Zomato has faced a Twitter backlash after one of its customer care executives referred to Hindi as the national language of the country.
A simple complaint about a delivery issue turned into a larger debate between a Tamil-speaking Zomato customer, unable to get a refund for an order due to a miscommunication between Zomato and the restaurant he had ordered from.
The executive cited a language barrier as the cause of miscommunication, but things took a turn when he allegedly said For your kind information, Hindi is our national language. So it is very common that everybody should know Hindi little bit,” when the customer asked if it would be better to have had a Tamil-speaking executive to make the process smoother.
The larger point here is that the customer was told that he was expected to know little bit of what is supposedly national language” of India in his view, which could be considered a bit myopic.
The fact of the matter is that Hindi, or for that matter, no language is the de facto national tongue of India, although we have a set of officially recognized languages, as per the constitution.
Hindi’s ubiquity in mainstream pop culture and political discourse is what perhaps leads people to believe that it has official recognition at the national level as a state language.
The chances of running into a person not well-versed in Hindi are more than that of someone who does not speak a word of Tamil in Tamil Nadu. Even so, there is every chance that a language barrier might arise, if there is someone who speaks neither, preferring to converse in English, which is a sizeable number in India.
On the one hand, it would behoove a business to hire multi-lingual executives for their customer-facing positions, in a country as diverse as India. If that were not possible, then English as a lingua franca for business is a widely accepted cultural norm even in countries that hold great pride in preserving their local language, be it Germany or France.
As long as there is mutual respect and understanding, about understanding or not understanding each other and therefore switching to a common shared communication, there will be no loss in translation.
That seems to have been the core issue in the Zomato case.
Zomato issued an official statement along with an apology to the customer and confirmed that the executive had been terminated after the mass outrage on social media. It was later informed in another tweet that the part-time executive had since been reinstated, suggesting some resolution may have been arrived at to avoid such tongue-twisting issues in the future.