One of the many reasons I never felt at home in Delhi was Hindi or, to be precise, my lack of fluency in it. It has to be said here that before I moved to Delhi, I had nothing against the language. In fact, I was quite looking forward to the day when I would be jabbering away in it nonchalantly, tossing in a yaar here, an arrey there. After all, I had not been entirely bereft of Hindi in my life — we had studied it in school in Kerala as a third language for five years, and regurgitating the text we learnt by heart with nary a thought to grammar had been enough to top exams. And my English was fairly good, so I presumed that “flair” would extend automatically to all other languages, never mind that I had lived in Chennai for three years during college without progressing much beyond “Anna, evalavu” (How much, bhaiyya? — the standard question to auto-drivers).

><table width='100%' border=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 18px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; COLOR: #0253B7;'><B>Indulekha Aravind:</B> Hindi, yaar</td></tr><tr><tr><td style='FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: 11px; '>If you are with a bunch of North Indians, the conversation 

Indulekha Aravind: Hindi, yaar

If you are with a bunch of North Indians, the conversation or at least chunks of it will invariably end up being in Hindi

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