One thing that always interested me was how Hindi speakers pick up English so easily and speak with idioms smoothly Whereas, my Asian wife and her cousins have a really hard time putting sentences together. The Hindi/English languages must be constructed similarly or we just think in the same patterns.
I've worked with a lot of Indians over the years. It's not just a language thing. We do think in the same patterns. The engineering solutions to problems are indistinguishable. Solutions that Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippine or Japanese engineers come up with, although perfectly valid, just 'feel' different. Don't know why.
What I find even more interesting is how close the senses of humor are in both cultures.
One of the more striking and convincing evidences of the affinity of Indo-european languages that I've ever seen is the paradigms for the personal pronoun in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit.
That not withstanding, educated Indians learn English from an early age and English has been the linga franca of the subcontinent for the last two centuries.