It was during a lecture in college that Vrinda Vaid realised she was the only student in her class who had heard a Ghalib sher in her textbook. “Kab tak aasmaan ko chhuoge, jab zameen ka hi pata nahi,” says the 22-year-old from Delhi, seamlessly switching languages as she makes her point. “We have forgotten where we have come from and that’s a shaky existence.” The English literature graduate — who had grown up on a steady diet of Hindustani music and literature, thanks to her father’s keen interest in the language — then took it upon herself to further educate herself in the blend of Hindi and Urdu, which forms the medium of most “Hindi” conversations in our country. “Bahut sundar” is a simple example of this, with bahut being an Urdu word, and sundar a Hindi one.

This weekend, Vaid is in Mumbai to conduct a two-day workshop called Arq-E-Zabaan, or the essence of language, which will introduce participants to writing, articulation and expression in Hindustani. While Vaid is learning the Urdu script, the workshop will be conducted in the Devnagari script, which she has been writing in since she began her engagement with Hindustani. But before she picked up the pen, she devoted time to finding what she could read and watch in the language.