Ad-sense of humour...non?

I knew this would happen...the only question was 'how soon?'... and today morning when I went to my blog, there it was...a few days back I had posted a piece on how a student had mis-(dis?) understood the term 'waste management' and went on to write about how the college 'management' is 'useless'...

Bloggers would know that the embedded ads on the blogsite always reflect the contents of your posts...and therefore for most of the time, the ads on my blogsite are about pens and occasionally about real estate and/or hotels in Hyderabad...not that I have made any money out of these ads...but that is another matter...

And after I posted my previous item, I wondered what ad would come up next to it...and more or less expected it would be something to do with 'waste management'...and true to form...the ad is there today...

I intended my post to be a kind of light humourous take on the use of the word 'waste' in the Hyderabadi lingo and how the meaning was transferred to a totally different domain and how this resulted in a hootingly hilarious interpretation... and see what these Ad-sense people interpreted it...bhaste phellows...

***end note***

Glasses have a remarkble effect on the eyesight......

Especially if they are repeatedly refilled......

yenzoi...

Waste Management…Management of Waste…same? Or what?

I am not making this up…honestly…this really happened…a kind of blooper you find in examination scripts…

A couple of years back on the directive of the Supreme Court, ‘Environment Studies’ was introduced as a subject in all undergraduate colleges across India…in the university where the college I teach in is affiliated, environment studies was initially introduced as an ‘audit course,’ meaning, teaching-learning will take place along with tests and exams, but the subject itself did not find a place in the final marks card…so one can imagine the seriousness with which teaching-learning of this subject took place in many colleges…anyway, in our group of colleges, the teaching of environment studies was ‘pushed’ to English teachers! The English teachers decided to something different with this and used the allocated class hours to make students practice presentation skills, group discussion, public speaking, etc., using topics from the environment studies syllabus…some students enjoyed it…some, as usual, did not want to do anything with this… anyway…

During one of the exams, the teachers had asked a question on ‘waste management’… an important topic in environment studies… about managing domestic, industrial, medical waste… and this was related to me by a colleague working in one of our sister colleges… many students had written brief answers indicating clearly that they had not prepared well for this examination…one student wrote about 2 ½ to 3 pages on this topic…and the teachers were curious to know what he had written…the answer was a scathing criticism of the college authorities…talking about lack of proper sanitation facilities, photocopying facilities, insufficient books in the library, benches and boards in the classrooms, lab facilities, indifference of faculty members…and the tirade went on for close to 3 pages and finally, he said, the college management is a ‘waste management!’

It was then that the teachers realised why he had launched this attack…he had ‘clearly’ understood the question in a different sense…in Hyderabad and most of Andhra Pradesh, the English word ‘waste’ is used as an adjective (across English, Telugu, and Hindi/Urdu) to mean ‘useless,’ ‘worthless,’ ‘hopeless,’ etc., (as against the standard English usage of ‘waste’ as an adjective which means leftover, excess, unused, discarded, spare, etc.) and it is a common to find people saying, ‘he is a waste fellow,’ ‘ waste film,’ ‘waste hotel,’ ‘mera bhai waste hai re,’ ‘waste cinema ra, damagkharab aayi poyindi’…

And for this student, the college ‘management’ clearly came under the category of ‘waste’… ‘waste fellow’…

Translating an early Kannada novel...first draft completed

I am returning to blogging after a long long time...not that I didn't want to or didn't have anything to write about...maybe it was the scorching summer that sapped my interest...or maybe I was just lazy...(see, I have written three lines without saying anything...!!)...If my I put my mind to it, I can write... and this is what I thought I should do and went ahead and translated an early Kannada novel into English...it is an extremely short novel called 'Chandramukhiya Ghaatavu' (The Murder of Chandramukhi) written in 1890...I have researched and written about the translation scene during the early days of the novel in Kannada...and I had always wanted to translate a novel from Kannada to English and felt that this short novel would be an ideal beginning...I thought it would be easy translating a 26-page novel into English...a-page-a-day kind of schedule will take me a month to complete it...only when I started to translate that I saw and felt the real challenges...I found it really tough to locate synonyms for certain words and phrases and idioms and proverbs of the Kannada being spoken and written more than 100 years ago...sometimes the parallels for proverbs and idioms were easy to find in English...like the Kannada idiom 'go-mukha vyaaghra' (a tiger with a cow's face) was easily rendered into the familiar English idiom 'wolf in a sheep's clothing'... and many examples of people and events quoted in the novel were from Ramayana and Mahabharata...mythological figures entered and exited at will...verses from Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti appear at crucial moments...but the story is essentially about 'reforming' the 'Indian' society, a topic that was popular with the early novel writers in almost all languages in India...here, it is about the nefarious activities and final repentance of a fake swamiji...but this novel fascinated me for its narrative style which was unique for an early novel...It finally took me 3 months to complete the translation...I am now doing the proof reading and corrections...this is again taking its own time...there is so much to do after that...and since I studied novel as part of my doctoral research, I want the English translation to be slightly academically inclined with an introduction, preface, notes, glossary, etc. I want this translation to be published...lets see how soon I can release the draft from my hands... for a larger release...