I'm surprised ....
to see a message from patienceGC asking people not to post messages completely in one's mother tongue! PatienceGC, have you not posted such messages before, the entire message in Tamil? Ofcourse you provided translations afterwards. I, too, am from Coimbatore and enjoyed your email messages in Tamil, for I find it quite funny when we try to translate certain english words and phrases into tamil.
What I was surprised about was the fact that you made the same mistake as someone else did on the day of your post. Yes, we should refrain from posting messages in one's native tongue as others can not understand it and this is a common forum for not just Indians but folks from other countries as well. But, this reprimand coming from you is not quite likely to settle well with other people.
For those who claimed Hindi to be the national language of our country:
You can go about saying "sun rises in the west" a million times, but that ain't going to be the truth. Hindi may be the most spoken language of India but by no means is it the national language. Whether it was thrust upon us or not, English is most easily understood by majority of Indians and is the undeclared national language or what I would like to term as the "link" language. I don't understand Hindi, but used to watch Hindi movies and used to have this desire to learn the language but slowly that desire was killed by people like you.
The worst mistake, post independence, was the creation of linguistic states. I don't hate the Hindi promoters any more than those who demand separate nation for Tamilians or those who force that official business be transacted in the regional language thus making life hell for people from other states. Past mistakes aside, one should start to have more wholesome a view of India than what is being seen here.
As much as I like Vajpayee, for the decent leader he is, it certainly bothers me that he would give speeches in Hindi claiming that it is the only language he is good at. My prime minister has the responsibility to make sure that what he says reaches every Indian in his audience. Ofcourse, if the crowd had gathered to treat their ears to a fine feast of Mr. Vajpayee's poetic ability, then that is a different issue.
Why can't we say that one is an Indian from the such and such a state instead of xxxxxxian?!
-Palaniappan Rajaram