In India the so-called battle between English and the mother tongue has long been a vexatious one. This ad for a mobile phone taps the vein to have comic artist Kapil Sharma launch into an ideological sermon that ends with the tagline "Glory awaits those who are proud of their roots."
Accompanied by the mildly provocative hashtag #AngrezipantiKoAngootha (English-ism isn't cool), the ad makes a case for not equating English with accomplishment. Only, it just replaces with English with another attempt at a lingua franca: Hindi.
The strokes are broad and the plugging of the "not-imported" line obvious: after all, the ad is for a homegrown brand of phones competing against multinational brands. (The irony, though, is that the phones are still manufactured abroad.) Still, it's not difficult to see what sentiment is being tapped.
The fact is that India is already the world's second-largest English-speaking country, and will become the largest shortly (though China has other ideas). The country's language landscape is complex, to say the least, but despite the diversity, the move towards convergence of tongues is having a problematic effect.
Although 780 languages are spoken (the India has 22 official languages, of which Hindi and English are two), some 220 Indian languages have disappeared in the last 50 years, and another 150 could go the same way as native speakers die and their children fail to learn their ancestral tongues.
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