A Bengaluru resident has shared a troubling experience on Reddit, calling for greater empathy towards Hindi speakers. The incident, which occurred in the ISRO Layout area of the city, involved a north Indian pineapple vendor who encountered hostility from a customer for not speaking the local language.
“Can we be a little kind?” a Reddit user wrote in the “Bangalore” community. The post detailed a recent event involving the vendor and a customer.
The incident began when the Redditor bought pineapples from the north Indian vendor. A woman inquired about the price of the pineapples, to which the vendor replied, “40 ka ek [Rs 40 for one piece]” and “100 ka 3 [Rs 100 for three pieces].” The woman, unable to understand the vendor, asked him to repeat himself several times. The Redditor then stepped in to explain the prices in Kannada.
Instead of thanking the Redditor or placing an order, the woman criticized the vendor for not knowing Kannada. The vendor apologized and explained that he had been in the city for only a week and would learn the language soon.
The Reddit post attracted widespread attention, leading to comments such as: “Everyone in Bangalore is becoming insensitive nowadays. What a poor vendor will do. They don’t have the means to learn a new language. At least the privileged North Indians can do. It looks like a typical high class high handed behaviour.”
Another commenter noted, “For all the ‘learn Kannada’ voices that I have seen in the city, I have seen zero to none accessibility to do so. I visited several bookstores; they didn’t have a book to learn Kannada from. English-speaking course books were plentiful, though. I know I can access the internet and learn via an e-course, but what about a layman who doesn’t have internet access and doesn’t even know English properly? I haven’t even seen physical advertisements for speaking courses. The locals want immigrants to wake up one day and speak fluently, as if they were born and raised here. When I ask my colleagues for sources to learn the language, they nonchalantly say that knowing English is enough. So tell me, where is the incentive, accessibility, and opportunity to learn?”
A third commenter shared, “This. I’ve spent 9 years in Bangalore on and off and I couldn’t learn much Kannada at all except for Kannada Gothilla. Three months in Anekal and I can now understand it for the most part and can speak a broken version of it. Made me realize that everyone in Bangalore wants you to learn Kannada but doesn’t want to teach you any. On the other hand, if I’d been living in Chennai for this long, I’d be rapping Tamil like a localite.”
