Julia Middleton's Thoughts on Leadership

It’s been a pretty big week at Common Purpose, with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom paying our emerging leaders course a visit in Bangalore.

The occasion has me thinking about what is emerging for leaders in India – and Hinglish leaps to mind.

It’s the language of the future I am told – a combination of English and Hindi.

I even met one man in India who told me that English was no longer “yours but ours” because “we are the biggest population in the world speaking it” and it will be increasingly Hinglish.

At a course day a group of participants started explaining Hinglish to me. They showed me how they could switch their phones to HING.

And me, who is so famously haphazard about my use of English, got all offended. So this reminded me that leaders need pushing just a bit sometimes.

I spoke to the participants again and they pretty well told me that I needed to get real. English was their language now and soon most English in the world will be spoken in India. And its Hinglish. The British could get all purist about it, but if they did, they would be left behind.

Bear in mind that I was educated French and am very conscious of failing a language by being too purist.

I heard it spoken and understood two thirds. Some highlights were…

• “Hungry kya? (Are you hungry?)
• “What your bahana is?” (What’s your excuse?)
• “Prepone” (i.e.  dinner plans – if you can postpone them, you can prepone them.)
• “Yeh Dil Maange More.” (The heart wants more.)
• “Life ho to aisi.” (This is what life should be.)

Then a few weeks later I got an official letter from an Indian accountancy firm on and remember reading it and instinctively wondering how poorly educated the author was. Then I realised that it was in Hinglish.

I was watching my sons play and one of the kids had the role of an owner of a corner shop, and he had chosen to put on an Indian accent. As I watched it I thought the boy was playing a pretty cheap caricature, little did he know we was actually speaking the English of the future.

Our UK course participants have discovered that Hinglish is a language that they will need to learn, and not the pigeon English that they currently associate with corner shops. They can see that they better start to understand it.