Back in the eighties, everybody was pretty much like Om Prakash’s character in Chupke Chupke: English was English and Hindi was Hindi and everything was fully separate separate and alag alag.
Thums Up was singing in a propah Brit Gary Lawyer-ish accent ki ‘Happy days are here again!’ Gold Spot was doing a Riverdale High-inspired ‘As crazy as crazy as we’re about Gold Spot, the zing thing’ and Enfield was saying in chaste hinterland Hindi ki ‘Yeh Bullet meri jaan, manzillon ka nishaan’.
But then Juhi Chawla wore a large black felt hat over an Anarkali-inspired salwar-kameez and crooned ‘Yeh hi hai right choice baby, aha’ along with Remo Fernandes and a new advertising language was born and embraced with gusto. It helped that this was just a little after Bachchan had sung ‘Hum tum pe itna dying, jitna sea mein paani lying, aakash mein panchi flying, bhavra bagiyan mein ga-ing’ in Namak Halal and Rajiv Gandhi had swept the nation off its feet by talking about how ‘humko 21st century mein jaana hai, aur India ko superpower banana hai’.
The language clicked because it reflected reality. That was the way we all spoke anyway. But we spoke that way when we were ‘off stage’. Not when doing serious stuff like addressing potential consumers in ads.
In those initial days, using Hindi mixed in with our English during formal communication processes had a bit of a cheap thrill to it. Of being irreverent. Of taking pangas with the purists. The same illicit thrill as using gaalis.
But once an American brand like Pepsi gave it the stamp of cool, Hinglish got official status. It got Standing. It got Aukaat. Or as the kids would say today, it got ‘aux’. ( I love ‘aux’, by the way, so much nicer than ‘status’ or ‘consequence’ or the hard, rude-sounding ‘aukaat’, a word I can never utter without feeling like Amrish Puri playing an evil zamindar in a Subhash Ghai flick.) And of course it helped that people had no problem reading Hindi words written in English because they’d been reading Hindi movie names that way for years!
Advertising embraced Hinglish with great gusto, because advertising always embraces all the latest trends with great gusto. But Hinglish has really stood the test of time. Mainly because Hinglish really is the national language of this country. Or Tamlish. Or Malluish. Or whatever.
It is Hinglish we’re using when we tell the brawling parties in any tussle ki ‘compro kar lo compro’! When something touches our hearts, we declare ki ‘feel aa gayee’. When we have a passing acquaintance with someone famous we say ki ‘woh mera known-to hai’. And of course, there’s the world-famous ‘adjust’.
Hinglish makes English-speaking brands a little more inclusive.
And it makes Hindi-speaking brands a little more aspirational. It’s the ultimate massifier. Also because it’s a shortcut language, it lets you say a lot of stuff in just about thirty seconds, which is vital in advertising. At a very basic level it also helps large national brands knit their slogans across the country together, more cohesively. So ‘Yeh hai Youngistaan meri jaan’ becomes ‘Idhu Youngstaan chellam’ in Tamil, ‘Idhu Youngistaan priyare’ in Malayalam, ‘Idhi Youngistaan my nestham’ in Telugu.
Hinglish has given us some lovely lines and phrases over the years. In advertising it’s given us ‘Yeh dil maange more’, ‘Kya karein control nahi hota’, ‘Mera number kab aayega’ and ‘Kya aap Close Up karte hain’. Of course, Hinglish has also delivered a load of total clunkers like ‘ILU-ILU’ which makes my children projectile vomit every time it comes on TV, and all the hideous songs from films starring Ritesh Deshmukh (Cash and Apna Sapna Money Money types).
Hinglish in the movies has gotten just a little too Hard Kaur for me at the moment, I guess. There have been some truly inane ad lines as well. Like the contrived ‘Don’t atko, Chocoleibe gatko.’ The glib ‘No jhik jhik, no chip chip’ for Fevistick. And the surreal ‘Kyonki fighter hamesha jeetta hai!’
Of course, the use of Hinglish itself will never guarantee an advertiser a hit line. Or vice versa. One of the coolest Pepsi lines ever (that I personally spent ages trying vainly to convert into Hinglish, in order to make it more ‘mass’ or ‘catchy’, back in the nineties) was ‘Nothing official about it’. It just didn’t work in Hinglish. And some truly sublime lines feature no Hinglish at all. ‘Thanda matlab Coca Cola’ is one. And so’s my personal favourite: Kurkure’s ‘Tedha hai par mera hai’.
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