Kichcha Sudeep shared this image. (courtesy: kichchasudeepa)
Vikrant Rona star Kichcha Sudeep invoked two giants of Indian cinema - Amitabh Bachchan and Kishore Kumar - when asked about his Twitter exchange with actor Ajay Devgn over the Hindi language. In an in-depth interview with NDTV, the 48-year-old actor revisited the conversation he had online with Ajay Devgn in April - Ajay tweeted to Sudeep in Hindi after the Kannada actor corrected the usage of the term "pan-India" in a media interaction. Hindi is not the national language, Sudeep had said. Why do you dub your movies in Hindi, Ajay Devgn tweeted to Sudeep - Ajay's tweet was not just in Hindi but also in the Devanagari script. In reply, Sudeep tweeted back to explain that Ajay had not been made aware of the context in which his statement had been made.
He told NDTV, "I'm a man of my own mind. I will not hesitate to speak something if I feel it is right. Probably I want to put it in a way that everybody understands and I don't want to take my twitter so seriously that I start portraying myself as a man who has great following and my arrogance speaks, not my vocabulary."
Speaking to NDTV, Kichcha Sudeep said, "Ajay Devgn sir is a gentleman and of course he was misguided on certain things I spoke. What I spoke had a different relevance. I took to Twitter to explain to sir. He's a senior man, whatever said and one we should respect that."
Sudeep also touched on Ajay Devgn's tweeting in Hindi and revealed that he had learnt Hindi by watching Amitabh Bachchan's films and listening to Kishore Kumar's songs. "Him tweeting in Hindi was something that probably they thought that we understand. Luckily we did, thanks to Kishore Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan who taught us how to speak and learn Hindi. Kishore sir and Amit sir are my teachers, I learnt Hindi because of them. I wanted to understand what Kishore sir was singing. His songs were so beautiful. And Amitabh Bachchan we were such fans of, he was the first Avenger in India. Every state would run to watch his films, whether we understood Hindi or not."
In April, Ajay Devgn and Kichcha Sudeep had this tense exchange on Twitter:
Ajay Devgn's tweet was prompted by a media interaction in which Sudeep said that "everyone says that a Kannada film was made on a pan-India level but a small correction is that Hindi is not a national language anymore."
Speaking to NDTV, Sudeep commented on the fact that Hindi is widely-spoken. It belongs to everyone, he said "Hindi belongs to us also, it doesn't belong to a particular state. Like Kannada belongs to Karnataka, Telugu belongs to Andhra and Telangana, Tamil to Tamil Nadu, Punjabi to Punjab, Bengali to Bengal... Hindi is the universal language, you can't really debate and outcast us from that language."
"As a Kannadiga I was only trying to say, what if I tweeted in Kannada, would you understand? It's a matter of respect we should give to each language in India," Kichcha Sudeep added, "No language in India is existing without a history and no language in India is existing without it's heroes."
As far the Twitter conversation with Ajay Devgn goes - "We both got our answers and we were okay with that," Kichcha Sudeep said.
Vikrant Rona, co-starring Jacqueline Fernandez, opened in theatres last week.