July 27, 2007
Once Upon a Time... [UPDATED!]Comics
…in a land not-at-all far away, there was a divisive issue that was almost as annoying as Paris Hilton— and just as ubiquitous, too.
According to the SAJAforum blog, yesterday, there was another cartoon on outsourcing (shocking! original! unexpected!).
This time, it’s Mother Goose & Grimm who are having their say. Well, more like Grimmy and Attila, but you know what I meant.
Do you think it’s funny?
Better yet, does anyone feel like getting creative the way our beloved DJ Drrrty Poonjabi did with the last cartoon I blogged about on this “hot topic”?
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w00t Nina! Thanks for the prompt “revision”. :D
…that’s much better. Anyone else?
anna on July 27, 2007 12:00 PM in Comics, Humor, Issues, Politics · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
Hey! Come on, folks, they at least got Gandhi's spelling right. No?
Didn't anyone of you encounter wrongly spelled Ghandi??
I'd change the middle panel to:
"YOU! With Fair-n-Lovely(tm) cream."
The obvious one replacing Gandhi with MLK and India with the ghetto comes to mind, but I'm sure we can do better.
Sidhu: Right you are about the spelling... See this posting on the topic of spelling Gandhi wrong:
Gandhi vs. Ghandi
http://www.sajaforum.org/2007/03/names_ghandi_vs.html
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Well, feel free to change it. Then I'll post is as an update. :D That goes for the rest of ya, too.
land of snakes,elephants,half-naked men,saaris,poverty,nuclear-bomb,bindis,caste-cauldron,cows on the roads,outsourcing etc. etc. What more. India is different..Albeit some for the postive and some for the negative. Enjoy the show :)
Anna,
don't know if you ever blogged on this Time article...in case not here is cover picture from Times magazine. sometimes the media is funny and sometimes it is not. i guess in the end it evens out.
Updated with Nina's "remix"! :D
I love how when folks get stereotyped they come back with a cartoon about a black man being stereotyped. The least that he should have done was stereotype a white person not that two wrongs make a right.
Me too !
Honestly, I saw this cartoon and it mildly irritated me yesterday but in retrospect it makes no sense. If the Mirror had answeres "Aishwarya Rai" there would be some logic to the whole thing!
Understood Nina. I see clearly now.
@ 8,
Without downplaying many of Gandhi's great contributions there are lot of debatable controversies about his personal life -
For e.g, here is an excerpt from the review of one of the books
"....Wolpert touches on the fact that Gandhi's transformation alienated his children and wife (whom he married at age 11) even while he expressed an "intensely personal passion" for various Western missionaries and forced some ashram devotees to sleep by him naked. By supplying more detail than useful analysis, Wolpert's effort is ultimately disappointing, and, in the end, Gandhi remains a recognizable but cryptic figure...
Also note the movie - Gandhi my Father which dealth with his controversial life...
Oops...the two links above @ 14 were wrong...Here are the correct ones. Anna can you please correct it.
Wolperts' book - Gandhi's Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi
Movie - Gandhi my Father
Nina, not only does that restaurant in the West Village annoy me because of the spelling, but their food is absolutely horrendous. Basically they besmirch his name twice with the misspelling and the terrible food/service.
I thought it was pretty funny.. Americans don't discriminate with humour. They make fun of everyone.
I am fair, with no cream, and Rouser has left me. So.. Indian guys would be into me?
Yeah, those reverse-minstrel shows and Abercrombie t-shirts making fun of white people were awesome.
@Sree
Thanks for the link, I encountered the name in an online class for Info. Resources mngmnt where in one of the available articles was a video - Richard Attenborough's "Ghandi", It took me a while to realize what the video was....
:)
Regardless of whether it offends or not - outsourcing jokes are just so *tired*.
#4 (Sree) and #21 (Sidhu)
Is this really such a big deal? First of all its the English language version of his name. As you know, our names all sound a little inexact when the English spelling of it is pronounced and often there are a couple of ways of spelling them. I don't think that Americans who say "Ghandhi" are doing it deliberately or even even callously. There's obviously some phonetic/linguistic reason for this error, that it somehow gravitates to the 'Gh...". Not a big deal fellas, really. Now Gumbi is a whole different story.
Nice riposte Nina. This cartoon back and forth is so much better than Yo mama stuff.
They had one of those stupid jokes abt call centers in Transformers... Jeez.. its like flogging a dead horse, I mean how much mileage can one get out of the same joke!
Alot.
@Sandeep
May be not that big a deal, but generally speaking pointing out to someone spelling Gandhi the wrong is definitely something positive, I mean I wouldn't care if someone got my name wrong, unless I worked with them or lived with them. I'm sure I won't take a crash course in spellings or linguistics :), but you know a small wrong spelling can be horrific to the reader.Anyway, when it comes to correcting people about the right spelling of Gandhi, I would more often than not refrain from taking some kind of action.
i think it's kinda of odd to mix gandhi and call centers.
are these the only two images of india that the common americans recognize?
and agreed with the person above, outsourcing jokes are tired.
To parallel DJDP, one would have to outsource something to the US I suppose.
M M on the wall,
who has the worst combover of them all?
Donald Trump!
This mirror has been outsourced to the US!
I think it's good. Good jokes are good jokes, irrespective of how often the topic has been used. So saying outsourcing jokes are 'tired' is to lump good and bad jokes together. One might say the same thing about all overused topics - Bush jokes, or Bin Laden jokes, but we're not tired of them, are we? Just as Bush jokes are about Bush, not Americans, outsourcing jokes are about outsourcing to India, not about all Indians. No need to read racism into everything.
Concatenatrix is brown
pretty funny (both versions)
BTW, Ghandy is a legitimate last name (not sure about Ghandi); IG's husband was "Feroze Ghandy".
How did she end up with the name Indira Gandhi?
She could have changed it to conform with the way the Mahatma spelt it. I can't confirm how Feroze spelt his name before marriage, but I do know that Indian Parsis often use the spellings 'Ghandi' or 'Ghandy'. Sir Jehangir Ghandy for example, was a big man at TISCO. The name 'Ghandi' also exists among Arabs. But the spelling 'Gandhi' has so hegemonized usage and on the internet, that googling 'Ghandi' will give you hits for 'Gandhi' by default, because google assumes you misspelt it, and actually mean 'Gandhi'! I had to go 'ghandi not gandhi' to get my listing.
My guess is that Gandhi was/is politically a more useful name than Ghandy ;-) I think the husband was a Parsi. I just googled "Feroze Ghandy", and saw a claim that Pandit Nehru was behind the name change, but then again you can't believe everything you read on the internet!
*GASP!* You CAN'T??? There goes all the 'common knowledge' I've picked up over the years.
Well, it would seem that you are in a bit of a pickle...
She also kept 'Nehru' as her middle name, though she didn't use it much.
Oh well, it'll still be an interesting bit of trivia for cocktail parties; I just won't appear on Jeopardy anytime soon.
When I read the cartoon I was struck with another scenario. If a mirror like that exists it might as well say Mahatma Gandhi is the fairest person (read: fair minded). Like, he came close to the man of the millennia in polls. This is purely my personal reflection.
I suppose this is a fair (no pun intended) assumption, but honestly I think it started as an outsourcing joke and the cartoonist used M.K.Gandhi as the most widely known Indian (because it couldn't have used Filipino outsourcing as an example) by average Americans. It seems dated(just because Gandhi is no longer alive) and unfunny to me, but then everything seems to pale in comparison when run next to Marmaduke and The Family Circus.
Doesn't the Mahatma with the Gandhi automatically mean that we are talking about Rahul Gandhi?
Rahul Gandhi seems to me to be an, ummm..., interesting character. I haven't found a lot of concrete information on his background - educational or professional. And he seems to me to be one of those people about whom you might want to be careful what you say. I read in Wikipedia that "[his] legal affairs team has taken a number of heavy-handed measures to prevent damage to his image".
Rahul Gandhi's legal affairs team has taken a number of heavy-handed measures to prevent damage to his image. For example, when Newsweek alleged in late 2006 that he had not completed his degrees at Harvard and Cambridge or kept his job at the Monitor Group, they were slapped with a legal notice, following which they hastily retracted or qualified their earlier statements.[19].
I don't know whether remarking on the odd state of being Indian in America, and dealing with the dual problem of skin color bias in Indian culture and anti-color racism in America here on the internet among ourselves is healthy and cathartic or actually a way of avoiding any real or meaningful acts in response to problems we perceive with the society we live in. Sometimes, I think I only voice my complaints here in essentially secret then return back to my public life in the white world I inhabit. And those of us dating white guys and girls wouldn't dare to have this conversation with our significant others. It's a bit schizophrenic in a way.
Hey guys. I know I'm replying pretty late, but I felt compelled to make the following points:
1. I cannot take credit for the caption in the "remixed" WSJ cartoon. Though he's too much of a gentelman to claim it (as evidenced by the fact that he's already posted twice and said nary a word), the honor belongs to our own and venerable Chachaji. I found his punchline to be much funnier than the original and wanted to give him a chance to have his revision actualized.
2. I do acknowledge that the second cartoon stereotypes whites as racist and, though I do not agree with that obvious generalization, the whole point of my detournement was to subvert the original work and mock those who would probably have found it funny.
3. Excellent job, Nina!