Nobody From Tamil Nadu Needs to Learn Hindi Forcefully, Says Actor Siddharth

Even though the chairperson of the committee on the new National Education Policy, K Kasturirangan, has cleared the air on the Hindi bias in the draft policy, saying that the focus is on multilingualism and flexibility, the debate on the supposed 'Hindi imposition' is far from dead. Some social media users continue to opine that citizens of India should learn Hindi, irrespective of which state they live in, while others insist that learning the language is not a necessity.

Tamil actor Siddharth, who has starred in Hindi films like Rang De Basanti and Chashme Baddoor, is known to be vocal about socio-political issues. He joined the #HindiImposition debate on Twitter, in reply to a Twitter user called Mayur Puri, who sought to urge South Indians to embrace Hindi instead of preferring to learn English.

That sparked off a long debate between the actor and Puri, whose Twitter bio says that he wrote the dialogues for the Hindi version of Avengers: Endgame.

The actor then replied, "Nobody is against #Hindi. The problem lies in #HindiImposition. There is no effort from #Hindi speakers to learn beautiful regional languages. Why is there this silly expectation that we should prefer #Hindi over a neutral, efficient second language like #English?"

Puri asked for data to prove Sidhharth's point, and the actor retweeted data from another user about how many native Hindi speakers were also multilingual.

As the debate raged on Siddharth put up two long tweets about how he thinks that nobody from Tamil Nadu should be forced to learn Hindi.