What pops into your mind when you see Arabic script? BBC World News? Urdu shayari? Old-school Punjabi poetry?
Midwest Airlines grounded a flight from Milwaukee to San Francisco after a passenger grew alarmed at seeing Arabic script handwritten inside a magazine (via Half the Sins). The plane returned to the gate, a thorough search turned up nothing, and passengers had to spend the night. The script turned out to be a meditative passage in Farsi written by a Persian Jack Handy.
Reminds me of a trusty Shazia Mirza joke which went something like this: ‘I told my audience I had a surprise for them. And everybody ducked.’
I heard that Mideast airlines grounded a flight last week when a passenger was found reading a book in English. They figured that since Americans don’t read, it must be a fake, and the guy must be a terrorist.
As opposed to what happens when a desi man takes of his shirt at the beach:
“Take cover! It’s …. furry!”