Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s teachers at the National School of Drama routinely ignored his Hindi answers to questions accepting the same response when offered by someone else in English. Over the few interactions I have had with Siddiqui, we have spoken in Hindi. When I asked him if he found the lack of command over English to be a drawback, Siddiqui smiled. He said that whenever he went overseas he found that English-speaking people understood what he said and vice versa. What he did not say; that it was an issue only in India. He’s over any insecurities about not knowing the language when he says that “English is just a language, not a measure of intelligence.”

English is an aspirational language for most Indians. Notice how many parents use English with their kids from day one, negating completely the mother tongue or state language. Representation pic/Thinkstock