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Half Girlfriend and Hindi Medium are proof that the Hindi language is cooler than you think
Hindi is the new cool and these films tell us why...
Shraddha Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor's Half Girlfriend and Irrfan Khan starrer Hindi Medium have released today. Though the films focus on rather different specifics of life, the connecting thread is where they both touch upon a rather sensitive issue that our country faces - language.
For aeons, India has had somewhat of an obsession with the English language, and though most would downright deny it, a major chunk of us are under the misconception that only those who speak fluent English are 'well educated' or 'cool'. For the other half who stand their (Desi) ground, the battle to prove themselves as worthy or well deserving continues...
Saket Chaudhary, the director of Hindi Medium spoke to a daily in regard to this. He said, “The initial intent was to write a film on education and how parents are obsessed with getting their children into big brand schools. As we researched more, we started discovering the kind of criteria on which parents are rejected and their children not granted admission, the most obvious one was addressed, then it started becoming about educational qualifications and finally, we realised there was a very strong bias against parents who were not very fluent in English.”
Isn't this a matter of concern? Not being able to speak a certain language really has no co-relation with one's intelligence and IQ. So why this unfair game? Moving away from education, there are other aspects in India too, that literally revolve around the language one speaks - marriage, being a primary one. There are an insane number of 'rejections' that happen in the arranged marriage process, only because the prospective wife or husband is incapable of speaking English - technically, a foreign language to us Indians. "He's not educated enough." "She's a gawaar. I'm sorry," they say.
Half Girlfriend, the film adaptation of author Chetan Bhagat's hot seller, is a film that uncovers the romantic and linguistic struggles of a simple Bihari boy, who enrols in an English-medium college in Delhi and ends up falling in love with a girl 'well educated' in the capital. Again, the struggle of the non-English speaking person continues. This time to do with love.
Shifting from this 'English' craze, when it comes to marketing and business strategies, Hindi seems to be the way forward. Speaking to a daily, Saurabh Uboweja, the chief executive and chief brand strategist at brand consultancy firm said, “English may seem mainstream to us because we live in the big cities but for brands, Hindi and regional languages are pretty centric to their campaigns."
As the above descriptions reflect, our country seems to be torn between striving to compete with the ever so cool (eye roll) West and making money by using the authentic desi (Hindi) medium. To put it in the simplest way - We want to sell brands and products in Hindi to the people who want to be 'English'. And hey, it works! If that isn't enough food for thought... I don't know what is!
