Bengaluru autorickshaw driver comes up with innovative idea to teach Kannada to non-Kannadiga passengers
Azzu Sultan is also an avid social media user and his Instagram account @aut0kannadiga0779 has more than a lakh followers
3 min read
Sultan decided to put up a leaflet inside his auto offering passengers a chance to learn Kannada while commuting. (Express photo)IT capital Bengaluru in recent months hit the headlines several times over the emotive language issue, but a 31-year-old autorickshaw driver is now trying to bridge the language divide by using an innovative method to teach passengers some basic Kannada words.
Moved by several incidents wherein autorickshaw drivers faced problems because of the language barrier, an autorickshaw driver, Ajmal Sultan, popularly known as Azzu Sultan, decided to put up a leaflet inside his auto offering passengers a chance to learn Kannada while commuting. His leaflet is headlined, “Learn Kannada With Auto Kannadiga.” A native of Ilkal in Bagalkot district, he has been working as an autorickshaw driver in Bengaluru since 2012.
“Many non-Kannadigas did not bother to learn Kannada and when I asked some of the passengers, they said they could not pick up even basic words,” Azzu Sultan said.
He then tried to figure out the words that a passenger would require to communicate with autorickshaw drivers. “Most of my customers are from the Whitefield area and IT parks. The majority of them are non-Kannadigas and I started out by asking them about the basic words they needed to communicate with an autorickshaw driver. I listed the words and then translated them into Kannada. Thereafter, I displayed the list in my autorickshaw. The response was really good and then I met some members of the autorickshaw associations… and now, we have been able to place these cards in at least 500 autorickshaws in the city,” he said.
He added that he never faced language problems as he can speak Hindi, English, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, and Urdu, besides Kannada.
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Azzu Sultan is also an avid social media user and his Instagram account aut0kannadiga0779 has more than a lakh followers.
Talking about his Instagram journey, Azzu Sultan, who has studied up to Class 7, said, “I came to know about Rajesh Rawani, a truck driver and vlogger in August last year. It was Anand Mahindra (Chairperson of Mahindra and Mahindra) who had posted about him on his social media account. Thereafter, I decided to learn how to edit videos. I initially posted videos for entertainment and there was no other purpose.”
Later, Azzu Sultan started posting videos on social issues as well. “I try to promote linguistic harmony and also teach non-Kannadigas the Kannada language. I hope it will be taken in a good spirit,” he concluded.
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