All Jessica Kumar has to do is utter a certain word to win the approval of millions of South Asians.
But the millennial white woman has done much more to impress desis than possess the ability to say “namaste” without making us wince or snicker.
Kumar’s Hindi is so impeccable, she’s been invited to the dawaath — or party — earning the right to playfully roast those who’ve butchered one of the many languages spoken in India and many other parts of the world.
Kumar hasn’t held back.
“Can I have a side of subtitles with that?” the mother of two laughed on an Instagram post earlier this year after Conan O’Brien took a stab at Hindi, along with Spanish and Chinese, in his monologue at the 97th Academy Awards.
More recently, Kumar, who grew up in the western suburbs, called out a more habitual offender.
“Why you gotta do me like that?” she giddily cried out to Siri in a video clip, correcting the virtual assistant each time it fumbled street names during a car ride in India, where Kumar has lived for nearly two decades.
Kumar isn’t just kidding around. She has taken Hindi and its proper pronunciation seriously ever since she arrived in India fresh out of college as an intern at an information technology company in the ancient city Haridwar in 2006.
She could have easily survived on English, but Kumar yearned to “connect with her colleagues on a deeper level.”
Kumar was already viewed as an oddity — an unmarried foreigner with a penchant for soy milk, peanut butter and tooling around town on a bicycle. She figured she might as well take what made her stand out in stride, allowing herself to make many mistakes as she practiced her Hindi in hourslong lessons before starting the workday.
“I didn’t care if I looked like an idiot,” Kumar, also a podcaster, told me on a Zoom call where she said my name exactly the way my mom does.
Kumar credits the effortless Hindi that rolls off her tongue today to those tutorials, living off Devon Avenue between her time in India, and violin lessons that sharpened her ability to perceive and analyze sounds.
It also doesn’t hurt being an extrovert willing to ask questions, said Kumar, who in 2020, launched Learn Hindi Anywhere — online self-paced, conversational courses that lean into “practical, modern, speakable Hindi.”
As a girl, Kumar was fascinated by her international businessman father’s overseas tales. By the time she was a teenager and had volunteered at an orphanage in Peru, she knew she wanted to live abroad for at least a little while.
But she never imagined she’d make a life in India where, in addition to teaching Hindi, Kumar works as a consultant for corporations, governments and nonprofits operating in the South Asian country.
There were some “divine” signs along the way, including the road trip where Kumar and her college friends’ van broke down en route to the Grand Canyon. They ended up staying at an Indian immigrant-owned motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named after the Taj Mahal. It was the first time Kumar had chai.
A more solidifying moment came years later in 2009 when Kumar met her future husband, Abhishek Kumar, who was studying in the U.S. but intended to move back to his native Bihar, the eastern Indian state where my parents and older sister were born.
Jessica Kumar followed and spent seven years in Bihar, developing a strong bond with its inhabitants who are often maligned as uncouth bumpkins by outsiders.
Kumar was repeatedly asked why she wasn’t married days after she first stepped foot in India. Now, she gets grilled on why she married a Bihari — an absurdity she’s challenged on social media, much to the delight of the Bihari writing this column.
Kumar’s family, including her in-laws, have since moved north to the state of Uttarakhand.
Because her son, 11, and 8-year-old daughter are constantly exposed to Hindi, Kumar feels comfortable mostly talking with them in her Midwestern American English. Kumar is sure she’d switch it up if she and her husband ever decided to move stateside.
I’m glad I grew up speaking Urdu, which is similar to Hindi in spoken form. But I do get sad knowing the Urdu speakers in our family will dwindle through the years as my siblings and I mostly use the language with our elders or when we want to throw shade at a non-South Asian who is getting on our nerves.
Knowing more than one language can do more than boost a resume. Countless studies show being multilingual can enhance multitasking, memory and problem-solving skills, as well as delay age-related cognitive decline.
Kumar most values another benefit: “It really makes you understand the hearts” of people speaking the language.
“You really get to see things from another perspective,” she said. “It makes you change the way you think.”
That’s the language I love to hear.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and leads the opinion coverage at the Sun-Times.