Classes 9 and 10 interacts with School chairman, Mr Goradia on the problems of Hindi as the national language

On 16 August 2019, the students of classes IX and X had an interaction with SchoolChairman, Mr Prafull Goradia. The talk was about understanding the problems of Hindi as a national language and identifying solutions for them.

Sir shared two anecdotes that highlighted the barriers to speaking in Hindi. The first instance was about his office where he was the only one who spoke in English whilst his colleagues preferred Hindi or a regional language. A funny observation he shared was of a particular guard (who always spoke in Hindi) but would salute him because he spoke in English! Mr Goradia felt that his being able to converse in English made others unconsciously consider him different.

The second instance that he shared was from his school days where he told us about the difficulties he faced while learning Hindi and Gujarati, his mother tongue. Due to frequent transfers, he was unable to learn the two languages properly. Later he realised the importance of these languages when he started working. He told us that learning ones mother tongue is very important.

Mr Goradia spoke about the constitution of India in which Hindi was named the official language of the country after independence. This idea was not successful and it was replaced by English till 1965. Due to a lack of adequate effort to promote Hindi, people stilldont accept it as the national language. Sir further told us about the problems that non Hindi-speaking people like those in the South are likely to face if Hindi is made the official language.

One big problem will be that people from non-Hindi speaking states will be forced to learnan extra language. For example a person belonging to Gujarat would be forced to learn three languages namely Gujarati, Hindi and English, whilst a person belonging to Delhi willonly have to learn Hindi and English. This will cause conflict between states and people. Inorder to prevent this problem there should be an official language until everyone is readyto accept it.

To make everyone accept Hindi as the official language, the government should firsttake steps to popularise Hindi. Only then will people become more receptive to the change. In the end, he concluded that once people are convinced, they will happily accept. On the contrary if the language is forcibly imposed, people will rebel.

Asmi Midha, 10D.