oh, well..some of us are sick of the dumb goris everyone’s wanting to boff off, so fair’s fair and all for the share. equal rights.

That was pretty heavy stuff. If the written matter goes beyond 20 words in a sentence, my ADA kicks in. j/k i dont think this will start a cascade effect, but I hope it does, just for the sake of some comic relief.

-ParAnd

Yes, you’re absolutely right! I just tried reproducing the experiment and “atul kulkarni aamir khan chandni” does indeed get transmogrified via standard MS Word spell-check into “atoll kukri aimer khan chanting”. Brilliant! I’m curious, now, whether journalists for this periodical are supposed to tag non-english words appropriately so they don’t get substituted — the answer would indicate whether the onus was on the journalist to tag these words for omission from editing or whether the onus was on the editor to spend the time to grasp the context.

Also, I wonder if this spelling gaffe is not the start of a torrent of similar goofs to come. This might be a recurring pattern growing in severity amid advancing globalization. I think demand for incorporating alien words — with which the editors and readers are equally unfamiliar — outpaces, even with podcasting and all the other ways to emanate information, the supply of information from those competent to use these words. Moreover, I think the psychological and social repercussions of a misstep in the U.S. involving non-english, non-french, non-italian, and non-german languages is vastly meeker than an equal misstep involving english, french, italian, or german. I do not believe malice or intended apathy is the reason. Instead, I think the same problem preventing Japan from properly employing English are surfacing in the U.S. The problem is a lack of a noticeably large – and integrated – community which has already mastered the language. Japan’s solution is to increase the rigor of their English classes, importing teachers from the U.S. when needed. Since the U.S. has fairly large and diverse immigration, and since our public schools do not offer languages outside latin, spanish, french, italian, and german, our solution is more likely to leverage immigrants and less likely to rely on public schools.

Cheers, thoreaulylazy

AD, if the mentioned link is to be taken as a representative example of his work, then i am not too impressed. The article has all the cliched mistakes common to a non-desi viewer of Indian cinema and the research seems to be incomplete. The recent article profiled here on Sepia has the more obvious mistakes, since its the names that have been mangled. But this older article has similar spelling mistakes, but less obvious that they are not really visible unless you are Tamil and familiar with the movies and the personalities mentioned.

For example:

Bachchan films like Lawaaris (Orphen, 81) and Mard (He-Man, 84) operate in a realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy so extreme that they become surreal.

and

Rathnam’s gentle domestic drama Mouna Ragam (Silent Symphony, 87) shuttles most of its crowd-pleasing melodrama onto a siding, segregating it in a flashback to an early romantic trauma suffered by the heroine (Revathi) when she loved a terrorist who was gunned down right in front of her.

My grouse with the first passage is with the literal translations of the names and in case of the second passage, he has used the word “terrorist”. If you are not familiar with the Mani Ratnam’s Mouna Ragam, the character played by the actor Karthik is not a terrorist, but just a leftist activist. To me that’s a huge difference and points more to incomplete research than anything else.

Psst, like someone said before this is not the sloppiness of the Journo, but his lousy/uninformed editor. If you write – atul kulkarni aamir khan chandni – in MS word and accept the first “suggested” spelling, you get the Engrish words

But, what the hell, lets make fun of the journalist anyway.

-ParAnd

same guy