A tip about this photograph was posted on our News tab a few hours ago by “namantra” under the title Dehli ad on Metro. It was their description of the link which interested me:
The same country that often frowns down upon public displays of affection has billboards that openly use curse words.
I must say, I was slightly surprised to see one of my favorite blue words gettin’ dropped so blatantly, but I know nothing about advertising in the Motherland. Does this ad signal a coarsening of Indian culture? Or did it not raise the threaded eyebrows of those of you who are familiar with such things? And are we comparing jack fruit with ambarellas; does one have nothing to do with the other?
That’s bullshit.
Why such a victim complex, Anna? These are faceless names “insulting” you on cyberspace. I love the way you write, but geez; calm down. Do you honestly think most of us would take the time to comment if we didn’t love your posts or the fact that SM keeps us informed about such random stuff?
I guess you have right to express your displeasure at my call.
Btw, it is not one of the seven dirty words.
May I offer a comment as an IBD who has lived in the US for 34 years and has some ability to contrast Indian English vs. American?
In Bollywood movies, the curse word SHIT is used liberally in place of the less offensive DAMN or the benign DANG or DOGGONE IT. SHIT seems to be a favorite of Shah Rukh’s. But that does not mean that Bollywood is echoing a common Indian English word. I have never heard any of my friends and relatives in India use that word casually. I know some commenters insisted that SHIT and BULLSHIT are used more freely in India but probably only when young people are talking strictly among themselves. I would be surprised to hear a 20-year old Delhi IIT guy use the word around any 40-year old or women not his classmates or close friends. SHIT is a Bollywood elitism, which in this case happens to be a linguistic misunderstanding of how this word is actually used in the west. That surprises me even more, because in the last ten years, the educated Indians have become quite aware of Americanisms. In fact, they use DUDE more often than Americans. Now DUDE is definitely a common word specially among the urban, educated youth.
The billboard with NO BULLSHIT, in my opinion, and I am an ad guy in the US with more than a passing interest in Indian advertising, was meant to tout the benefits of the metro over taking other modes of public transportation, all of which might entail accidentally stepping into bullshit. Even in modern Delhi (or NCR), “gais and bhains” do roam the streets. I love jogging in India but with my eyes downcast. I don’t always missed them, though. Ahh, the “gobar of matribhumi.”
What is surprising is that the ad people did not edit themselves before putting this up because bullshit is not an inocuous word in India and will never be used in polite company. That brings me to a little peeve I have against Indian advertising in general. There is occasionally a cultural gap between the highly urbane and hip advertising people who create the stuff and the 1.2 billion “regular folks” that consume it. In fact, there are cultural gaps across the entire socioeconomic spectrum in India. But that’s not a criticism, folks. The gaps are getting blurred as the emerging middle class expands, specially in the top metros. Indian advertising is shaping up fast, partly in response to the changing demographics but largely due to the intense competition caused by a level of brand proliferation that will scare the bravest US marketing pro.
As the ‘go-to’ person for advertising in the Indian blogosphere, I’d say this ad’s probably an attempt at speaking straight and honest. More ads these days in this genre – have sex, sleaze, wtf, and what not. It’s another matter that they are all cookie-cutter clones of each other and probably suck big time in achieving the objective.
Floridian, I agree w/ your assessment of insular phirangised ad folk. There are some geniuses who know complete words to every song by Nirvana but falter at Jana Gana Mana. Their rival UberDesi camp is just as foul. Their common theme is “Will Mrs. Shinde and Sangli get it?†Not patronising at all. Dumbing down is their idea of authentic Desiness. They come up w/ gems like “You driving, it soching†(sochna = thinking). In between these two camps lie some smart, talented professionals. They are sadly a minority.
Ravages: “As the ‘go-to’ person for advertising in the Indian blogosphere, I’d say”
I might “go to” you one of these days for some chat about Indian advertising. When I am in India, I read ads voraciously, perhaps some created by you. The changes over the decades are dramatic. You guys still use Rosser Reeves’s USP a lot? Somehow this theory, practiced everyday in the US consciously or unconsciously, is never referred to it as such.
What are the national accounts based in Chennai?
Floridian, it seems the ad is for a newspaper, not the metro itself. But excellent comments.
I too have been surprised at the casual use of shit, hell, and damn among IBDs. I know a girl from Mumbai who uses the word ‘fuck’ and ‘bitch’ all the time, but she flipped out when I said ‘bhainchod’ one time. Just fascinating.
Hmmm, my Indian mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if I had used bullsh*t in front of her….but she did come here in the late sixties, so maybe she’s just not up with the latest Indian English lingo. Personally, I hate too much swearing, although I’ve been known to do it myself. It’s unimaginative.
To add some levity: I’m surprised this hasn’t become a list of Indian swear words, which I am sure we could all use a few more of, especially those of us who speak only one Indian language. I need some good Tamilian swear words! =) Go!:
Excellent comments, Floridian.
Amitabh, I think the idea is that you can buy the newspaper and then read it on the metro/buy the newspaper at a metro stall.
No, piss and crap are not bleep-worthy. “shit” has never, at least for long centuries, been merely a descriptive word in English. It has been an obscenity. If it is thought of in India as merely a descriptive word for poop, than that is in fact an anomalous usage.
Aaaaand, SHIT was an obscenity long before English-speakers had indoor plumbing and mass poop-hiding.
Anyhow, how exactly does omnipresence of shit (the substance) in one’s environment make one “down to earth” and not ABCD-ified?
I understood ANNA’s reaction perfectly, because it point-to-point matched my own, hence my original comment #19.
Am I one of the few people who saw the ad and thought it was quite unremarkable? Formerly a Delhiite for the better part of two decades, I can attest that using the words “shit” and “bullshit” in a casual conversation would hardly ever raise eyebrows.
I also suspect the educated (and admittedly more “westernized”) urban population is as amused by PDA episode as the readers on this blog. They’re certainly not the ones protesting in the streets and filing Public Interest Litigations(PIL) to overburden the courts with frivolous lawsuits. A PIL, for the unfamiliar, is a provision that allows ANYONE to file a lawsuit with minimal investment of time and money even if they’re not the aggrieved party. In this case a woman from Jaipur claimed that the entire Indian community was outraged by the kiss. I say Bullshit!
Good point, Floridian! Might get lost in all the, er, bullshit here. 🙂 So let me amplify it a little, since it is a pet peeve with me too. Ad copy, even for large multilingual campaigns in India, gets written in English by the urbane and hip people you speak of, and is then translated, often comically, sometimes idiotically, into the other languages. There is a mild example right there in the picture, in the grey billboard in the background. The Hindi slogan says “Har kisi ki zindagi se juDaa hua hai SAIL“, which carries nothing of the punch that the English version does: “There’s a little bit of SAIL in everybody’s life“, which, among other things, is also a pun on the acronym, SAIL being Steel Authority of India Limited.
The Hindi slogan says “Har kisi ki zindagi se juDaa hua hai SAIL”, which carries nothing of the punch that the English version does: The pun was probably not considered important to the message of the ad.
In Delhi, Hindi ads are conspicuous by their absence. I’d say less than 15% of ads seem to be in Hindi. The vast majority are in English. SAIL is a government company, hence the use of Hindi as well. Upscale private firms rarely use Hindi. They DO use Hindi (or more accurately Hinglish) catch-phrases written in Roman script quite a lot.
I agree, I’d be surprized if anyone even thought about it. Still, conveying a message properly involves the idiomatic use of language, even if the puns don’t survive. Nobody says things like “har kisi ki zindagi…” – that is, nobody, except the people who translated that, who also largely think in English and can’t tell truly idiomatic Hindi from a literal translation.
would it be more acceptable if indian equivalents of BS were used?
Question for the pukka Delhi-wallas – can someone ID the building in the background? Is that, could it even be – this hotel, which I remember as the Oberoi Intercontinental – seen from the back?
Since I’ve never been to India I can’t comment on the word and it’s use there
BUT…Bullshit, and variations on that theme were constantly used in the Guju household I lived in.
Ex.- “I don’t have any homework”
I have many, many other examples but my fondest memory is listening to Mista cussing out a driver in Gujarati, English AND Spanish after the family car, a 1978 station wagon, was hit by a drunk. Good times.
Chachaji,
I don’t think the building in the background is the Oberoi as the Metro doesn’t go to South Delhi yet. The buildings I think are the office complexes at Jhandewalan but I may be wrong.
If the foo shits…
Still hurts. Yes, I’m a weakling, stuff gets to me, I never denied it. Anyway, I felt like EVERY second-gen kid was being “insulted” and that’s unacceptable– can’t we get past this bullshit FOB vs ABCD divide?
I honestly thought I had. If this teaches me anything, it’s how perspective is such a crazy thing; a friend of mine read my post and comment this morning and called to remark that I seemed far more chill than usual. I’ll let them know they were wrong. 😉
Many of the people who take the time to comment do so because they can’t stand my posts or often, if we want to be really blunt or realistic about it– me. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s because my posts are loved (but Thank You!), I think it’s what you said, that SM keeps you informed and that’s what keeps y’all coming back for Sepia crack.
Hear, hear!
I have always wondered why ABCDs are so pre-occupied with India and everything Indian. Is there nothing else you can talk about?
When I first stumbled upon this blog, I was stunned by the depth of ignorance in the ABCD community. I had met some ignorant ABCDs in real life but I had no idea it was so prevalent among you that, indeed, it is the defining aspect of your (ABCD) community. Yes, you are defined by self-loathing and loathing of your parents and perhaps by your love of coloured contacts.
Your posts serve one and only one purpose – they show that you are completely ignorant about India or its culture. “I had no idea how powerful the sport truly is, until now.” You have no idea how ignorant your posts sound to an Indian. I guess you either promptly ban anyone who points out your ignorance/bigotry or gang up against him/her. The end result is a blog that is so bigoted that it is comparable to those neo-con blogs. The tragedy is that this blog is not a forum for exchange of ideas – you meet here only to re-enforce each other’s bigotry. Its one thing to have a personal blog thats used as a punching bag but an entirely different thing to have a communal blog spewing ignorance and hatred. In the latter case, the reader will form certain opinions about the entire community (and rightly so). At the end of the day, I simply feel sorry for you and your parents.
‘You have no idea how ignorant your posts sound to an Indian‘
You have no idea what a pompous horse’s ass you sound like here
“The tragedy is that this blog is not a forum for exchange of ideas – you meet here only to re-enforce each other’s bigotry”.
if that is the case then what are you doing here? if that is truly the case?
Saira posted a link to Yahoo’s article Bollywood’s Rai targeted in new Indian kissing row, whose last line offers a blanket explanation about apparent double standards. It says, “Public acts of endearment are banned in India under the British-era Obscenity Act.” So there’s your source of population control concerns and lack of control over poop jokes right there. Now I’d like Rajiv Malhotra to send us a PDF of the British-era Obscenity Act.
Funny. Most of what we post about is diasporic. Still, if we don’t post on issues in South Asian countries we’re called deracinated, and if we do, we’re called pre-occupied. Yawn.
Wow. You sound really cranky. I personally apologize on behalf of all ABDs that we are not as well read, educated and enlightened about the topics you find especially important.
Wow. Non-sequitur much? Is this a pre-packed ready-made rant, or did you prepare it specially for this occasion?
Damn. I missed the memo. I thought they were funny.
Ummm – there are plenty of Indians (and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans) who read this blog, both NRIs and readers in India. Sometimes they agree and sometimes they disagree. Sometimes they enlighten us and sometimes they learn something. But honestly, the ones as cranky as you generally stay away on their own.
Awwww, how sweet. A gesture of concern. Thank you for your caring.
Out of curiosity, I followed the link to the blog of the thing that posted comment #74. This is what I found.
i just always assumed indian newspapers were shitty.. so this just ‘fit’.. i mean the ‘toi’ is such a crappy paper, i’m surprised people will pay to read it..i’m sure this newspaper is full of nothing as well.
and as for bullshit.. it should read bushit.. and feature the guy i love to hate.
and as for this from ‘dining’:
i really feel sorry for YOU and concur with coach diesel.
end to the haterade.
Ah, I get it. Another lonely person who wants attention and trolls to get it. Right, everybody, there’s nothing to see here. Let’s just silent treatment this troll for now please … the more we respond, the more we feed it.
Divya hit the nail in the head regarding cuss words not carrying the same weight in English. Most of us used “shit” quite liberally (the word not the real stuff 🙂 ). But I think if someone ever tried saying “tatti”..it would have brought a lot of ewwws specially if there was fairer sex present :).
And I am annoyed like hell with this handful of idiots who burn effigies and even got an asshole judge to write an arrest warrant. But its very unfair to generalize the whole country over this. I know a lot of guys would have been jealous (Shilpa is one hot tamale!) rather then offended. We need an NGO who can get our fundi brothers laid and things will be much more peaceful :).
Also its intresting to see how the timing of the controversy( mainly fueled by MSM) comfortably concides with Mr Gere’s movie coming out ..hmm not publicity is bad publicity.
I know you said no more feeding the troll but as an IBD, I have to say this this is of the best desi blogs around. Yes, the perspective is more ABD than IBD but that is what I would expect from a blog run by ABD’s. Keep up the awesome work ! If the Dining fella has a problem with this, he should know that there are other excellent blogs such as indiauncut that looks at life purely from an Indian perspective.
Dining — I’m Indian, living here, as you seem to be too. However,
I don’t think they are. They are in this blog, because that’s specifically what it’s for.
I have met some ignorant, obnoxious ABCDs IRL, but people here tend to be fairly open-minded and well-informed. If they don’t understand the motherland perfectly, they can’t be to blame, not having lived there. Do you understand or know everything about India and its culture? Especially given how variegated it is, socially, economically, geographically, and communally? Do you think the same way as your parents?
As silly as most of the discussion on this post has become, I think ideas are being freely exchanged here. From what I’ve seen, there’s no bigotry elsewhere either. If the general echoes are from ABDs, it’s only because they probably make up a majority of the readership.
I glanced through your blog, and I don’t think this place is the only one contributing to your prejudices. Besides being strongly anti-ABD, you seem to be anti-White, anti-Jewish and anti-American. If, as I’m guessing, you’re living in the US — aren’t you being hypocritical yourself? Yes, there are some ignorant ABDs, but has the group as a whole caused you any personal harm? There are racist and bigoted whites, but (if you are living in America), the group as a whole has clearly welcomed you here. Israel’s policies are generally not praiseworthy, but: you seem to be a student or researcher in academia — do you realise that most of your colleagues are probably Jewish, and have accepted you into the research community?
This — “I spit on Americans. I spit on the white man. I spit on the West and its lick spittles. I spit on Zionists. I spit on all the scientists. I spit on all the western philosophers. I spit on God. I spit on Human Race. I spit on myself.” You, or your rants at least, are clearly unbalanced.
58 · Amitabh on April 29, 2007 12:27 PM · Direct link Floridian, it seems the ad is for a newspaper, not the metro itself. But excellent comments.”
I am embarrassed by my mistake, but as an ad guy, I will say this. The advertiser in this case deserves to be misunderstood. When advertising becomes gratuitous in words or visuals, the communication is compromised. As we like to tell a new recruit – sure, people will remember the big breasts, but they will forget what product they were for. (Unless, of course, you are creating ads for breast enhancement procedures.)
No, it is definitely not Oberoi.
Dining “At the end of the day, I simply feel sorry for you and your parents.” How could a generation we raised be anything but top-notch? You don’t have to feel sorry for us, kid.
Sorry, should have read the thing about not feeding the trolls, but this guy’s personal blog was… uh, riveting.
A friend of mine sent me this message today;
Got to admit, she does have a point.
(She’s a Latina married to a Bengali)
i just always assumed indian newspapers were shitty
The lady doth presumes too much, methinks.
TOI (specially the web version) is as much a barometer of quality of Indian Media as National Enquirer is of American media.
Although tragically, ever since all these 24 hour news channels arrived, the quality of reporting has gone down really fast. And the same can be said about the american media too.
it’s definitely not the Oberoi (the building in the background). I think this is the Metro passing between the Pragati Maidan and Mandi House stops, so the building in the back is probably one of the ugly government buildings near ITO. Near Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, so could be one of the newspaper offices or other office buildings in that area. But the Oberoi, it ain’t.
I have to confess I was amused, and a tad bemused, by this post. I think Anna, in all her innocence, missed the point completely. Somehow it is comparing apples to oranges to compare the ShivSainik reaction to l’affaire ShettyGere to the casual use of mild swear-word-type things in Indian advertising. I don’t necessarily want to generalize from this to SM writers in general, or ABCD’s, but it does appear that in this instance, Anna ‘didn’t get it’. At all.
Which, I think, isn’t a problem: why should she be expected to? I do think, though, that vapid theorising about a society you have some connection with but don’t know intimately is annoying to read for those of us who think we are a little more clued in (which isn’t about being better or worse: it is, after all, at least in part an accident of birth). But if one operates on the rough principle that it is unwise to try to comment on that which one does not quite understand, then it might be wise for Mutineers to be a little more circumspect in passing judgement on various aspects of life in India which they, understandably, don’t quite get. Which is not to say that my point is quite relevant to this post, since Anna made her position quite clear at the outset. However, whether you like it or not, there is a certain (I’m sure unintended, and perhaps completely unconscious) prescriptiveness that I occasionally discern in SM’s writing about things in India/South Asia, which occasionally borders on the patronising, and does bother me, as someone who lived for 21 years in India and the remainder in some part or other in the “West’. This is also particularly pronounced when you guys write about FOBs, a term that I personally abhor, and I’m not sure has been actively ‘reclaimed’. Be that as it may, it often appears that Indians born or raised in the US do have a sort of … sense of superiority to their Desi-raised/born counterparts, which isn’t to say that the opposite is never true (I’ve met several specimens of the ‘Indians-in-the-US-are-immoral-Westernized-scum’ variety of Indians), or that there is never any basis for emphasizing a particular aspect of your perceived identity. Simply to say that everytime someone suggests something along these lines, there is no need to get all wounded and on your high horses about it. The person earlier may have been a bit of a loony, but not everything s/he said about you and the site is .. bullshit. 🙂
Princeton professor on bullshit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
Once I was at an temple in South Indian with some erotic carvings throw into the mix. My aunt pointed it out to me and my white American friend and said,”Look. Fucking.”
89 · someol’guy
I do appreciate your non-judgmental comment on the ABD/IBD subject. But think about SM for a second. Here are ABD’s who have voluntarily made desi/brown/South Asia their passion? Doesn’t that say something about them?
If anybody ends up attributing their desi mission to their need to find themselves or validate their existence… please stop. The ABD’s do not feel marginal in the American society, period! Yes, everybody has a few anecdotes to prove otherwise, but I meant that by and large, ABD’s don’t HAVE TO do this. I, for one, am amazed that the next generation cares enough about some place where their parents came from, and in many cases knows more about it than their parents ever did, to even start a blog such as this.
Anna isn’t the one who submitted the tip to the news tab; she’s just the one who asked the rest of us what our opinions are about the ad since she readily admits she doesn’t know. Instead of conducting a dialogue where we share what we do know, let’s label and discourage those who sincerely ask their betters as being vapid, because that wouldn’t make us pretentious at all, would it? I can’t believe you accused the writers here of conveying an unentitled sense of their own “superiority”.
Here’s my pet peeve- If they don’t write about India, then these these bloggers are self-loathing snobs. If they do write about India, they’re hopelessly confused naifs who don’t understand anything and therefore shouldn’t comment. What do you people want? And do you realize that you set everyone here up for failure with your extraordinarily unreasonable expectations? An allergy to logic indeed…
btw i thought the logic of the ad was pretty simple. allergic is probably not the right word, even as metaphore, but it just seems to be saying “if you don’t like bs, read this paper”
You are right, I think that’s exactly what they seem to be saying, but I think that it wasn’t about the ad not making sense, it was the juxtaposition of boundaries, i.e. it’s okay to use a “curse word” but kisses are punishable. Apples and oranges, but that’s what the post was about, not whether or not the ad itself seemed logical.
wut % of ppl in brownland are literate in anglais?
SM is lovers, y’all. We come here to share knowledge and experience. Criticism is an important part of that exchange, but only if delivered constructively and in good faith.
someol’guy: You were very polite but the substance of your post affirms the tenor of 74. You even admit that your comments might not be relevant to this post because its author so carefully qualified her inquiry. There are no truths on this board, its all about reshaping ideas and if we got it wrong please do offer your perspective. But heavy-handed sweeping critiques, especially when they don’t really apply to the facts at issue, are not helpful.
UPS: I think the metaphor was that antihistamine:allergies as metronews:bullshit. Thus metronews is bullshit medicine. Newspapers and medicine both being things consumed daily.
Pondatti (#93):
Here’s what I wrote:
I don’t necessarily want to generalize from this to SM writers in general, or ABCD’s, but it does appear that in this instance, Anna ‘didn’t get it’. At all.
Which, I think, isn’t a problem: why should she be expected to?
Did you miss that sentence, which drove you to remind me that “Anna isn’t the one who submitted the tip to the news tab; she’s just the one who asked the rest of us what our opinions are about the ad since she readily admits she doesn’t know’ ? I know that, and I said as much immediately after the sentence you chose to repeat out of context.
My point is not that Anna is somehow making some egregious error, or that SM-ers or ABDs in general do not have a right to engage with India or South Asia (anyone who is interested in anything has the right to engage with it, with or without the ‘benefit’ of an ancestral connection. In fact, I was, as I made clear, expressly not talking about this post (scroll up if you doubt this), but making a couple of points about the attitude of (some) ABDs, and a subset of posts on SM, to Indians/IBDs (ah, that’s a nicer term – thanks Floridian) that are at best tangentially related to the post itself but which I was driven to make courtesy of some of the comments and what in my opinion is over-defensiveness on the part of SM-ers to any suggestions of this ilk.
“…discourage those who sincerely ask their betters as being vapid”
Err .. ‘their betters’? I didn’t say that, you did. Just sayin’….. My whole point was that this shouldn’t be about better and worse, but you seem to have missed that somehow. Or maybe you do think in those terms…
Classic.
Suggestion box: grammar-check for comments. thanks.