2657 Productions News » Humor

I’m not at all religious, but…

Ananda — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 12:43:03 +0000

… here is a goddess that I am happy to worship…

Don't make me squirt my milk bottle at you!

I also had a few alternatives–and I’m still not sure which one is my favorite.

On the trucks around town…

Ananda — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 04:40:22 +0000

Anyone who has spent some time in India is sure to have noticed the slogans painted on the back of trucks, autos, and other vehicles advising “we two, ours one”. This is part of India’s “family planning” efforts–efforts which have had a pretty bumpy history that included a forced sterilization program.

Originally, the slogans were “we two, ours two”, or at least that was the catchy English version–regional languages usually had a slogan more along the lines of “one family, two children”. And, the change to the new slogan led to at least one humorous math discussion with an auto driver who commented that, “Earlier, it was ‘we two, ours two’; now, it is ‘we two, ours one’. What’s next? ‘We two, ours half?’”

Anyway, keen observers might have noticed the following new addition to selected trucks:

Sometimes, I wish I could turn my editing eyes off

Ananda — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 19:24:33 +0000

… but if I did, then I would probably miss out on some of the fun that Indian English has to offer.

Like this advertisement from a big electronics store:

Read the fine print...

So, I showed this ad to all of my Indian colleagues and my students, and none of them were able to see any problems. Even after I asked them what the definition of free is.

“It must be a very good deal,” everyone kept telling me, justifying the fine print. Apparently, in India, free means “a 30% discount”; in the same ad that was announcing “Pay Rs. 2000 extra and get a DVD Writer FREE”, Croma was advertising DVD writers for Rs. 2900.

But that’s not the only great “FREE” that I’ve seen. Earlier this week, I went to Nagapattinam with the PDM 9 students to see what community radio is all about. At the end of the trip, we stopped at Velakanni to see the town’s big church and check out the ocean.

Here’s the first sight that we were greeted with:

Such a beautiful beach...

The sign boldly proclaims that the town is a “plastic free zone”. Looking around, I couldn’t help but think that this is certainly another strange interpretation of “free”. The best part, though, comes when you read what’s written on the rest of the sign. Check it out:

Infertility and choked drains... all because of plastic

The ODF Campaign

Ananda — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:33:25 +0000

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about poop in my “community”. Amy had given me a book to read called “The Big Necessity” and I found it really interesting and applicable to what the students at the Tata-Dhan Academy have been studying. I, in turn, lent the book to one of my colleagues, who also seemed to love it. We (faculty and students) have even had mock “role plays” (during lunch, of all times) where we pretended to be villagers who like to poop in the field and students who are trying to convince them to change their behavior. We brainstorm on trying to find different ways to communicate the message of creating an “open defecation free” India.

I was feeling a little bored, so I decided to use the zimmertwins site to give an example of the kinds of charming lunchtime discussions we occasionally have.

The text moves by a bit too quickly, and I couldn’t get better sound. Maybe I’ll get around to uploading a different version with some rockin’ DWAB background music.

Google Page Creator is gone….

Ananda — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:29:31 +0000

And, they didn’t do such a great job of transferring the Google Page Creator content to Google Sites. So, I’ve decided to delete the content from Google Page Creator and transfer it here instead. This site has so much random content already; four more random articles shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

Read on to find: