Category Archives: india

Some humour to help alleviate the Monday blues…

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I am not one for email forwards and my father knows that. So he only forwards quality stuff to me! Here is a collection of hilarious examples of wrong English that he sent me.

In Infosys, Bangalore an employee applied for leave as follows:

"Since I have to go to my village to sell my land along with my wife, please sanction me one-week leave."

This is from Oracle Bangalore. An employee who was performing the "mundan" ceremony of his 10 year old son:
"As I want to shave my son’s head, please  leave me for two days…"

Another gem, this time from  CDAC. A letter requesting for leave from an employee who was getting his daughter wed:
"As I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week’s leave…"

From HAL’s administration dept.:
"As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one responsible for it, please grant me 10 days  leave."

Another employee applied for a half-day’s leave as follows:
"Since I’ve to go to the cremation ground at 10 o’ clock and I may not return, please grant me half day casual leave."

Another example of a letter requesting for leave:
"I am suffering from fever, please declare one-day holiday."

A letter applying for leave to a school headmaster:
"As I am studying in this school I am suffering from headache. I request  you to leave me today."

Another one written to a headmaster:
"As my headache is paining, please grant me  leave  for the day."

This referenced a covering note, which said:
"I am enclosed  herewith…"

Another covering note:
"Dear Sir, with reference to the above, please refer to my below…"

A letter written for application for leave:
"My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am her only husband at home I may be granted leave.”

This one I admit sounds made up!
"I  am well here and hope you are also in the same well."

A candidate’s job application: 
"This has reference to your advertisement calling  for  a ‘Typist and an Accountant – Male or Female’ … As I am both for the past several years and I can handle both with  good experience, I  am applying for the  post.”

That’s all folks!

PS: If the blues still won’t go away there’s always Engrish.com – more hilarious examples of wrong English!

Buying from Amazon in a non-Amazon country

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This post was triggered by a couple of things. First, I was reading a nice guide the other day about buying stuff on Amazon and then getting them shipped to Singapore. Second, after I started serving Amazon ads, a friend asked whether it isn’t a bit pointless since most of the people who would pay a visit to The Waste Land would be from a non-Amazon country. Of course I would like to counter that by saying The Waste Land has a global audience! But who am I fooling?! So I suppose it is better instead to espouse the benefits of buying from Amazon even in a non-Amazon country!

Jokes apart, I am a serious Amazon fan and I have been buying CDs/DVDs/books from them for at least the last couple of years. And I truly believe there are definite advantages some times. Let me plagiarize from the guide I spoke of above, adding my own insights, to explain to you what they are!

First and foremost for me is their sheer variety! I have often bought titles that I would never find anywhere else or at the very least would find it pretty darn tough to source them. E.g., tapes of T.S. Eliot reciting his own poems, Da Ali G Show – Da Compleet Seereez , Jaco Pastorius Live DVD, a Jack Bruce solo album, Letters Of A Javanese Princess – Kartini’s letters, The Trio of Doom Live (McLaughlin and Pastorius playing together!), Lost interview tapes of Jim Morrison, complete poetry and prose of Chairil Anwar – the list is eclectic and endless!

Second is their customer service. Once I had ordered a few audio CDs and after waiting for double the average shipping time, when my shipment still did not arrive, I wrote to them. They immediately sent me the whole set again, no questions asked! (I ended up receiving two sets though!) They also have excellent return and refund policies in case you are not satisfied with your purchase.

Finally, believe it or not, it actually works out cheaper sometimes to buy on Amazon, even after taking into account the shipping charges. If you are buying a few titles together, you can get even lower shipping costs per item. The logic is simple, you walk into the CD/DVD/book store in your city – half the Western titles there are imported anyways plus the store puts in their operating costs and hefty margins. So do the math!

And of course you can do it all from the comfort of your home or office! So check out my Amazon recommendations or the Amazon ads and start buying through clicks on this page! Come on people, the charity “Keeping Suman drunk” needs your support!

Gay Justice

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Gay sex decriminalised in India

A court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ruled that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act.

In an earlier post on an Indonesian rock musician’s theory on homosexuality, I had written how strange it is to hold on to such prejudices in this day and age when Science has already shown that there are possibly ‘biological explanations for sexual orientation across species — including humans’. This bold judgement coming from my ultra-conservative country is sure to do some justice to this much maligned group of our fellow human beings.

[UPDATE: Loved what Gautam Bhan says in Indian Express:

"This judgment should be seen by all of us, gay or straight, no matter what we think of sexuality and homosexuality, as a victory for a secular, democratic, constitutional and free India. We should all be proud."

]

The rumblings of protest from religious bodies have begun – my only prayer is that they do not grow loud enough to drown out the voice of rationality.

On a similar note, watch the movie Milk if you haven’t. It is the story of Harvey Milk, an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Sean Penn in the title role does a beautiful job in portraying such a sensitive character and rightfully earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

R.I.P., King of Sarod

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Ali_Akbar_Khan 

How could I have missed this one?! Must have been the myriad goings-on in my life… Thanks to Prasun for bringing this to my notice.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin once called “the greatest musician in the world”, passed away on June 18, at the age of 87. But even that might be too early for an artist, according to him:

"If you practice for 10 years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist– then you may please even God."

Who knows where he might have reached, if he had lived longer?

The New York Times reporting…

Indonesia votes

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My adopted country, Indonesia, is in the middle of elections. The first round where they elect their parliament, is over. Based on those results, the coalitions with at least 20% of the vote can nominate candidates for President and Vice-president. (The coalitions are mostly formed after the elections for the parliament.) Then comes the second round which is next month, when people directly vote for the President and Vice-president. 

The contenders this time round are:
1. An ex-President and daughter of the first President of independent Indonesia, with an ex-chief of the controversial special forces unit Kopassus (during the autocratic regime of Suharto) who is accused of involvement in various “riots, plunderings, rapes and murders”. And did I mention, he is a son-in-law of Suharto! 
2. The current Vice-president and a wealthy businessman, with an ex-Army general who is accused by the United Nations of having a role in human rights violations by the Indonesian Army in East Timor.
3. The current President, also an ex-general under Suharto, but known to have a reformist mindset, with an economist, who was listed as “one of the Wharton School’s 125 Influential People and Ideas in 2007″ and who is the current Governor of the central bank, Bank Indonesia.
It should be clear from above where my sympathies lie! But a poignant fact is that three of the six contenders are ex-military people. A dominant role of the military in democracies is unhealthy to say the least, take for example Thailand or Pakistan or Bangladesh. I contrast this with the Indian armed forces and I, on behalf of my billion-strong countrymen are extremely grateful that they have always played a subservient role to the greater cause of democracy but have been in the forefront when it comes to protecting it. That gave democracy the space to grow in India, that it needs so desperately. Indonesia is still a fledgling democracy, less than a couple of decades old. And I have high hopes for its success. Because, as I see it, Indonesia has only two choices – nurture democracy or perish. For such a huge and diverse country, a totalitarian government might be able to keep the country together by force for a few decades at most. 
But even in the democratic system that Indonesia possesses currently there is a huge flaw, a hangover from the autocratic regimes of the past – it is too centralized. There is a huge need for decentralization of power in order to give voice to the myriad ethnicities, religions and races that make up this colourful nation. This has begun to happen in the recent past but has mostly manifested itself through local governments enacting Syariah laws to restrict freedom rather than legislation which affect real issues and day-to-day problems that people face. Only when that starts to happen will Indonesia have a true, mature democracy that will be the pride of South East Asia.
To lighten things up here’s a few funny election posters from Indonesia that I came across in Indonesia Matters, a sincere blog that attempts to analyse Indonesian current affairs.
gandalf.jpg
Gandalf
obama-osama.jpg
The bridge between Obama and Osama
piggy-back.jpg
The leader(pemimpin) who carries the public(rakyat) on his back

smart-guy.jpg
The star performer

Check your organs before you leave!

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A typical appendicitis operation at a nursing home in Cuttack, Orissa, India.
  • Check in to the hospital for the operation with one brain, one heart, two lungs, one stomach, two kidneys, one appendix etc. 
  • Successful operation a couple of days later.
  • Convalescence period of one and a half weeks.
  • Check out with one brain, one heart, two lungs, one stomach, one kidney, no appendix etc.
Wait! How many kidneys did you say?!
If I ever go for an operation I am going to insist on an inventory list of organs before and after!

Google does an India thing!

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Posted on the Google Blog. 

Mowing with goats 
At our Mountain View headquarters, we have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard. This spring we decided to take a low-carbon approach: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us (we’re not “kidding”). A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.

Big deal! In India we have been doing this for ages!
Goats_Kolkata.jpg

BPO is passe… Here comes RPO!

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Too busy to pray? Let modern technology do it for you! Information Age Prayer at your service!

“Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.”

Their FAQs section has some priceless gems!

“Are the prayers meaningless, will subscribing really make a difference?

As with all prayer, the final results are up to God as everything follows His will. We make no claims regarding the efficacy of the service, however it is our opinion that the omniscient God hears the prayers when they are voiced, as He hears everything on this Earth. The omniscient God knows exactly who has subscribed and who each prayer is from when their name is displayed on screen and their prayer voiced. He is also aware of all donations to charity from each subscriber and we can surely make a difference in these charities supported.”

If you think this must be a humour site, one of my favourite blogs, Pharyngula by PZ Myers, who is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, points out,

“…the buttons to bill your credit card actually work, and go through paypal.”

Reminds me of something closer to home. This website is hopping on to the Indian BPO industry bandwagon in a completely novel and laughable way! They perform yagnas for you for a fee! They used to go under another name, “puja.by-choice.com” and were covered by the BBC then. Now they call themselves ”vedic.by-choice.com”.

yagna.jpg
Their target clients seem to be the completely irrational and gullible, as is evident by this brilliant line on their website:

“What makes Yagnas so easily accessible to you, is that you do not even need to understand them or to attend in person to benefit from them.”

In other words, trust us blindly! You give us some money and we do some hocus pocus, which you have no clue about and which you do not need to personally attend (and thus save us the trouble of actually doing it?) and your life will change for the better or your such-and-such problems will be solved! And do we guarantee results? Are you kidding me?! 

“So although most people will feel Yagnas, some people may not perceive anything, or may not acknowledge the transformation, or may not attribute their life changes to Yagnas. So this being quite a subjective service, we can never promise any results.”

Go figure!

Our options…

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I read this guy’s blog often enough. Thankfully he is not that prolific! But he has numerous articles that as a Bengali and a Calcuttan I can identify with. And he is a self-confessed Bollywood buff and has knowledge of Bollywood trivia like no one else I know of! So his Bollywood articles make for interesting reading too. So it was a bit of a surprise to see an article on the Indian election on his blog. He talks about our options this elections, or the lack thereof. And he is serious and cynical and funny, all at the same time. It is a good read. I love the way he ends the post:

“Is it Congress who is giving 35 kilos of rice at Rs 2 to BPL families? Or is it BJP who is giving 25 kilos at Rs 3?

Should I vote for Mayawati because she is Mulayam with a handbag?

Or, should I vote for Mamata because she is Jyoti Basu in a saree?”

The ‘Moral’ Police

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(Warning: If you possess religious sensibilities and they are easily offended, I advise you to refrain from reading further. And especially if you think the following quote from Voltaire is a bunch of bullshit: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”)

There are very few things I strongly hate in this world and one of them has got to be the moral police. Two stories in today’s news caught my eye and both are related to this issue – one a severe, disturbing example, the other a far more light-hearted, even ridiculous but nonetheless disturbing – one in Pakistan, the other in India.

In Pakistan, in the Swat valley, which the government virtually gave up control of in favour of Taliban militants, a 17 year old girl was publicly flogged for having an affair. (Read it here and watch it here.)
Apart from the fact that 

“they did this brutality just on suspicion. There was no trial. No evidence, no witness was produced.”

lies a very fundamental question, what is exactly an affair with reference to a 17 year old girl? Is she married? If she is, in my humble opinion that is a far greater crime than the one she has purportedly committed, assuming that a 17 year old married girl was probably married off against her informed will or decision. If she did make an informed choice and decided to commit adultery, then as an individual she has every right to. I am truly unaware of her circumstances, of her relationship with her husband and hence cannot make an unbiased judgement. 

The real rationale of punishing an adulterous woman, it seems to me is the ingrained jealousy of a man when a better man comes along and steals his woman. The problem with this approach is the implication that a woman, once married is the property of her husband. But we are not talking about non-living assets here, or even a living asset such as a cow or a dog, we are talking about a thinking human being, who is capable of judgement, no matter how flawed.
This is one of my problems with religion. Most religions relegate a married woman to the status of an asset. Just yesterday I saw this web comic, which talks about the status of women according to the Bible, and this is the New Testament, not even the controversial Old Testament. The comic is reproduced below.
 ByTheBook61.PNG
To come back to the 17 year old girl in question, if she is unmarried then an affair would probably just mean a harmless teenage romance. And to view that as a crime worthy of a public flogging is beyond my normally vast comprehension. When we were growing up, the most conservative of parents would at the most admonish their daughters in the privacy of their homes for such a crime, impressing upon them to concentrate on their studies. But I forgot, in Swat valley, after the Taliban took over, girls are not allowed to go to schools!
I find it frankly ridiculous that the Pakistan government so steadfastly hangs on to its claims of control over extra territories (read K-a-s-h-m-i-r) when it can’t even control the territories it already possesses! Don’t get me wrong – I am all for a Kashmiri plebiscite. But that is the subject of a separate post.
To diffuse the tension of the last few paragraphs, let me move on to the next story. Akshay Kumar, the Bollywood star, who I am not a big fan of, asked his wife, Twinkle Khanna to unbutton the top button of his jeans, which belongs to the Levi’s ‘Unbuttoned’ range of which he is a brand ambassador, in a fashion show in India. This offended a certain social worker, Mr. Anil P Nayar, who promptly filed a case against him with the police in Mumbai/Bombay. 
As if there is not enough social work to be done in India, not enough backlog of court cases, not enough unsolved crimes, terrorism and what-have-you, Mr. Nayar has all the time in the world to waste his own time and the courts’ time and the police’s time for this. I strongly believe that such people need to be flogged in public and not a 17 year old girl accused of having an affair!