I had a rather funny 'road rage' incident the other day. I live in Pune, and when you live in a city that is famous for its ridiculously bad roads and mismanagement, driving the odd 14 kms to work becomes a mammoth task. As you get close to the end of your 40-minute drive, it's not very difficult to lose your temper if you're already exasperated and red in the face 10 minutes after you left home!
So I'm driving down to work with the missus. I'm irritated because the driving is getting to me now (the missus doesn't drive yet) and the bad roads and traffic aren't making things easier. The missus and I have been working out of different office buildings for the last 2 months. We get to her building first and I pull over so she can get out. As I'm about to pull back onto the road, I look into the rear view mirror and see a handcart approaching. I think to myself "Okay, good! This guy's gonna block the traffic behind me. So I can go." And so I get back onto the road and start driving. As it so happens I get a bit close to a biker, not very close in my opinion but close enough so that he gets a scare. The biker turns around and starts staring me down, then decides he doesn't want to just drive off without saying his piece. So he slows down. Like I already said, I was irritated by then and I decided I wasn't going to back down either. So I pull up next to him, looking really pissed off all the while. He stares as I roll my window down and probably arrived at the conclusion that things wouldn't go very well for him if they got out of hand and visibly calmed down a bit.
"Indicator de kar kyon nahin chalate?" he asked. I was expecting him to come up with something nastier, something that would make it easier to get out of the car and throw a couple of punches, let out some of that aggression. Without a pause I lean over and yell back, "Indicator chalu hi tha, samjha?" and then drove off feeling very stupid! No more words exchanged, no abuses even and neither of us even made a fist!
Damn! I guess some people give road rage a bad name don't we?
Friday, July 27, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
9/11, Planes 'Falling', and a Grammar Course
I script courses for a living. Not a very flashy means of sustenance but it has its moments. The courses I script are meant for clients the world over. A good number of clients I have interacted with are Americans. Good ol' Americans! They who elected Bush...twice! They who make life a living hell for us writers with their senseless Americanization of the Queen's language, the basic premise for which is "Let's just spell everything differently in the US of A, shall we?" They who reached an all new height of paranoia ever since a bunch of Islamic extremists decided to commit yet another act of terrorism, about six years ago, but on American soil.
Ever since the tragic 9/11 occurrence, the most powerful nation in the world has been reduced to nothing more than a bunch of paranoid blustering idiots with a serious case of prejudice towards brown skinned people wearing any kind of headgear. But how deep this paranoia runs would have to be seen to be believed. Recently, I scripted a course that was meant to teach basic English skills to Arab males working with an oil manufacturing company. And rest assured, the said company is definitely not a front for jehadis!
Once the scripts were ready, they were sent to an American voice over artist to record the necessary VO for the course. The artist came back a day later, saying that there was a rogue sentence in one of the exercises. This rogue sentence would make it quite difficult for him to export the recorded content without spending a lifetime in a US prison! The exercise required learners to pick a correct word from a list and complete a number of sentences. The missing word for the rogue sentence was "ground." The completed rogue sentence would have read as, "The airplane made a lot of noise when it fell to the ground." This was enough to send quite a few people at the recording studio into a tizzy, first because they thought the sentence described an air crash in a nonchalant manner and next because they were convinced that certain government officials would definitely see this sentence as being 'terroristic!'
The result? The course is yet to be developed, with final judgment yet to be passed on the rogue sentence. I can only hope that a plane does not really fall and hit the ground before this time. Till then, if you're reading this blog, don't send mails to your relatives abroad with words like 'airplane', 'crash', 'boom', 'bang!'
Ever since the tragic 9/11 occurrence, the most powerful nation in the world has been reduced to nothing more than a bunch of paranoid blustering idiots with a serious case of prejudice towards brown skinned people wearing any kind of headgear. But how deep this paranoia runs would have to be seen to be believed. Recently, I scripted a course that was meant to teach basic English skills to Arab males working with an oil manufacturing company. And rest assured, the said company is definitely not a front for jehadis!
Once the scripts were ready, they were sent to an American voice over artist to record the necessary VO for the course. The artist came back a day later, saying that there was a rogue sentence in one of the exercises. This rogue sentence would make it quite difficult for him to export the recorded content without spending a lifetime in a US prison! The exercise required learners to pick a correct word from a list and complete a number of sentences. The missing word for the rogue sentence was "ground." The completed rogue sentence would have read as, "The airplane made a lot of noise when it fell to the ground." This was enough to send quite a few people at the recording studio into a tizzy, first because they thought the sentence described an air crash in a nonchalant manner and next because they were convinced that certain government officials would definitely see this sentence as being 'terroristic!'
The result? The course is yet to be developed, with final judgment yet to be passed on the rogue sentence. I can only hope that a plane does not really fall and hit the ground before this time. Till then, if you're reading this blog, don't send mails to your relatives abroad with words like 'airplane', 'crash', 'boom', 'bang!'
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