I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox, at least for the adblock plus extension which doesn’t let me see insane banner ads all day long. If not for speed, I’d have never moved to Chrome at all. It turns out, I was losing out on a lot of fun all the while just by not looking at these orkut ads!  There have been instances of orkut ads going wrong for me, but this one is a HUGE fail. Visualize this:

Orkut wtf

So orkut tried to “Find a match in my community and profession“. These are three epic stupidities in just one sentence! The girl they choose to titillate me with is Ms. Shah, a Gujarati (while I’m a marwadi), who is an MBA (while I’m an Engineer). And of course I’m MARRIED! The probability of me being interested in marrying Ms. Shah would be lesser than me surviving two thunder strikes and dying off a coconut falling on my head. So much for the targeted ads.

Oh, by the way: Facebook isn’t doing too good in terms of targeting either. The post on pluggd.in which talks about Indian matrimonial websites stooping too low also notices this.

After writing a previous blog post on naming asklaila.com, I was thinking more and more about how do companies name their products. And does this name have anything to do with the success of the product? If the answer is ‘yes’, I fail to understand how in the world has Hero Honda succeeded in becoming the numero uno in motorbikes five years in a row!

According to me, Hero Honda has come up with the stupidest names ever for bikes. Now, what kind of a loser names his bike Achiever? No seriously! Why would anyone in the world want to buy a bike which is named Achiever? Ditto for Glamour, unless you are a yellow-pants-orange-shirts wearing Govinda yourself. With Hunk, they reached a new low, which I didn’t even think was possible. Well, maybe they thought of building an hunky Indian version of the Harley Davidson, but named it so that everyone understands what the name stands for.
Ambition, in my guess would be for the 50 year old virgin who still thinks he could marry a princess, but manages only to buy an Ambition in the end. And don’t even get me started on Splendor(and the thousand versions of it: Splendor plus, super Splendor, Splendor NXG)!

Glamour might be for Hunks who have the Ambition of being Achievers of Priyanka Chopra. Speaking of bollywood and HH’s naming of bikes, I think there is a definite correlation. In my opinion, Hero Honda names most of its bikes keeping one bollywood star in mind. If Glamour=Priyanka Chopra, Hunk=Hrithik Roshan, Joy=Joy Mukherjee, Ambition=Imran Hashmi, no points for guessing what’s Karizma for. I can actually read through the mind of the person responsible for Karizma. “Hmm.. I need to name this bike in English… I think Charisma is a good word, which although I don’t understand, would look nice. Moreover it sounds like Karishma Kapoor (big grin). But people would think it’s a lengthy version of “chashma”, so let me make it more like Karishma.” Hence the name Karizma.

With Passion, they forgot that they are selling a bike and not viagra on wheels. And I can only assume that Passion Plus would be an ideal name for a stronger medication.

Maybe I was a little harsh on Hero Honda, because other companies like Bajaj, TVS, even Yamaha sometimes name their bikes idiotically. Like Dawn or Boxer etc, but come on. You have to give it to Hero Honda for the maximum number of ridiculous names.

When Hero met Honda, a cycle company met a motorbikes company, and you can only be sure that cyclists are nothing more than stupid people, hence the awesome bike names. I could go on and an, and take a dig at pleasure, sleek, street, and the endless other ludicrous names, but I should just stop and let you know that such names not only grind my gears, but make my blood boil.

p.s.: I ride an Avenger, and if you think the name is awful, you are wrong.

I always find pretty amazing how the indian press empowers women, statistically. Allow me to explain that in a little detail: Today’s headline in the TOI read: Girls outshine boys in CBSE 12th result here, and here. Ditto with Hindustan times
What a sexist way to announced that the CBSE 12th class results have been announced!
This also makes me wonder who are TOI and HT (and all other newspapers) really trying to impress? The girls who passed CBSE class 12th exams? The girls in 11th grade who want to insult their male counterparts by claiming percentage victory of their seniors? The village idiot who doesn’t send his daughter to a CBSE school (Forget the fact that he can’t/won’t read english dailies)? Okay lots of questions, which you can answer in the comments.

If you want the same fact statistically analyzed even more, I am willing to oblige. This year, 637,578 students – 264,248 female and 373,330 male – took the Class 12 board exams in the country and abroad. If I ran a daily: the headlines would be:
1) 288957 boys and 243282 girls pass this years CBSE. Boys outshine girls, yet again
2) 19% more boys pass CBSE than girls, buck up females!
3) Mass hysteria in women as CBSE 12th girls fail to pass (as much as boys)

For one more example of selective statistics for empowering women, now bring your attention to something we’re so used to seeing that we hardly notice the prejudice. Do an exercise: Grab today’s newspaper and search for any news which mentions an accident (where > 10 people died). I bet you’ll be able to find the pattern, “52 people died in a bus accident near blahblahland. 19 women, 3 children and 4 senior citizens were identified dead in this horrible accident”. Yeah right, what happened to the men, Sherlock?
The newspaper almost wants to say: “Some men also died, we’re too lazy to count. If you’ve attended kindergarten, do the math yourself. Anyway, they deserved to die. They were not cute little children or helpless women or old dying senior citizens. We won’t evoke any sympathy from the reader if I mention such trivial details.”

And this really grinds my gears.

Having a reputation a reputation helps for sure. And if the reputation is for being a nitpicker, more so! Ujjwal has sent me a couple of gems from his Shirdi’s trip which I’ll share here:

The first one is of a guy selling gay milk. As simple as that! Now I’m no Dubey that I can even try to figure out what was going through this guy’s head when he wrote that.
And forget writing it, he earns his living out of selling the homo milk, have a look:

Now this one is a little less hilarious, but definitely noteworthy. How does an merchant sell a product meant for foreigners (or pseudo foreigners) without knowing their language? At the least he’ll try to use a couple of words, which make the foreigner understand about it’s availability. Here’s what hamara hero writes:

If I were a mineral water bottle, I would do the same. i.e. Hang myself to death(see pic above, again) rather than being avelebal hear.

I don’t usually write blogs.
I certainly don’t crib or make fun of fellow human beings, publicly.
So what really grinds my gears here?

Nothing really My bored self couldn’t say ‘no’ to Anuj’s “Dude! You gotta write about this one on my blog“.

So, the motif of this post is an accidental discovery made by me sitting in the confinements of a cybercafé in downtown Kolhapur. Yeah, the birthplace of those famous-but-i-have-no-frikkin-idea-how footwear. So tacky and uncomfortable that I could never get my feet to wear a pair for one hour straight.

Anyway, let’s come back to the cybercafé where I was going to search something in Google. I clicked in the search box to start typing and popped open the dropdown menu with past searches stored in the browser cache.

My eyes and smile grew wider as I moved down the list, till I reached this absolutely breathtaking set of queries. I have seen a lot of bizarre stuff; I have seen a lot of crazy stuff; Heck, I’ve even seen MBAs actually doing some meaningful work. But I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I had never ever seen anything as phenomenal as this:

Yes! I had to pick my jaws up from the floor too!

Mosquito Net! Really???

Our hero was probably looking for fishnet clad females.
He must have seen the photographs or videos somewhere, and must be enamored by it. No surprises there. When I saw something similar in my childhood days, I liked it too! I can distinctly remember spotting those pages, presumably torn from a magazine, thrown on that deserted road over a which my 13 odd yrs old past self was biking nonchalantly. That  sudden visual stimulus prodded my brains hard enough to make my bicycle do a  5-0 in 0 seconds. “Holy cow!”; “What is it that she’s wearing?”;  “This thing is so cool!”; “Is it really what I think it is?”; “Oh my!”; “Why oh why would anyone throw these gems on the road like this?”, were few of the many thoughts that flashed across my titillated mind.
No, I didn’t pick up and stash those pictures. That happened later. and it was a completely different set of pictures, outside the scope of this article.

Now I wonder if I would have done something similar back then if I had the luxury of having Google at my command. The imagery was fascinating, I must admit. But I’m not sure if I was driven enough.

So there are many things that go to this dude’s credit. You just have to give it to him!
A – He’s got taste. An evolved one at that!
B – He’s a fighter. A go-getter! He seeks, fails, and tries again.
C – He’s creative! I couldn’t have come up with something like this. Could you?

It was Google’s job to better its algorithms to understand the need of this youth. Our man did his best. Not his fault.

I’m not taking any credit away from Google though. It’s awesome! But like all the know-it-all smarty-pants it does have fun with you once in a while. Which brings us to my other discoveries that fateful evening. A lot of queries followed this pattern:

Aishwarya hot and necked
Rakhi Sawant hot and necked
Mallika hot and necked

This is huge! Did he really wanna see these women necking?
Why would he need to go to a cybercafé to see necking when they show it on TV all the time. This age old technique has been depicting both love and rape on Indian silverscreen forever.
Not too difficult to guess what would have happened. This one probably wanted to see Rakhi au natural or, probably in his words, ‘neced’ or ‘neked’. And Google threw a googlie: “Did you mean necked?”
In a blink this dude must have gone, “Oh! Yes, exactly… yes yes. That’s what I meant.“  Google must have sniggered while this gullible juvenile browsed through the almost similar results thrown at him anyway.

You too have done this to the naive kids, haven’t you? You insensitive scumbag.

Before I conclude this post, I can’t help but wonder how my english literature professor would have interpreted the mosquito-net phenomenon.I can almost hear his words: “The author is a clever satirist. At display is his snide acerbic wit with carnal overtones. He brings the reader’s attention to the fact that most models these days have assets which qualify as ‘mosquito bites’. Therefore he cleverly weaves his metaphorical mosquito net and tells Google exactly what he does not want to see. Hence he craftily coveys his fancy of the ample curves of the feminine form.”

Hail mosquito-nets!

- Anupam