Surreal experience of the weekend: Sitting outside the Systems Administrator’s office and eavesdropping on a group of five girls and three guys who were practising their American accents. Practising, as in, the girls recited phrases from a sheet of paper, fumbling over pronounciation, and the guys ( who seemed to be the resident experts) correcting them from time to time. The girls weren’t too bad, I realised, after one of the guys took the piece of paper and gave a live demonstration of How to Speak Americanised English Properly.
Second-most surreal experience of the weekend: Gatecrashing Jay’s farewell party and being offered a bouquet.
I was in Bombay the last four days, working on a client issue, sitting in front of endless rows of 21″ flatscreen monitors and clicking on various instances of Web Application Performance Test. We needed 500 users to run a benchmark, and the evaluation copy of WAPT provides for only 20 users per instance, so we installed 25 instances of WAPT on 25 machines, and whenever a test was fired, we would have to start all of them one by one. Which, you will agree, gives a slightly different twist to the expression “running tests”.
It was raining on Monday morning, so I could not go to Flora Fountain and hunt for books. I was not supposed to buy any books for the next two months, but the Strand Book Fair got a little too much. Found a nice collection of short stories by Kim Newman, he of the Anno Dracula series, a couple of movie-books, and an interesting-looking book on songwriters of the 60’s and 70’s ( Dylan, Cohen, Baez, Carole King and all) They were also selling The Beatles Anthology for 1500 rupees, and because I have sworn not to buy it for more than 1000, and because I was short of cash, and because the weight would have been prodigiously high, I ditched it.
In a bookstall inside the Bombay airport, I found a copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke’s fantasy novel, ten years in the making, and much lauded by Gaiman and the NY Times and Salon.com. 950 rupees, the cover said, and I dropped it. For now.
Walden has a copy of Persepolis 2, and I plan to get it today, before anyone else does.
My surreal experience of the weekend-both of you sitting together and chatting away to glory.
Farewell party?! :-/
Jay’s leaving Bombay – shifting to Bangalore. The farewell party was from his office.
Oho! And Surrealism makes you blush everytime, eh?
heh heh heh
surreal indeed.
it’ll be interesting to see how india has changed since 1998, when our economies weren’t linked as closely.
These people who were practising their accents were employees of a call-centre company, one which takes support calls from the US of A. Everyone of them would take on an assumed name, for examle, Madhavi Jain would become Sharon Walker, on the phone and respond to customer queries with an accent culled from such “tutorial”s.
It has changed majorly since 1998, let me tell you.
yeah, i was going to touch upon the name changing, which i am somewhat bothered by.
for instance, today my phone support guy was named “howard”. it was clearly from a call center, as have been all of my calls to customer service in the last 2 months.
i guess from a business standpoint, this cultural masquerade makes sense, but i can’t help but feel that it’s ultimately unnecessary.
last me heard, the “neutral” accent was being encouraged in many places. Y? coz, customers complained that the service ppl were imitating their accents!
Too bad. If we don’t talk like them, they have problems. If we talk like them, they have problems.
The funny part is that if you throw a scenario they are not familiar with and its not in the script, they fumble and their orginal accents come out. And then try hard to cover it up. I get quite a few laughs everytime I call americanexpress.
I only hope you’ve heard of a certain “project gutenberg”? I hope that’s the right spelling.
What’s wrong with me… you must have… can’t do without paper, right?
Project Gutenberg has ebooks that are in the public domain, which includes mostly classics and early twentieth century pulp literature. Most of the books I buy (or at least, the ones I want right now) are those published in the last twenty-odd years. JOnathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Persepolis both came out last month, in fact. :)
But hey, that reminds me – I need to see if Murasaki’s ‘Tale of Genji’ is available on PG.
There, I could help you despite being clueless.
Er… I assume you are new to‘s journal?
Hahaha.
Not really… but his appetite for books never ceases to amaze me. I just thought I might mention it… even though I thought he probably knew about it…
How many farewells is Jay getting?
This one was an office farewell. :)
Oh the we will miss you boss thingie that translates to, fiiinally, we get rid of this one.
;)
Jay – you can’t kill me, you don’t know where I live.
Ha! It was a farewell lunch. I asked them to cut the official formal farewell crap.
Review Persepolis 2. Now.
*groan* Must resist must resist.
Dude, you won’t believe this, but I *just* finished reading it, and typing out initial reactions. :)
One word of advice, though.
Don’t. Resist.
Two words. Close enough.