On Mac OS X, Hindi text (and some other languages, too) seems to reserve a lot of space under the line. Is this intentional? It looks unnecessary to me and results in vertically stretched buttons. See screenshot.

This is the language dropdown in GMail's preferences. If I remove all <option>s of languages with a large line height, the dropdown's size shrinks back to normal.

This is how Safari renders the buttons on http://www.google.co.in/intl/hi/

Isn't this a dupe of bug 402239 ?

Yes, it is. It's not easy to figure out the ideal behavior here. Agreed, the examples look pretty bad. But that space is there because it's possible for the Hindi font to include characters that go quite a lot deeper below the baseline than in that particular sample; try a button that displays the text "वट्टू". In Firefox, that works pretty well - the text fills the vertical height of the button nicely - whereas in Safari the vowel is cut off. However, this is relatively uncommon, and for the majority of text our controls do look bad. :(