Lazy Hindi

I speak a LOT of Hindi these days. (Waiting for the giggling and guffawing to stop.) I do. I walk into a store and I don't even try to speak English, even into relatively big stores. The only time I remember speaking in English was in a Raymonds store and that too because the store keeper initiated the conversation in English.

The transformation into a Hindi speaker has taken even me by surprise. I lived in Hyderabad for a significant part of my life, so speaking Hindi itself is not new to me. What is surprising is the fluency that has returned. I am using idioms, slang and bargaining effortlessly. Of course, I don't think I am fooling a lot of people, but instead of thinking, "Wow, an NRI sucka!" they are atleast thinking "Wow, a non-Pune sucka!" which is good enough.

What isn't good enough is the Hindi that I speak. It's good enough to communicate but it's such a bastardized version that I cringe when I hear myself speak. Hindi is not native to Maharashtra. So, much like Hyderabad, they speak a functional version of it, instead of a pure version. (Sort of like High School Americans speaking English - technically it's English, but the Queen would faint upon hearing it.) It's a lazy version of the language with insufficient matching of subject and verb. Sometimes even the names are pronounced improperly, with the softer versions of the consonants replacing the real versions. Oh and the almost universal infiltration of English. I once heard two students speak absolutely beautifully pure Hindi on a bus in Austin once (they weren't trying hard, it was clearly how they normally spoke). So beautiful that I wanted to just get off the bus and follow them and keep listening to them. I hope to hear Hindi like that spoken again one day.

Mind you, it's not like the Telugu spoken in Hyderabad is any better. For that matter you hardly hear any Telugu spoken in the city in business transactions. A person I know in fact tried to speak exclusively in Telugu with the auto drivers to make a point. And that's sad. I only hope that there are still some people who still cringe when improper Hindi/Telugu is spoken, much like I cringe when improper English is spoken.