While the official office language is English my colleagues seem more comfortable talking to each other in Hindi so quite frequently the conversation will move into Hindi if someone isn’t directly speaking to me.

I initially found it tremendously frustrating that I couldn’t understand what was going on in group discussions and while I did point it out people don’t realise when they’re switching into Hindi so it’s a difficult problem to fix.

My brain now seems to zone out when people stop speaking in English so I don’t even notice that it’s happened unless I observe myself becoming much more aware of my surroundings because I’ve tuned out and started looking around the room.

An interesting side effect is that I don’t pick up as much information from osmotic communication as I have done when working in the UK/Australia because conversations between my colleagues have a 50/50 chance of being in Hindi.

I guess the easiest way for me to fix the problem would be to take lessons in Hindi but I’ve never got around to that.

Another interesting thing to note is that it’s not only me who doesn’t understand Hindi but also people from the Chennai office.

Swearing in India is a bit of a taboo which is quite strange for me because in the UK/Australia there’s not really any stigma attached to the majority of words.

There are a few people who are more easily offended so you have to be a bit more careful about word selection when speaking with them.

Having said that, with the majority of people that I’ve worked with the language that I use makes no difference at all.