No beef with Hindi, until forced

Let's be clear upfront: I have no beef with Hindi. In fact, like many Indians, I find myself effortlessly switching to it when the situation demands. Think about it: when I’m haggling with a vendor in a Delhi market, catching a Bollywood movie, chatting with a taxi driver or even trying to decipher the occasional railway announcement, Hindi slides in quite naturally. And frankly, why wouldn't it? It's a beautiful language, rich in vocabulary and allusion, and spoken by millions.

- SHASHI THAROOR

So, when certain quarters lament what they perceive as a “resistance” to Hindi, I can’t help but feel they're missing the point, perhaps even deliberately. The pushback isn’t against the language itself. It’s against its imposition.

Here’s the thing: Indians are comfortably pragmatic. We embrace tools that work. English, despite its colonial baggage, became our de facto link language for a simple reason—it opened doors to global commerce, science, and an ocean of knowledge. No one needed to hold a gun to our heads to learn “the Queen's English”. We learned it because it was useful. And since that’s true for all of us in every corner of the country, it helps us communicate with fellow Indians we meet, until we discover that we have another Indian language in common, and then we slip naturally into that, too.

The same goes for Hindi, to a large extent. The reach of Bollywood, the sheer number of Hindi speakers in trade and travel—these factors have naturally diffused Hindi across the country, not because of some grand government decree, but because people saw its value.