taken out a full page ad with Alia Bhat and the headline read ‘For your tinda moments’.  I first thought tinda was a South Indian dish that I wasn’t aware of, the same way I didn’t know that brinjal was also called aubergine and spent half an hour looking for a brinjal recipe in a fancy cookbook.

I turned to my wife, who is from Mumbai, and asked her what tinda was.  She tried her best to explain it and words like ‘kind of a gourd’ were used. Still, I didn’t really get a clear picture of what the heck tinda was. Not being a fan of gourds, I assumed it was a vegetable that people weren’t too fond of hence the need to reach out for a food-delivery service to order something that satiates their taste-buds.

My next question was – how many South Indians know what tinda is?

Languages have always been a bane for me. And doing battle with the national language is a daily occurrence.

At some point, it was just assumed that every Indian knows Hindi. Honestly, I don’t know how this flawed assumption came to pass.

In school, Hindi was my third language. I studied it from 5th to 8th standard and it was there for the sake of being there, Kannada being the second language. Not that I am very strong in languages but I am definitely a lot more comfortable in Kannada and Tamil. Here’s how bad I was in Hindi – I used to fail in the subject even when it was the third language. The teacher used to make all those who failed sit on the cold floor in the classroom until we passed the next exam. Aghast, my parents hired a Hindi tution teacher who pushed the speedometer from massive fail to just pass.

I think my revulsion against Hindi began there.

In the ensuing years, not knowing Hindi has led to many fearful, awkward and downright exasperating moments. When any conversation switches to Hindi mode, I am like a deer in the headlights. I once told a cab driver in Mumbai ‘bilkul teekh hai’ and he went on a 10 minute monologue about his life and I was helpless as I couldn’t engage in a conversation with him. If a Hindi movie doesn’t have subtitles, I laugh when the audience laughs, pretending to get the joke. Bollywood movies without subtitles are a bane as they mean my wife has to play the role of translator, which inevitably gives her a neck pain at the end of it. As if being a pain in the ass at home wasn’t enough. When an airport security guard asked me a question in Hindi and I said ‘sahi’ without understanding a word of what he said, he gave me an understanding look and said ‘South India’? At least those two words I could comprehend.

I don’t say my Hindi is poor with any pride. In order to learn the language, I went and bought a Hindi book to relearn the vowels and consonants. I downloaded an Hindi app to learn 5 sentences a day but whenever someone speaks a sentence to me in Hindi, I shake my head and pretend to mumble something and make it look as if I have understood.

A phrase you hear very often in Bangalore is ‘Kannada Gotthila’ (I don’t know Kannada). In Bangalore, it’s possible to survive without knowing the local language. Recently, my wife told me that she spoke to a cab driver in her rudimentary Kannada. On hearing a few words in broken Kannada, the driver sounded very relieved and told her that speaking to passengers in Kannada instead of struggling with passengers who issue orders to him in Hindi are some of the brightest moments of his day.

There are people who make the state their home and don’t make any efforts to learn the local language, much to the irritation of locals. This underlying pent-up anger leads to incidents like self-proclaimed preservers of all things Kannada taking down hindi signboards in metro stations. 

There is inherently nothing wrong with not knowing the local language in any part of the world. But knowing it will surely make life easier. Not everyone takes to learning a new language easily and people who do have always been subjects of my envy. I have been asked on numerous occasions why my Hindi is so bad. I have been tempted to reply to those people that it is for the same reason that their Kannada or Tamil is so bad. I didn’t grow up around the language and developed a bit of a block towards it that added to a sorry state of Hindi illiteracy.

In a country like India, it’s a little preposterous to expect a one-language-fits-all solution, just like not every Indian is united by their love for cricket or khichdi.

Uber’s tinda ad assumes that everyone in India can relate to a vegetable that is particular to only one region. To a South Indian like me, tinda is a vegetable I will probably never eat in my life. They made amends by releasing a new set of ads with names of the local equivalents of tinda. In Chennai, tinda was replaced with podalanga (snake gourd).

The only downside is that South Indians got to know that there was something called tinda while people in other parts of the country will never know what podalanga is.

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