Practical Thoughts

Life Should be Easy

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Actually we speak good English, because we were ruled by British, you know..

We Indians are very proud of the fact that we speak English better than people from other nations. True...To a certain extent but since its not our mother tougue we sometimes make hilarious mistakes.
I have listed some of the very funny stuff that I heard...

1) People from every state have their typical accents. My friends from Andhra often confuse the usage of "J" and "Z". For example, if a Telegu guy wanted a person called Jerry to Zero out a certain field in the database by visiting a certain page, this is how he would say
"Zerry, Can you please Jero out the field, by visiting this Paze"

And after that if you would check with him if he did inform Jerry to zero out, he would say "I told the Zerry to Jero out..."

Talking about accents, people from UP and MP tend to add an "e" sound in front of words that start with the S. For example, an UP guy would say
Snow as iSnow
Start as iStart
Stop as iStop
Specifications as iSpecifications
Spa as iSpa

We started calling this UP guy as boolean talker.

Tamil guys, I have noticed say Temporary as Tempravary

Having made fun of people from other states, I should say a few irritating pronunciation mistakes that Mallus make.

Mallus say Man as Maaan, have as Haaave, Van as Vaaan,Office as Oofees etc. For a mallu, a word is not a word unless you give equal importance to each letter in it. For eg, a mallu would say Running as Rrrunningg.


Now some of the amazing goof-ups I noticed or told to me by my friends here...
1)A manager wrote to his boss voicing the concern of his reportees
"Please improve the speed of the connection. Its becoming difficult to maintain the motto of my people"
Hello...You may wanna say "Morale" or "Motivation"...anyways why do you need another motto apart from "Applying Thought"

2) During a meeting, a manager wanted to stop one of his subordinates from speaking. So he said "Sorry, I want to interpret you" and he started speaking..
Boss??? Did u wanna interpret or interrupt me?

3) A manager wanted to tell his reportee to invite all the concerned people to a meeting. This is what he said..."Please dont forget to invite all Shakeholders"
Shakeholders??? What kind of shakes do they hold boss? Milkshakes ??

And finally the clincher..
One guy wanted to tell the Operations folks to execute a series of jobs at certain times. This is what he wrote

Hi,
Please execute the blow jobs regularly without fail
PFPDOXOX Daily
PWPDZ22 Saturday...
........



And finally...
Q: What would you call an amazing Telegu speaking Tennis player ?
A: Andhra Aggasi

11 Comments:

At 10/08/2005 7:17 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The blow job incident was real????

hilarious :)))))))))

 
At 10/08/2005 12:07 PM, Blogger Sandesh said...

Yes sir. It was
And the client increased the font and made it red and took a print out and showed all the people in the team. Of course he was making fun of our wipro chap....:-)

 
At 10/09/2005 11:06 AM, Blogger kuffir said...

it's not telegu - it's telugu. it's funny that you should commit a spelling error in a post on wrong pronunciation. it's an enjoyable post, otherwise.

 
At 10/09/2005 12:59 PM, Blogger Sandesh said...

Kuffir,
Thanks for pointing it out. My understanding was that we could use both Telegu and Telugu.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/88/T0088800.html

And a search in google fetches hundreds of pages with the word Telegu also :-))
I made fun of Mallus too.
My aim was to expose the false pride amongst Indians that we speak Queen's english.... And apart from that some humor.
I will read your blog also. Are you studying in IIM btw ?

 
At 10/09/2005 4:42 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

hi sandesh,
I guess our Tribe rocks big time when its comes to screwing the Queens Language...

Not far behind are Gujus, Goans Catlick :), Ghats, Mangloreans, Surds....

Shall compile a few as I recollect 'em...
cheers n rock on
satish

 
At 10/10/2005 1:06 AM, Blogger Govar said...

Came here thro desipundit.

I agree with most of what you say, but some of them are plain vanilla mistakes... like the ones on interpret etc. You wouldn't call that accent problems, would you?

 
At 10/10/2005 9:53 PM, Blogger Sandesh said...

Thanks Shalin, Bombayiye, Jagan, LearnFromMe, Deba and Govar for your comments !!

The last section in this post was just for humor and had nothing to do with accents :-)

 
At 10/11/2005 2:35 AM, Blogger Prahalathan said...

Like the joke goes
A British told an Indian "We screwed your Mother Land for 400 years" The Indian replied "We will screw up your mother tongue FOREVER!!@

 
At 10/18/2005 3:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Sandesh

Hehe being a mallu myself it's possible to relate. Have lost quite much of the MTI (Mother tongue Influence) but still sometimes it pops out. Here's my own experiences on the same. Guess u wont be disappointed

http://o3.indiatimes.com/jonagil/archive/2005/04/30/106957.aspx

cheers
flaash

 
At 10/18/2005 3:24 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Attaching the link again



http://o3.indiatimes.com/jonagil/archive/2005/04/30/106957.aspx

 
At 10/19/2005 9:37 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

bhery bhery phunny!

 

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