nationality: Indian
ethnicity: This’ll be fun…

Father: a North Indian (from a city called Benaras) born and brought up in Mumbai (yes, the very same one in Slumdog Millionaire for those who need a reference point) in the Western region of India. His natural language is Hindi.

Mother: a South Indian from Bangalore (natural language is called Kannada). She, however, spent most of her life in a city called Chennai (where everyone speaks Tamil, which happens to be the language in the Benny lava video, I think multiple people have already confirmed it).

To top it all, I’ve been out of India for the first half of my life, living in Abu Dhabi (which is a city next to Dubai), so I do know a little Arabic.

Of course, due to this happy mishmash, English ended up being the language of choice in our household.

I’d like to think I have the benefit of straddling multiple cultures (though this very justifiably could just be hubris on my part. I am aware that cross-ethnicity alone does not make a multi-cultural man, it has a lot to do with general attitudes, tolerance, respect, etc.).

I see nothing wrong with videos like this, as long as they’re taken in the right spirit. Note that such videos being MADE in the right spirit does count a lot, but its our responses to such events that are more important than the driving forces (i.e. I’ve heard that during the American war of Independence, “Yankee Doodle” was actually a derogatory rhyme penned by a British colonial, which become a badge of pride for the American revolutionaries). Being open-minded need not imply some sort of “surrender”… but more of a “limited assimilation” of other attitudes and cultures. Something that I feel my country is steadily moving away from, a slide that we must somehow arrest (if not reverse).

By the way, the video made me painfully slip off my chair in the office, hit the plush carpeted floor in a moment of exquisite surrender, and writhe in agonized laughter.

http://aussgworldpolitics.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/anti-american-spoof-tamil-music-video/

That one’s so cheezy-bad it’s good (the key to not taking this stuff seriously, IMO – if it’s cheez, it’s fair game). One recent new vehicle I have observed for cross-cultural humor sharing is the overstream.net site, which facilitates home-dubbing.

Here’s the Titanic in Tamil – dubbed in French!

http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=nrikuknbi4mr

I noted that funny youtubes have gone internationally viral, with people doing their own home-dubbing of homemade youtubes into foreign languages. I found the “Unemployed Star Wars Stormtrooper” one dubbed into Russian there, for instance. It’s scary, watching those memes hopping like lemmings into a foreign cyberpsyche…not knowing how they’ll be treated and how they will morph. Ideally you want only the best of your culture being represented faithfully and respectfully in careful translation to another. But the elites no longer have control over transmission. The Net has allowed large numbers of people unsupervised access to an astounding amount of material. Now we have a global human experiment in the making. Frontier-watching in this area is an irresistible hobby.

I am not sure what time it is ware ever you are Max but it is very late here and so i will now attempt to defeat my insomnia! Good night.

Caleb Hitt your friendly neighborhood political activist.

Contrast for instance, in the case of Great Britain, “Little Britain” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream…

I should have said, “don’t get me started,” but really this is the kind of thing that preoccupies me most on this blog. I am very thankful for your visits and I hope you will be back.

P.S. could anyone tell me the real name of “May he poop on my knee” i love this song and cant stand giving Bufflax and his ilk any more views….