I followed Kunal’s “Ceteris Paribus” to Aadisht’s “Maajorly shadymax arbit fundaes“. Aadisht leaked some juicy emails exchanged between on a newsgroup that he belonged to. The emails are written in Hindu – Punjabi and are between a moderator of group and an irate lady member of the group. Well, perhap’s not a lady after all.There are some real gems there that I recommend reading for a laugh. Don’t take this too seriously either.
At a lab I was working a couple of years ago, a co-worker and friend of mine was a thet-Punjabi (hard-core North Indian). He was a member of an esoteric mailing list on AI. One day, he decided to post asking for help on a topic that was frequently discussed on the group. Some french guy thought this is a good day to crack a joke. He obviously had worked with other people of a particular community before and he recognized the name as one belonging to that community. He replied saying it was a great day for the group since even people of this certain community were beginning to take interest in the subject. The french guy stirred up something in my friend. He replied in the heat of the moment that if the french guy would just send certain female member’s of his family over, he would love to teach them AI. Admittedly, my friend reacted a little too excitedly, but the french dude on the list had it coming. Then again, it wasn’t really just my co-worker who lost his marbles over this.
here is a (censored) transcript, not meant to offend anyone, we all have our faux paus’.
“i am a student from india . i a want research in *** *** so i want a tutorial of it . if any body has it plz send it as possible earlier . it is very urgent”
Smart-ass French guy posts back…
“A S***** doing research in *** ***!!!!!!!! indeed these are interesting times”
Here it comes…
“M*** c***, (french guy). Apni maa c***vani hai kya tuje sardar se. Bh*** vale. Apni b**** de ke dekh sardar ko Tere ko pata chalega,”
Now, someone was obviously confused by the mails and their authors, but understood what the intent of the last one was:
“Dear Moderator, Being an Indian, I was shocked to read an humuliating and abusive language mail by (the french guy). I request you to block the id of (the french guy) and take precautionery action to avoid like this situation in the near future”
To which the moderator, who wasn’t Indian, and was apparently powerless replied:
“The list is self-moderated. You can take some solace in the fact that the vast majority of the readers could not read the (apparently regretable) message involved.”
The original perpetrator then pops back into the conversation 🙂 hilariously pointing fingers:
“it wasn’t me who use the abusive language see the mail thread, it was mr. (my lab-mate) who used it. i don’t know what invoked him to use such an abusive language, i couldn’t even comprehend what he stated in his language.”
My lab-mate read this and flipped, he quickly sent in a reply and took self-moderation to the next level:
“Oh really, Can any one tell me if following stuff you wrote is not abusive? It is not only abusive to one person instead abusive to whole S*** community ‘A S**** doing research in g**** p****!!!!!!!! Indeed these are interesting times!’ You should better keep yourself in limits. I do not want you to post further messages on group. You can take it offline and e mail me directly if you still have concerns. I will tell you how it feels.”
Up until this point, only the Indians had understood what had transpired. The moderator sent out another groupd of messages in an effort to control the damage and get past the issue. So what follows was almost anti-climactic. Another member of the list actually had the e-mail sent out by my buddy translated :-D. So now, a thousand plus researchers were suddenly aware of this:
“> You can take some solace in the fact that the vast majority of the
> readers
> could not read the (apparently regretable) message involved.In case anyone’s interested: I read it to an indian friend of mine, and as I understand it, the deal was that one person made fun (in English) of the other person being S***. To which the response (in an Indian dialect) basically said a bunch of *highly* offensive slurs, plus a call to S***s solidarity. Basically we were witness to bigotry.”
Well 🙂 I think my lab-mate’s post honestly paled in comparision to this last one. I’m sure when I meet him again we can all have a good laugh over this.