Where do people in India learn to speak english? I mean, which english do they use?
This morning I heard a reporter on India tv say “If you believe people in Mumbai are strangers to terrorism, then Santa Clause is for you”. 
This is not unusual. I hear funny-sounding statements often. The host on Bollywood tv said “bye” in four different ways, ending with “I leave you now”. But frequently their comments are kinda, I don’t know, joshing. Like the Santa Clause thing mentioned above. Not mean, just funny. They seem to use simile and metaphor a lot.
Just now she said, during a story about the economy, “Come on, let’s go out and find out”, at which time the show switched to exteriors with different reporters in various locations. She stayed at her desk.
I wonder if this is common when they’re speaking in the local language (Punjab?).
Are people of India real kidders? 
Peace,
mangeorge
I don’t know about India per se, but I teach in Japan and have noticed that the Japanese use English in the same way they use Japanese (which makes for all kinds of grammatical errors and mind boggling statements) so I’d imagine that those in India do the same, and that their language is one that uses a lot of metaphors/similies.
That said, the indian people i know run the gambit of being abso-fuckin-lutely hilarious to sour SOBs who get all uppity about small little things (one dude I know almost got into a fight with a friend of mine cause my buddy wanted to store a beer in the indian dude’s ice bucket (which contained beer the indian dude was trying to sell) at a party)
For almost 100 years the British ruled India. I think the natives picked up on a few phrases.
I think it’s possibly just the issue PopeJewish brings up; people learning the words of a language but not necessarily learning (or learning to a lesser degree) the grammar and format of that language.
The second version you mention doesn’t seem all that particular to India, for example. I’ve seen British TV reporters use language in that kind of manner, though not often.
Indian English is fascinating, for quite a few reasons.
First is that English is not an ordinary second language in India. It is more like a secondary first language for many people. It is used in education, business and some of the media. So this means it’s not being re-learned every generation the way that we learn Spanish or French out of books, but rather it has been evolving as a natural language for quite some time.
And India is nearly unique among Anglophone nations in that it has a very well developed media industry, so it doesn’t just import everything. The only place I can think of that is similar is Nigeria, which also has a unique brand of English. This has given India a lot of time to cultivate their own branch of the English language. And Indian media is really something else- I’m sure you’ve noticed that Bollywood uses a whole different set of visual metaphors, storytelling devices, etc. They’ve just got a totally different media paradigm.
So anyway, Indian English is influenced by the British English at the time of colonization, local languages and the natural linguistic changes that time bring about.
As has been mentioned already, Indian English evolved from the pukka British English over a period of two centuries. Along the way, local languages and dialects made their own additions to the argot.
Not quite. Punjab is a state in India. It is also the name of a land region shared by Pakistan and India.
India actually has 22 national languages, each spoken by a million or more people (going into the hundreds of millions). Hindi is the most famous of these, spoken by somewhere around 700 million people worldwide. For context, that’s more than one-tenth of this entire planet’s population.
If you count languages spoken by fewer than a million people, there’s more than a thousand of those. And yes, in many cases these are discrete languages, rather than dialects. India is more diverse than you, or even most Indians like me, can begin to fathom.
I’m sure we can be. In this case, though, we just happen to speak differently than you’re used to.
There are about 250,000 native speakers of English in India and about 90,000,000 people who speak it as a second language:
Think of Indian English as being a completely separate set of dialects. It is as distinct from British English, American English, Australian English, etc. as those sets of dialects are from each other. English has been spoken in India for hundreds of years now, and it has evolved on its own to be different from other dialects of English just as English has evolved on its own to be different in the U.K., the U.S., Australia, etc. When someone learns English in India, he isn’t mostly learning it from a Brit or an American, he’s learning it from other Indians mostly. It would be surprising if Indian English hadn’t evolved a lot of its own pronunciations, words, and grammatical forms.