RASANA ATREYA
I am not rabidly anti-Hindi; quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve grown up in the north, and speak Hindi like a native.
I thought I was beyond this ‘you north Indian, I south Indian’ thing, and I was — until a couple months ago anyway. What raised my hackles was a stray comment by a Hindi-speaking friend of mine visiting from Pune. Knowing that I was a Telugu-speaking Hyderabadi, she asked me incredulously, “Can you believe it, ‘Radio Mirchi’ in this town is in Telugu, and not in Hindi?”
Because of the tech and construction boom, there is a steady stream of north Indians flowing into Hyderabad. That, I am fine with. What bothers me, though, is the attitude of some of the migrants.
This morning, I was talking to the carpenter who was doing some work for us. This “U.P. ka bhaiyya” tells me about his fellow carpenters, “people here do not even try to speak Hindi. Is not Hindi our national language?” As I fumed my way home, I wished I had thought to ask him why he did not even try to learn Telugu when he felt it was worth his while to migrate to our State and live here amidst us.
Indulgent locals
I am reminded of a trip my husband and I made to Greece a while ago. My intrepid husband, armed with his dog-eared Greek phrase book, was going around in Thessaloniki attempting to speak to the locals in Greek. Pretty much all the Greeks he spoke with were very indulgent of him.
‘Not like Americans’
After patiently letting my husband struggle with his phrase book Greek for 20 minutes, a store-keeper told us how much she admired the fact that my husband was even making the effort. “Not like those arrogant Americans,” she continued, “who speak to everyone in English, and expect a response back in English too!”
An interesting aside to the anecdote above is that a couple of my really nice American friends try to pass themselves off as Canadians when in another country, because they cringe at the brashness of their fellow Americans.
Anyway, back to my peeve. To all my north Indian friends (and I have a lot of them), I have this to say — do not expect the world to accommodate you. When you visit a State in our glorious country, each with its varied customs, attire and language, please respect local traditions and try to attempt to blend in. I do not expect that each one of you will be able to learn the language; in fact, you don’t even have to try. What I would like you to do is not be disrespectful to the people of your host State. In other words, please don’t be the “arrogant Americans” of India.
