"....I will cross verify. I have some thoughts, you have some thoughts if they are not matching? So, I will cross verify... OK" said the person I went to meet with. A thick voice and an equally thick moustache and a thick South Indian accent whenever he broke to speak in Hindi. He could last only 3 words in Hindi and switch back to English. Reminds me of my own struggle to speak in Hindi earlier on in my career. I had tried to use some words from the movies and got mocked for speaking "Bombay Hindi".
Being from South India, it was not easy to converse in Hindi. The language of the South of India is English. The conversation flows and so does the transactional language when you went to five star hotels or shops. Never in Kannada, the language of Bangalore, Karnataka.
When I had to sound cool, I learnt the dialogues from TV Serials. As you can guess, we never went to see the Hindi films in at the cinema. It was always Kannada, Telugu or Tamil or English. I was left out of the conversations in high school about the popular Hindi movies at that time. I often lied to watching some Hindi movie or the other, just to be included but was soon caught as the conversation went deeper into the twists and turns of the story. The maximum exposure to Hindi was when my cousins form Bihar (no less!) visited home and they spoke to each other (mostly argued / fought) in Hindi.
Wow. How did I reach here shared all these? The person I came to meet finding it tough to keep the conversation in Hindi. Right. Took me a couple of decades back in my life.
Being from South India, it was not easy to converse in Hindi. The language of the South of India is English. The conversation flows and so does the transactional language when you went to five star hotels or shops. Never in Kannada, the language of Bangalore, Karnataka.
When I had to sound cool, I learnt the dialogues from TV Serials. As you can guess, we never went to see the Hindi films in at the cinema. It was always Kannada, Telugu or Tamil or English. I was left out of the conversations in high school about the popular Hindi movies at that time. I often lied to watching some Hindi movie or the other, just to be included but was soon caught as the conversation went deeper into the twists and turns of the story. The maximum exposure to Hindi was when my cousins form Bihar (no less!) visited home and they spoke to each other (mostly argued / fought) in Hindi.
Wow. How did I reach here shared all these? The person I came to meet finding it tough to keep the conversation in Hindi. Right. Took me a couple of decades back in my life.
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