I always assumed it was Hollywood, but I really had hard time understanding former coworkers English with indian accent, even people from some regions of my own country (Colombia) speak English but with the same accent they use for Spanish and makes it harder to understand, obviously is a non-problem for companies that do everything thought text messages on slack but some companies really love voice calls, I avoid those if possible.
I'm English and it's not just you. I have had particular trouble with English spoken with an Indian accent. I'm not entirely sure why but definitely part of it is the speed many Indians speak at, considerably faster than a native English speaker like me, and the very 'compressed' vowels from Urdu etc. which they naturally use when speaking English. It takes a bit of practice but you do get used to it.
Oddly, I did work with one Indian guy who had excellent, un-accented English. He spoke like he'd been brought up in London, but in fact he hadn't and English was the 2nd language.
In my experience it's the unaspirated plosives ("p", "t","k") at the beginnings of words; I watched a YouTube video recently where an Indian consistently pronounced "two" like "do." Maddening. That, and the lack of stressed syllables.
From what I recall, that’s how you say “two” in Sanskrit. And they reason they sound similar n the first place is that both English and Sanskrit descend from Proto Indo-European.
This might be a spelling accent. In Indian subcontinent languages you have to distinguish between t, th, d, and dh, so in roman script you expect the h to be there to represent aspiration. If you learn English from texts, from a teacher who learned it from texts, you become fluent without ever mastering the pronunciation. And I imagine it's a bit confusing if your ear is used to four distinctions instead of two.
In a similar vein, I listened to a Google video narrated by an employee whose presentation generally was excellent, but who pronounced "snippet" as though it were "snip pet". It was charming but distracting.
After a visit to the company office in India, one of my colleague told me that some of the Indians working there didn't understand each other in English... Maybe there's some exageration there, but that's just not you
