--- On Sat, 23/5/09, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] More on India in "Illiad" cartoons
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Saturday, 23 May, 2009, 6:22 PM
> Giancarlo Livraghi wrote, [on
> 5/23/2009 1:05 PM]:
>
> > I hope it isn't boring to go back to the subject of a
> series of cartoons
> > on "Canadians opening an office in India". (The
> thread was "many a true
> > word is spoken in jest?")
> >
> > In case anyone is interested... the sequence is
> becoming quite long,
> > with more peculiar developments.
>
> Speaking for myself:
>
> I find it mildly amusing, and not particularly
> well-informed - but then,
> it never claimed to be.
>
> To pick up on IG's response, I wonder exactly what audience
> this is
> aimed at, and what the subtext is. The usual audience for
> userfriendly
> is typically young, male, white and geeky - an almost
> perfect overlap
> with the xkcd reader - or so I think.
>
> Udhay
> --
> ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com))
> ((www.digeratus.com))
I looked at Udhay's reply and wondered whether I was being geeky.
Perhaps it would help to point out that there is a certain amount of knowledge
assumed about India: it is about India, after all, so let's not beat around the
bush.
Next, if we enumerate these bits of information and knowledge, we find that
these do not form a cohesive, intermingled whole; instead, what we have is a
set of bullet-points, like so:
* India is a low-cost location for voice-based BPOs;
* Chennai is a typical Indian city;
* All Indian cities resemble one another; (implied in the depiction of
buildings, denizens, and descriptions of available food)
* Chicken tikka is an Indian dish (as opposed to regional, or faux-Mughlai);
* Curry is another generic Indian dish;
* There are no female Indians in real life;
* There are mythical Indian females, and these are seductive entities which
cannot be resisted;
* There are mythical Indian female deities, and these may or may not be the
same as mythical Indian females;
* The iconology of Indian deities is easy; multiple limbs, an aggressive
attitude, imminent danger to mankind;
And so on.
I would like some help to add to these as extra data points are generated. This
will give us a picture, a template of what India is in the cartoonist's mind,
and its expansion in stages, data point at a time.
That should give us some kind of a picture of what is going on and which way
the strip is going.
Bring your gang together. Do your thing. Find your favourite Yahoo! group
at http://in.promos.yahoo.com/groups/
