I met this Indian at a coffeeshop the other day. I was practicing Hindi writing (my tutor Ali at http://www.zabaan.com/ is awesome!) and he came up to me and asked me if I spoke Hindi. I answered him in Hindi and asked him if he spoke Hindi, but he just said he did not speak any. His name was Kheer (or something sounding like that) and he said that he wanted to learn Hindi someday, and that his parents spoke Hindi, and that he goes to India to see relatives at least every other year. He said that he was getting his master’s degree in computer science at the university.
I asked him where in India his family was from and he said Gujarat. He asked me if it was hard to write Hindi and I told him no, and asked him if Gujarati language uses the same characters as Hindi. He said that he did not know but he thought so. I looked this up later and Gujarati has its own written language, and it does not seem to have much in common with Hindi.
Situations like this happen to me regularly. I often meet Indian people my age, and I almost always know more about India than they do. In India, lots of Indians come up to me because they can speak English but in America, Indians come up to me because I speak more Hindi than they do.