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Log inChennai: Middle Class Tamilians want to make sure their children do not miss the Hindi Bus
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Chennai: Middle Class Tamilians want to make sure their children do not miss the Hindi Bus
by Guest Tue Jun 02, 2015 8:26 pm
Swati attends a reputed CBSE school not far from her home. Hindi is her third language of choice, after English and her mother tongue, Tamil. "My friends opted for Sanskrit and French because you can get better grades that way," she says. But Swati's mother, Ananya, takes a broader view. "I have lived in Mumbai for two years. Hindi is necessary if you want to move to other states. People living in south India are increasingly aware of this," says the 44-year-old, who watches Star Plus and Zee TV to help polish her Hindi. "We enjoy watching Hindi stand-up comedy — there is no equivalent of this on Tamil TV," she says.
It has been a full decade since the last anti-Hindi agitation in Chennai. The self-professed guardians of Tamil culture haven't vanished. Indeed, not too long ago, English signboards on some railway routes were smudged off in an act of Tamil pride, says a resident of Tambaram suburb. S Doraiswamy, a retired executive who has lived in Thyagaraya Nagar, Chennai, for close to two decades, says common English words are increasingly being translated into forbidding Tamil — for instance, some bakeries call themselves veduppagam (literally, a cooking room). "There are two sets of people in Chennai today. Those who go out of their way to introduce new ways of asserting the Tamil spirit; and the middle and upper middle classes who want to learn Hindi and to make sure their children don't miss the Hindi bus," says Doraiswamy.
http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/chennai-says-it-in-hindi/830371/0
It has been a full decade since the last anti-Hindi agitation in Chennai. The self-professed guardians of Tamil culture haven't vanished. Indeed, not too long ago, English signboards on some railway routes were smudged off in an act of Tamil pride, says a resident of Tambaram suburb. S Doraiswamy, a retired executive who has lived in Thyagaraya Nagar, Chennai, for close to two decades, says common English words are increasingly being translated into forbidding Tamil — for instance, some bakeries call themselves veduppagam (literally, a cooking room). "There are two sets of people in Chennai today. Those who go out of their way to introduce new ways of asserting the Tamil spirit; and the middle and upper middle classes who want to learn Hindi and to make sure their children don't miss the Hindi bus," says Doraiswamy.
http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/chennai-says-it-in-hindi/830371/0
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