Life and its challenges strangely led me to take an interest in this language. First of all, it is the mother tongue of my former life partner who is from Pakistan. Then, I find myself today in London working in an Indian company. So, I hear this language all day long and for years in fact… It’s time to take a closer look.

At first glance, this language is not sexy, especially with the accent that a person speaking this language can have in English. (Fortunately for me, the accent of Pakistan is much weaker than that of Indians). In short, I started learning this language a few months ago, which turned out to be very difficult since there are not many mobile applications or websites to learn this language (with Latin script).

So I downloaded quite a few apps from the Play Store, and the best one I found is called Learn Hindi Quickly . Indeed, Hindustani is also called Hindi or Urdu. These two languages are almost identical when spoken, but use a different script.

Here are the 3 wonders I have discovered so far:

1. “App” is the equivalent of politeness “You” in French.

Turns out it comes from the Sanskrit “Atma” or “Atman” which means Higher Being or Soul. I find it so beautiful, especially since I’m realizing that we’re all diamonds, and that life has dusted us with falsehood about ourselves. The beauty of dialogue comes when you see the person in front of you as a being of light who is surely unaware of himself, like a lost sheep, and you have to help gently remove this dust that is blinding him. Ah thank you the Hindustani for reminding me of this beautiful life lesson.

2. “Hona Jana” means “Becoming”

Hona jana is a compound verb: Hona means to be and Jana means to go . In a compound verb, Jana takes on a sense of completeness, finality, change of state. I am and I am going towards wholeness…

3. “Kal” means “Tomorrow” but also “Yesterday”

I am challenged by this notion of time which seems completely incomprehensible at first sight. I feel there is a deep meaning to this word. I feel that everything that is not now is “Kal”, and whether it is tomorrow or yesterday doesn’t really matter since there is only “now”, yesterday and tomorrow do not exist. Oh it’s beautiful, I love it!

What do you think ?

Thanks to C Rayban on Unsplash