If it is Monday, then it is time to segue back in to Sepia timepassing gently. After all, you’ve had quite the weekend, I’m sure. Exercise your commenting skillz by playing the caption game! Don’t you know that working out without a proper warm-up isn’t wise? 😉
Many thanks to Paul, who guaranteed we’d be able to play today by sending in this tip (“a great candidate for a caption contest”); if any of you spot similarly interesting, “Brown” photographs, pass them along! This picture accompanied an article, some of which is available after the jump.
So, just what is going on here? I’m sure that a few of you already know (and may have witnessed the spectacle yourselves!), but if you don’t recognize the hotstepping, here’s the relatively-somber caption the L.A. Times gave this image:
A Pakistani guard, left, and an Indian counterpart march during a nightly border-closing ceremony. It’s an elaborate, almost comical, show of martial bravado and chest-puffing that has gone on for nearly 60 years. [LAT]
Not sure how to play? Peep these previous editions of captioning fun: Ondhu, Eradu, Mooru, Naal’ku, Aydhu, Aaru, EyLu…
WAGAH CROSSING, INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER — If nations rose and fell according to their camp quotient and funny hats, then these rivals would still be locked in a total stalemate.
Who doesn’t love CAMP!
Most every evening for nearly 60 years, a peculiar ritual has unfolded here on what has been one of the world’s hottest borders. As twilight approaches and the gates are about to close between India and Pakistan, the guards on either side face off in an elaborate show of martial bravado and chest-puffing that nonetheless includes that most basic of fraternal gestures: the handshake.
Hundreds of spectators from both countries cheer as their men in uniform strut, goose-step and stamp their feet like impatient bulls. Individual guards on either side break ranks and power-walk toward one another as if to collide head-on, but stop just short of the line dividing their homelands and glower fiercely through their mustaches.
I’m rather anti-facial hair, which makes me a bad Malayalee, but I must say, the final five words of that quote almost make me appreciate a good meesha. 😉
Patriotic songs boom through loudspeakers as the national flags are lowered at exactly the same speed and the gates finally swing shut.
Would that the craptastic filmi dances one has to sit through at every single “community” event were as well-coordinated. If you want to imitate Bollywood, do it properly and don’t be THAT girl who’s constantly two beats behind. Especially during the turns or the dramatic sinking to the floor. It looks awful. Take a lesson from the glowering moustaches, ladkis.
The tightly choreographed ceremony is part colonial pomp, part macho posturing and part Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The rowdy tourist crowds eat it up.
If you ask me, there isn’t enough Monty Python in the world. Jai Hind! Er…and…Pakistan.
“Everything was just perfect,” Rajat Kalia, an electrical engineer who lives in Delhi, said after a recent viewing. “It’s impressive.”
It is also, of course, a manifestation of a very real rivalry that has produced three bloody wars since the twin birth of India and Pakistan in 1947.
For half an hour each evening at sunset, the decades of enmity are sublimated in a mostly good-natured, almost comical competition between the men in black, wearing headgear with fantails of the same color (Pakistan); and the men in khaki, whose hats are adorned with scarlet fantails (India).
They set up bleachers for this. They even have MCs to get the crowd hyped. No word on whether anyone does the wave or if either side is subjected to that stupid “right side/left side/who is louder?” game.
…Kalia, the engineer, found the event a good-humored, patriotic bit of fun, a friendly contest between two rival nations over pomp and circumstance. It wasn’t a competition in which national pride and prestige were really on the line.
“If it’s cricket,” he said, “then it’s a completely different feeling.” [LAT]
::
Silly title courtesy of this annoying joint. Like you didn’t know.
that made me happy. i miss home.
“Mine is bigger than yours”.
“SWORDFIGHT! SWORDFIGHT!”
Battle of the Scythian males!
its not the SIZE of your boot. its how you USE it..
“And then Chuck Norris kicked the bad guy like THIS!”
“And that, doctor, is how I got a hernia.”
Apparently both countries do try to choose the tallest, most physically impressive guards for this ceremony.
pakistani dude: “vat, no, i’m NOT indian! ve are a completely different race! that study last year that said that 60% of indian men are too small by international standards only applies to indians, not pakistanis!”
“lets try out a roundhouse kick and while you’re at it, check that fan on my head”
werd, the words for 4,5,&6 are exactly the same in telugu. 1-okkati, 2-rondu, 3-moodu, 4 is more like naalugu but sounds similar enough, 6-edu i love it! the fact that i can usually pick out what people mean when they are writing malayali or tamil words, based on similar words + context–well, that’s cool. especially when i hear other southie languages spoken out loud and i can semi-understand them.
oops, that should be 7 = edu
THAT SUCKS!!! What a typically Indian thing to do.
I thought so, too. It seems like innocent enough fun.
indian guard: “i should totally have gone into pro gymnastics instead of the military. at least then i can bring some glory to my people at the olympics. and get laid.”
Crossing swords is an occupational hazard. (Language NSFW)
the germans only THINK they can goosestep.
Mine is bigger than yours.
Brooke, in LB: “You had the best high kick I’ve ever seen!”
“Faster, higher, stronger”.
should have joined your army instead – do you see these nasty white stirrups they make me wear?
They have a similar dynamic on the Korean DMZ as well. Only the tallest North and South Koreans get to stand on guard at their respective borders. They stand there facing each other, chest puffed up, stomach tucked in while they stare down each other.
What about the Indian-Bangladeshi border? Do they get Bengalis to face down each other or do they have to import Non-Bengali Scythian males to do the staring?
“What’s your wife do these days?
“Cook, clean, the us-, yours?”
“Shoot guns“
Navdeep and Siddique demonstrate the cavalier disregard, shared in the spirit of cross-border harmony by both Indians and Pakistanis, of the possibility of developing a hydrocele.
“Remove your foot from my airspace, cowardly dog!”
And that was how the cross-border kicking incident started.
wasn’t the counting in kannada?
ak, i don’t know honestly, i assumed it was malayali. but kannada counts too, i just haven’t heard it spoken as much in daily life
That’s what I was trying for, but I have never learned Kannada, so I was worried I was wrong…especially once an Iyengar got homesick over my counting, upthread. 😉 Why is EVERYTHING I try to do Tamilzhrz?
Also, the first person to think it’s cheeky fun to substitute “everyone” for a certain word in that question is getting a nice set of addis with a branch from this tree outside, all old-skool-horrible-bruising-but-won’t-break-the-skin-go-ahead-I-DARE-you-to-call-CPS style. Ya heard?
“You go en pointe, the other leg en attitude, and you turn en dehors. Et voilà, une pirouette!”
“You got served bitch!!!!”
ANNA, i think you got it right – remember puli’s tamil has kannada overtones, and since your counting was not in tamizhrhL, i assumed it was kannada when he made that comment. plus, i assumed it was kannada since it was very similar to telugu, but not completely the same…so now you know – it is possible to escape the tamils once in a while on SM 😉
Nala, I counted in Malayalam in this edition. 🙂
Given that Puli has said he is a Hebbar Iyengar, he may have been referring to the Kannada influence when he meant “home”.
Puli correct me if I’m wrong.
It’s the South Asian Rockettes!!
No caption but this bit from the times :
makes me feel : I would rather that this show which the Times find “comical” happen everyday than another Kargil and the loss of brave soldiers (Yes – I mean on either side).If only all problems between countries could be solved like this we would not have twenty year olds dying half way across the world from home today. Sorry for the off topic somber note.
SM Intern: Please feel free to delete
No need. I wistfully thought the same thing, as I was creating the post.
that is correct.
Hmmmmm, now that means that tam n mallu number are pretty much the same…
Hey isn’t that a cool London bridge
oh damn i feel stupid. for some reason i was saying ‘malayali’ instead of ‘malayalam’ to refer to the language. forgive me, mallus of the world!
to repent, i will share an awkward moment. the manager of an indian restaurant recently asked me if i was malayali; i said no, but i do get asked that all the time (seriously. ALL the time!). he’d asked me because he was mallu and apparently i ‘looked just like [his] wife.’ awkward. especially cuz i was with my mallu bf.
The turbanned saints, go marching in!
Er, someone ought to tell them aerobics went ‘out’ like a decade ago. I’d look more badass than them if I were doing pilates … with a fan on my head!
Ooh no it is not. 🙂 We might be quiet, but we are the watching.
And just to jog your memory, She did start counting in tamil first.
conclusion: southie languages sound very similar, at least when it comes to numbers.
hopefully this means that if i ever find my way to bangalore or chennai i can just speak in telugu and hopefully someone will understand me.
karthik- i thought she said that she was counting in malayalam in that post?
Fortunately not yet 😛 (play the main video). It made Tony Blair fall off his rowing machine.
A lot of autowallahs n hawkers in Chennai speak what is called ‘rickshaw-tamil’ it is tamil with dollops of telugu interspersed. So you will find words like ‘dabbu’, ‘chupistanu’, ‘ippudu chudu’, ‘donganakodakka’… They have been popularized by the Thalaivar and Vijay in their films….
44, umm, actually not, Nala. You might be understood quite a bit in Bangalore, but not much in Chennai. And I say this because I’m speaking from experience. Beware the auto rickshaw drivers in Chennai, because if they hear you speaking in Telugu, they start seeing money dangling in front of their eyes. 🙂
Numbers in over 5000 languages display remarkable similarity to numbers in their linguistic relatives.
i was joking; i wouldn’t be so arrogant as to actually do that.
really? are telugu people in chennai mostly tourists?
i have relatives who went to college in chennai, picked up tamil quickly… and never mentioned this to me!