The Dubbing Fiasco

Fact 1 : India has emerged as a major market for major film producers all over the world.
Fact 2 : For 'Convenience' of the common Indian movie-going audience, these movies are either dubbed in hindi or subtitles are made.

KAHAANI MEIN TWIST : The dubbing artistes are *******s.

End result : We end up proving once again that an investment of $200 million can be wasted in a single go with a 'Made in India' tag.

I am just thankful that they didn't change The Lord of the Rings to 'angoothiyon ka devta' or 'Terminator' to something like "Waatlagaaaoo'. But other flicks like Tomb Raider (Sherni Number 1), True lies (Safed Jhooth), Dunston Checks In (Ek bandar hotel ke andar) and A Bridge to Terabethia (Jaadui Nagri Terabethia) could not escape. The subtitles were equally bad. I distinctly remember a sequence from Home Alone:1. There were nine kids in the house and the eldest girl was given the task of counting them up while going for a trip. After she counts, the dialogue goes something like this:

Father : Judie, did you count them all?
Judie (frustrated) : Five Boys, four girls and a pigeon on the peach tree.


The subtitles were:
Father : Judie, kya tumne sabhi ko gina?
Judie : 5 ladke, 4 ladkiyaan aur naashpati ke ped par ek bater.

This sort of kills the whole fun (although I agree that it brings in a new kinda fun). This has been extended to another degree now. Providing english subtitles to hindi songs, and thats even worse. I recently saw the video of the jagjit singh ghazal from the movie Jogger's Park. If you haven't heard the song, here's the link to the lyrics http://www.indiafm.com/lyrics/song/31543/index.html

Have a look at the hindi sub-titles.

The destination is very delicate,It's a journey of love... - 2
Beat slowly, Oh! My heart, -2
It's a journey of love....
The destination is very delicate,It's a journey of love...

Nobody should hear this tale, Ah! I am so scared... -2
But what shall I gain of it? -2
It's a journey of love..
The destination is very delicate,It's a journey of love...

It's not easy to tell, hiding it is also difficult -2
Oh my God! How difficult -2
Is this journey of love...
The destination is very delicate,It's a journey of love...

Ohhhhh...
The lights of heart have spread, please do come! Oh Darling!
Please do come!........... Oh Darling!
Highly worth being loved -2
Is this journey of love...

Funny? Then picture this last translation. What if the sub-titles guys decide to extend their efforts to rock songs.
Nobody can tell, and I was curious. So I came up with this translation of the timeless classic 'Time' by Pink Floyd. Here's the original lyrics http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/pink+floyd/time_20108616.html

My translation

Tiktikaate hue, wo pal jo ek pakaauu din banaate hain...
Aap hilte hue apna waqt faaltu tareeke se bitaate hain
laat maarte hue ek zameen ke tukde par apne grihnagar mein
intezaar karte hain kisi vyakti ya vastu ka raaste dikhaane ke liye

dhoop mein pade pade thake hue, aur baarish ke liye ghar ruke hue
tum ho jawaan aur zindagi hai badi, abhi hai waqt maarne ke liye
aur ek din tumhe pata chalta hai, 10 saal tumhaare peechhe chale gaye
kisi ne tumhe nahin kaha kab daudna hai, tum shuruaati bandook chhor gaye

aur tum daudte ho, daudte ho suraj ko pakadne par wo duub raha hai
aur tumhaare peechhe waapis aane ke liye daud raha hai
suuraj to wahi hai ek tareeke se magar tu budha chuka hai
saans phool chuki hai aur maut ke ek din aur kareeb aa chuka hai

har saal chhota hota ja raha hai, kabhi waqt milta dikhta nahin
sujhaav jo ya to shunya hote hain ya aadha panna godi hui panktiyon ke
khaamosh bechaini mein latakte rehna to angreji tareeka hai,
samay chala gaya, gaana bhi khatm, shayad mere paas kuchh aur tha kehne ke liye...

Think About It.

The Adventures of Gillu, the Giant Flying Squirrel

Another joint venture by the guy who typed this and the no-(no non-sense) guy

Nothing has biological origins... its easier to assume (assume= make an ass of you and me) that things have their origins in this little black bag which Hall and Knight had come to love so much, and we had come to hate... random selections which by their own constructs of pseudo realities try to decide how intelligent they are...

This time however, the origins are much more complicated... because this time the origin is hinged on the concept of symmetry... Good/Evil, Yin/Yang, Baskin Robbins/coolfi... You see, sometime in the previous decade there was the birth of SF..and to take you through with the mathematics of this theory, i present the man who gave the hypothesis himself... Tapas

" Let us assume that S and F are 2 nXn invertible matrices.
for convenience, the following function indicates inverse, with the argument in the parenthesis..

inv(F)= F^-1

Then, it follows that, inv(SF) = inv(F)*inv(S)

Now, since Gillu(the flying squirrel, who is 8 metres tall and weighs a mere 1031 Kgs) hangs up-side down, from a banyan tree,

inv(F)*inv(S) = FS [Flying Squirrel]

Since he is one of a kind, and is our friend, we call him Gillu.
(Now for those who ask, "Why a male?", well, as it turns out, he was found in a boys hostel loo, so he's gotta be male)
To continue with our deprivation...oops i mean derivation

SF is also short for SpringFest., the name of the soc-cult fest in this institute, and despite the mathematical inverse relationship between the SF and the FS, they co-existed in harmony...
All was well, till SF invited the 'Band of Gays' to play in SF, and after they did a sound check for an hour and lip-synced their horrible songs, the FS decided that this transgression of basic human sense will not go unpunished. It was, after all, the guardian of all good sense in the institute. It ran around the nstitute, stomping on the heads of all the Core Team members and at 8 metres and 1031 kilos, even Bhati didn't stand a chance...
The legend of FS continued...as can be seen in this manuscript which was found deep in the archives of the great libraries of gmail...

tgwtt : The Guy Who Typed This.
tnnng: The no-(no non-sense) guy.

tgwtt: ***** was murdered by the flying squirrel of LLR hall
tnnng:squirrels are very peaceful and harmonious creatures
1:05 AM
tgwtt:he was minding his own business, when a scream of exasperation from a resident of a nearby hall made the resident flying squirrel go wild
tnnng: there is but one loophole in this lame and fucked up theory
tgwtt:the squirrel attacked ***** in the loo, before he could wash it, and stomped on him
1:06 AM
tnnng: ***** is in a hall called Azad hall of residence
tgwtt:since it was 8 metres tall and weighed 1031 kilos, there was no chance the guy could survive
tnnng: and so the squirrel tried to find the guy who had made it go wild
tgwtt: The flying squirrel has the powers of teleportation for those who didn't know
1:07 AM
tnnng: then ***** shat green all over his pantsbut it was too late!
even his godly CV could not save the great *****
ok dude, now here's a bargain
tgwtt:shat green, and the stench drove the FS away
tnnng: lets introduce a new angle and kill kartik prabhu instead
tgwtt: prabhu is god, he is immortal by definition
1:09 AM
tnnng: but he doesn't believe in the concept of god, and that lack of self-belief takes away his immortality!
tgwtt: aah! his own demise...
tnnng: so the FS attacks the self proclaimed atheist god
1:11 AM
tgwtt: but prabhu killed himself..
tnnng: and akash ate FS to have prabhu trapped in his body
tgwtt: FS just stomps on the body
tnnng: FS curry
1:17 AM
tgwtt: now that my friend...is really nuts..
tnnng: exactly
tgwtt: u didnt eat the nuts, u ate what eats the nuts
tnnng: cartman can have kenny trapped in his bodybut akash cant have prabhu?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9 Minutes

1:27 AM

tgwtt: sorry, kahin bahar gaya tha

akash can't have prabhu, compare relative sizes

tnnng: abey yaar!i dont want prabhu goin into bhati!

tgwtt: dark, scary place!!

tnnng: and thats the only match according to size

1:28 AM

if u trust me

This is an actual Chat, any reference to any person, living or otherwise, is clearly intentional, though their deaths as imagined are obviously impossible.

As we can see, Gillu's legend had permeated the thickest of skulls, and Gillu, decided to disappear into obscurity....

This was a difficult task to do, (please check his physical statistics, in case you have no common sense, or suffer from short term memory loss)... So Gillu decided that he would wander the jungles of KGP ( the AgFE dept) after 0230 hrs for 12 years , till the SF guys finally call deep purple and metallica to perform in one of their editions. That shall be the time when the FS will return... but only to headbang with the rest of the audience at TOAT...

The Simple Truth : "Digesting Bhati is a difficult thing to do... but I shall be back!" --Gillu (Glaucomys gigantivolans)

The Teacher Species : Revisited

Statutory warning : If you hold IIT Kharagpur in high esteem, please stop reading right here.

Data required : 1 Torr = 1 mm mercury pressure = (1/760) atmosphere pressure
I still remember the day when I first entered into the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I had spent 3 whole years thinking day and night about IIT, and once I got admission, I was excited beyond limits - excited about the prospects of the great things that I'd get to do in the largest engineering institute of India. 2 Years have past since then, and I have really enjoyed a lot. But that's not due to the college- it's due to the people (read:weirdos) that you find in this hellhole.

Having met a lot of interesting guys (and some girls too), and many retarded professors; I have discovered that the people on campus can be broadly divided into some categories:-

Chauvinists : Most of the male population.
Desperate : Copy the last point.
Optimists : Electrical engineering students who think the coming sem will be peace.
Pessimists : Insti rank under top 10, 12 inter halls in sports, soc-n-cult and tech... but perenially screwed.
Messachusettists : Guys too interested in higher studies.
Schlumbergerists : Want nothing but a high paying job.
Sadists : Whoever conceptualized TDS.
Satanists : People who suggest TDS should stage another production in the year.
Scientists : Kartik Prabhu, Abhas Saroha, Vaibhhav Sinha....
They-shall-be-hit-by-my-fist : Don't even get me started.

But some profs are by far the most-impressive nut-cases that I've ever seen. The very first roll call in the class gave me an indication of what i was to see in the coming five years of my stay. Somehow, Tapas became Tapaush, Vinayak Pathak became Bina-Yolk Pathok (Albumin Pathok as I now call him) and (the worst one) Ankit Mantri became Onki Monkey!

I can't name all of them, but I distinctly remember our Electrical technology prof (Professor NKK) in our first year. He had remarkably large front teeth (quite like a beaver) which protruded way out of his mouth whenever he tried to smile. Sadly, this was the only expression his face allowed him. Whether he was angry or sad or disappointed or naughty or joking or talking, he used to open his mouth wide with his teeth threatening to jump out of his mouth and lodging themselves in your neck, quite dracula-like.

Then there was this guy who used to instruct us about shaping in the manufacturing process workshop. He spoke at the rate of exactly 20WPM in a sing-song tone, and it went something like this, "Deesh eesh a cheeshel (chisel). Dere aaaare two typesh of cheeshel- one eesh a flat cheeshel and I forgot dee name of dee other cheeshel. Now deesh eesh a hammor. Doo note pooot the hammor een your mouth ebon by meeshtake. Eespecially eef eet eesh a pin-headed hammor!" And you feel like saying, "Chi... Thanks for telling dude. I'd love to put hammers in my mouth... they are so yummy!!!"

Now moving to the third sem.

Prof DDK's class. He asked a student to explain the behavior of some chemical with incresing humidity. The student tried to elucidate through a chemical bonding approach, and went wrong somewhere. Professor DDK's statement went something like this, "Your answer is wrong. The fact is that you don't know anything and are just trying to make up information. This can be dangerous. Human beings have this tendency to fabricate information which they don't possess, and this precisely is the reason for divorces. Now I know that divorce is a very sad thing, but it becomes very probable if you tend to fabricate things or there is no dowry and the woman doesn't earn. This is why I am pro-dowry. And this is the reason why I would like to marry my daughter to a bihaari instead of a bong- bihaaris have fixed rate. And I shall marry her off real well so that the groom is obliged and can't say anything to my daughter. The only thing that stops me from doing so is that I don't have a daughter- I am not even married. But don't try to fabricate knowledge!!!"

Can you imagine what all can happen to the students when the profs are so confused? I got to witness an excellent example few days back. A debate was being conducted in the college and the topic was 'Indian economy- Prosperity for few or development of all'. A student came to the dias with an air of confidence and started speaking.

"Indian economic policies are not going to yield desirable results at all. It's because it is too theoretical and India is too diverse a place. A communist approach has to be applied, just like it has been done with so much success in many other countries, and in states like west bengal. This eminds me of the marxist states like the Soviet Union. Marx and Angels did a superb job... the Russian revolution was simply a marvel, as was the American revolution. America, which was once a slave nation, gained independence due to the American revolution and now is so rich that is finances projects in IITs where this debate is taking place. And.... (A long pause follows)............. Sorry, I think I have strayed away from the topic. Thank you."

Then there is another prof in the department, famous for her marvellous use of pronouns in place of all the nouns in many sentences and for her quotable quotes in general. Sample these:-

"Now we have these three relations that can be used. Which one of these would you like to favour to prefer?"

"We know that a real gas cannot behave like an ideal gas. But since we have to assume something, let us assume that the real gas behaves ideally."

"It is obviously obvious that the van laar constants are obviously not temperature dependent so it is obvious that there has to be a differential equation which obviously has temperature dependent constants."

"This is a new situation that we have never faced before. Neither of the two approaches that we've studied works independently in this case. So for this situation, we use a mixture of that approach and the other one, and this gives rise to a new method which is this one."

But some profs are really good, and even the others are not completely useless. Atleast they form core entertainment in our lives and blogging material for some jobless people like me. And maybe they are not such bad teachers after all. Maybe it's the pressure of training the brightest minds of the country that does this to them. To sum up the things, here is a simpe truth

SIMPLE TRUTH : "The pressure required to convert a mentor into a TORR-mentor is just the 760th part of atmospheric pressure."

P.S. : If you still didn't understand the not-so-simple simple truth, refer to the data given at the top.