India: a regionalist Nation | A case study on Hindi Diwas

1:04 PM

It's Hindi Diwas last month on Sept 14th and being an ardent linguistic person, I felt obligated to celebrate the day for the love of Hindi. I chose twitter as it's the place where I get instant feedback and some intelligent conversation.
Few weeks before the event, I wondered whether #HindiDiwas too make it to the trending saga of hashtags on twitter. (It did not, Sigh!)
Nevertheless, with all the vague anticipations, I started tweeting. RTs & mentions kept flowing in and I found a sudden transition of Indians into regionalists, asking me to stop imposing Hindi 'on them'. The people I engaged and the outcome, to an extent was more negative than how I expected it to be. Well, it was out of my surprise, because I surely wasn't promoting Hindi but tweeting facts about Hindi language. All I meant was that Indians should respect Hindi which is the official language of India, but all I concluded is that an Indian prefers English over Hindi and if you dare to favor Hindi, the same person will start favoring different regional languages in India and bicker about Hindi. Though I still don't get the idea behind such a split thought-process. People can blurt out that Hindi isn't our national language, but have no idea that it's the official language of India. At one point my mind went to a state of disbelief and confusion that how to respond to them. Though I responded anyway because it's a social media practice that one should respond every conversation, provided the argument makes sense. (by fitting into 140 characters if its twitter.)
How can you be so proud to be an Indian if it sounds 'cute' or 'not-a-big-thing' to you when you fumble while speaking Hindi, but embarrassing if its English. When 41% of population in India speaks Hindi & those who understand it are more than 65%, why there isn't one language that can be learned, spoken and taught to every Indian just like other countries? Why can't Hindi be eligible for this (Or Sanskrit for that matter. No, it isn't funny). It's curiosity and curiosity is quite human. Anyways, if people can keep fighting over 'India' and "Bharat" we can surely see more such things peeking up.

Anyways, at the same time on twitter when I had having such confrontations coming by, I did get some positive feedback and appreciation too, across the country. I considered this as a success for all my endeavors.

PS: I love languages, be it Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Urdu,... French or Latin, and... I Love our India.


Image courtesy: Screenshot is just one example taken out of my twitter handle. I've kept the image here this large intentionally to make it legible.

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