Greetings;
I have also faced similar situtations when i was in chennai and bangalore, and in mangalore, in chennai nobody spoke hindi and i am given to understand it is more to do with politics, some regional parties in late 80s DMK to be specific fought the elections on anti hindi plank and infact anna durai, the late congressmen was the first to use this strategy and since then people are using it as a tool to win over locals and elections also.
Infact i understand some people know hindi but do not want to speak hindi, though the circulum has hindi, nobody wants to speak for speaking in hindi is considered as politcally incorrect.
further india has many national languages, 16 to be precise and tamil is also one of them, well tamil is also one of the language in singapore.
Yes Rindam, you are right in what you are saying. If one has a different mother tongue then getting the fine nuances of the language right is tough. Also, you don't think in Hindi.
However, here the matter is of common communication. In most cities in India, exposure to Hindi is very common. Hence in most parts, people are able to communicate, even is they are not fluent in hindi. Not getting the genders right is fine, as long as the effort is there. Here we are talking of people who, inspite of knowing the language, refuse to communicate. They wud rather converse in broken English than answer in broken Hindi. The cabbies in Chennai don't even answer if spoken to in Hindi, and yet they understand if you are talking about money in hindi and the amount settled is wrong.........isn't that strange? Specially when most of them are exposed to Hindi as a language in school at one stage ? At least one wud expect them to communicate, even if it in broken Hindi? And that is true in many regional areas of India, not only of Tamil Nadu.