. . . you use the expression “by the way” in conversation with an Indian woman and she says “Oh, so you DO speak Hindi!” at which point you say “No, I don’t,” to which she replies “But you said ‘by-the-way!’” and you explain that “‘by the way’ is an English expression, with three words, ‘by’ + ‘the’ + way’” and she says “No, that’s Hindi!” at which point the head of the HR department explains that actually “by the way” is an English expression.
(Now wouldn’t it be funny if “by the way” were actually an artifact of British colonialism, borrowed from Hindi and adopted by English speakers around the world, and I didn’t know it?)
The moral of this story, as the head of the HR department explained it to me, is that nobody in India speaks pure Hindi (at least as far as he knows). People speak a mix of Hindi and English called “Hinglish.” So if you listen carefully to what people are saying, you can use the English words and context to get a very rough idea of what they’re talking about. You won’t understand the whole conversation by any means, but you’ll understand the basic parameters.
When people speak English, on the other hand, they speak more or less pure English.