I have completed my education till graduation in Gujarat. Coming to a Central University and witnessing the great cultural diversity was a completely unique experience for me!
It was for the first time in my life that I got to meet so many students from Kerala and got familiar with a culture that I was totally unaware of.
I made a lot of Malayali friends in a very short time. I observed that most of them were more comfortable speaking in Malayalam and English! Some of them also speak very decent Hindi.
It was very important that I break the language barrier for us to better understand each other. That is when I decided to start learning Malayalam!
My Malayali friends from the class instantly supported the idea and started teaching me words and sentences which are frequently used in day-to-day conversations.
The best part for me was shocking the Malayali students with what I just learned and immediately building new friendships.
The cherry on the cake was learning a song in Malayalam and performing it on Onam, for which I got crazy good reactions! Not to forget to mention that I have been getting recognized as that one North Indian guy who speaks Malayalam, though only a little bit!
We are conditioned to believe that Dravidian languages are difficult to learn but I would most humbly disagree by stating that, we hardly give it a try.
I would also like to talk about the sub-conscious regionalism when we expect the students from South India to learn Hindi when they’re studying in North India, but why should we not try to understand their culture too, rather than implying the superiority to ours?
I also find it problematic when the teachers would sometimes forget that students come from different cultural backgrounds and keep going on by speaking in “Hindi” in class.
I was deeply saddened when my friend at a university event auditioned by singing in Malayalam in the “Light Vocal Solo (Indian)” category but he was told to sing in Hindi as they don’t have judges who can understand other languages!
I believe that universities need to be more culturally inclusive rather than imposing.
I think student life is the best time when we learn and respect cultural diversity and the differences in our society and try to understand each other better. We can make it possible by “trying”. Trying does wonders!