Don’t blame Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, or Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan or Home Minister Amit Shah for the mess we seem to have got into. They didn’t start the fire. It’s been there for a long time. In fact, it’s been there since the time of Mahatma Gandhi. Listen to this: the celebrated poet Dom Moraes, when still a child, was taken to meet Gandhiji in Mumbai (then Bombay). The Mahatma chucked the boy under the chin and asked: ‘Beta, kya naam hai aapka?’ With his 'propah' English upbringing in south Mumbai’s tony Altamont Road, Dom just about understood the question, but couldn’t bring himself to reply. Gandhiji got cross and said something that sounded eerily similar to what the BJP would now say: 'This is not good. All our children should learn Hindi.'
For the full picture, listen to this other story from around the same time: a political aspirant from the south turned up at Gandhiji’s ashram, seeking to strengthen his commitment to the national cause. He was sincere and hard-working but the one thing lacking, he confessed, was that he did not speak Hindi – the lingua franca among freedom fighters. Gandhiji replied that he had the solution. He took a sheet of paper and, addressing a well-known pundit, wrote: 'Subramaniam ji ko Hindi nahi aata hai. Unhe sikhaiye'. When Subramaniam dutifully approached the scholar, he took one look at the note and smiled: ‘Actually, Mahatmaji himself doesn’t know good Hindi. Correctly written, this note should read: 'Subramaniamji ko Hindi nahi aati. Unhe padaiye.' So much for the champions of language and their credentials!
Actually, language is too serious a matter to be left to politicians. Instead, we should approach a higher authority – Bollywood. Early Bollywood had a simple formula – the villains did evil deeds while speaking florid English while the good guys did patriotic things, led by their captain Manoj Kumar, and spoke chaste Hindi. More important than what they did was what they sang. All of them sang Hindi songs – melodious numbers that won your heart and stayed in your mind. The tunes and lyrics were so captivating you remembered the words even though you were not sure of what they meant. Vintage numbers from Rafi, Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar made fans of strangers across the country and did a better job popularising Hindi than the new-fangled New Education Policy.
Now, to salve bruised egos and bring down the temperature, let’s have a re-play of old Hindi film songs, and watch the Opposition melt. Better still, let us go out of the box, and reprise Big B giving us those well-remembered lines written by the brilliant Kader Khan: ‘I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English.’ Given our present predicament, we can modify the line to: 'Talk Hindi, walk Tamil and laugh English'. How does one do it, you ask? Well, don’t overthink this and fall into the trap our politicians have got into. Just go for it, and your heart will find a way.