It has been 7 weeks since I moved back to Chennai. In that time, I have come across some fairly ludicrous situations due to language problems. While most of these situations were pure comedy gold, some grated my nerves mainly because of the attitude of the main protagonists.

Let me explain by means of some imaginary scenarios.

Imaginary Scenario A

A Tamil woman walks into a juice stop in Allahabad and orders a lime juice. At the juicing counter, she approaches the boy making the beverage and says “Uppu add pannunga!” (Translation: Add some salt)

The boy blinks. She repeats, a bit louder this time. After the third time, the old man standing next to her butts in with a “thoda namak dal dean!”

The boy rushes to comply, while the girl turns to the older man and gushes her thanks. “Thank you! Language is such a big problem, no?”

Imaginary Scenario B

A man gets out of his car in front of a roadside veggie shop in Lajpat Nagar. He points to the various vegetables and states how much of each he’d like. The vendor packs them up accordingly and when the man is done, tots up his bill and gives him the final tally. The man looks at his wallet and says, “En kitte 200 rooba thaan irukku, sayankalam vandu meedhi 50 rooba tharen!”

The vendor, typically, scratches his head and asks a question in Hindi. The man repeats his earlier statement, punctuating each word with a long pause and increasing his volume of delivery. The vendor shakes his hand and says “No Tamil“.

The man gives him Rs200 and then mimes “50 evening, ok?” The vendor grudgingly pockets the money, muttering to himself.

Imaginary Scenario C

Kanpur. A tailor’s shop. It is evening and the shop is full of patrons queuing up to collect their clothing. In that pandemonium, this nattily dressed gent waits calmly for his turn. He is busy talking in his mother tongue with a friend. After the crowd has dissipated, he shows his collection chit and the tailor’s assistant, a boy who looks about 13, rushes to look through the bundles inside, deciphers the hieroglyphics and hands the correct packet to the man in a plastic bag. The man eyes the thin plastic in distaste.

“You are charging Rs.1500 to stitch 4 sets of uniform but you can’t even provide good quality plastic bags? What is this?”

The boy, who clearly hasn’t understood a word of the tirade, looks blankly and says “no Inglis”.

The man tuts, shakes his head and says, “get me another bag.”

“Huh?”

“BAG! BAG!! ANOTHER BAG! THIS ONE… ONE MORE” he shouts and points to the one in his hand.

The boy hands him two more and the man walks out, complaining to his friend about the quality of the hired help these days.

What strikes you the most about these scenarios?

The jarring fact that the people in each did not use the correct language to interact with the vendors. In every case, they spoke their mother tongue or English in places where the prevalent language was something else. Hindi, to be exact. So what will be your reaction? What would you tell these men and the woman if you happened to come across them? ‘Speak the local language, stupid!’ Right? Maybe you wouldn’t have said the word ‘stupid’ out loud, but clearly you would have thought it in your mind, remarked upon the idiocy of not speaking in Hindi to the sabziwala and others, expecting them to understand your English / Tamil and respond in a similar manner. Am I correct?

Chennai is one of the few cities in India where you cannot get away with speaking in Hindi. Hindi and English are taught in the private schools, that’s it. Even in Kannada speaking Bangalore, you can easily find auto drivers that understand Tamil and get away with not knowing Kannada easily. But not in Chennai.

I have seen the above-mentioned scenarios in slightly varied formats almost on a daily basis in Chennai. Every time, the individual in question would confidently walk up to a local menial worker, who clearly hadn’t seen the inside of a school and thus had no chance of learning any language, and start conversing in Hindi.

The time when I butted it and told the juicer boy in Tamil to add salt, the bloke that had shouted ‘namak! namak!‘ till he was practically blue in the face, turned to me cockily and said: “Uff! It is so hard to make oneself understood, no?”

I felt like slapping him but consoled myself by answering tartly, “Next time try saying salt, at least!”

Many moons back, when an uncle of mine got a bank job that meant a transfer to Mandhya Pradesh, the first thing he did upon submitting his application form was sign up for a Spoken Hindi course. Granted, he had the advance notice but the point I am trying to make is this – when you move to a Hindi speaking area, you do not expect anyone to speak in your local language, do you? So why is it when Hindi speaking folk when they move to non-Hindi states think they can get away with speaking their language? And please do not pull the ‘but it is the NATIONAL language’ crap. This national language is taught in CBSE and other such schools. Tell me, is the average menial worker likely to have gone to a good private school? If he had, why the hell is he still playing go fetch to the local tailor?

Of course, I have nothing else to say to those idiots that speak English – ENGLISH, A TAUGHT LANGUAGE – to the hired help.

But I tell you what gets my goat big time, in relation to this language problem? Those that have lived in a place for YEARS – possibly, generations – and still do not speak the local language as if they are too cool to be caught speaking it. I was in college with this whole bunch of girls from Sowcarpet, an area of Chennai that is home predominantly to those that have settled from various Northern states. During the three years we shared bench space, I have never heard one of them even utter a word in Tamil. It was always Hindi or nothing.

After living in England for years, where the average English tourist expects to survive holidaying abroad by speaking English loudly and slowly, you’d think I’d be used to such atrocities.

No.

So yes, go ahead and call me names, tell me I am over-reacting. But please do it in Tamil or English. Mujhe Hindi nahin maloom.