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This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

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Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#61

Post by charlieflowers »

baldfat wrote: post #44
InclinedPlane wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pakistan is a pretty screwed up country in a great many ways, and much of their problems are due to Islam having such a central role in the identify of the country. I think they have the capacity to get past their problems but they have as difficult a problem ahead of them as does Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon. On a meta-level it's fascinating how the vast majority of countries in the world still tend to be mono-ethnic "na…

well that anti-Islam rant might work IF there was no Islamic nation that wasn't peaceful.

I think you have a quadruple negative going on there. Not trying to nitpick, but it was too hard for my currently sleepy brain to parse.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#62

Post by anuragramdasan »

notatoad wrote: post #53
jtchang wrote: post #26

Amazing work! What strikes me most is how little the language matters. You don't even have to watch it with subtitles to see how solid the editing was. Kudos to the entire team that worked on these videos.

the subtitles might have been a bit more necessary if all the on-screen text wasn't in english. That seemed like a strange choice for an ad produced by Google India.

I really wouldn't be able to find my way around the internet or on my cellphone if all the text were in Hindi. It stands true for most Indians.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#64

Post by r0h1n »

Colour me cynical, but when a corporation is under fire from consumers, regulators and activists, a soppy and heartstring-tugging ad is exactly what the doctors order.

It is literally Google saying, "Oh look, cute puppies!" when faced with a global barrage of criticism about its disdain for user privacy or its own past promises.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#65

Post by dsrguru »

JPKab wrote: post #41
selmnoo wrote: post #2

This is the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGDN9-oFJE - be sure to have subtitles on (unless you understand Hindi). One interesting observation about the ad: the search results that the girl deems to be good and informative are almost all Wikipedia hits. It's actually pretty similar to my situation: Google is basically a better Wikipedia searching tool than what Wikipedia provides.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names.

Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin!

It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#66

Post by Wingman4l7 »

mikeash wrote: post #27
selmnoo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't want to go to far on an off-topic tangent, but basically what I was getting at was that I increasingly seem to be interested in a very limited number of sites -- that is, mostly, sites that I already know of and recognize. I use Reddit search more when I'm doing exploratory searching hoping to land on a site I've never been before, because it serves me already vetted/reviewed sites. In this way, Google is no…

It is an interesting point. Google has become as much a substitute for the address bar as a way to find new things.

(If you don't have bookmarks or don't keep a browsing history / don't know how to use URL autocompletion).

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#67

Post by coldtea »

anigbrowl wrote: post #12
capex wrote: post #7

Behind the division of the sub-continent lies a great debate, that of Jinnah vs Gandhi. Was it the true aspiration of the people to get divided geographically while getting independence from British rule? It seems the divide happened because of some ideology driven people (Iqbal) who convinced other leaders (Jinnah) to pursue it. Today, this is a raging battle in Pakistan, did Pakistan ever need to be an independent…

For those interested in history, Freedom at Midnight is a great documentary book on the liberation and subsequent partition of India: http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-at-Midnight-Dominique-Lapierre... It's a sad fact that the departure of the British Empire from various colonial possessions frequently resulted in a power vacuum followed by deep internal conflicts which remain problematic today - Ireland, Israel, and Ind…

>It's a sad fact that the departure of the British Empire from various colonial possessions frequently resulted in a power vacuum followed by deep internal conflicts which remain problematic today - Ireland, Israel, and India being three obvious examples.

Not a "sad fact". It's how the "british empire" planned it, melticulously and with great effort and cunning.

It's a result of their "divide and conquer" way of ruling, in their colonial era, and it's something they pursued afterwards in order to keep it's post colonial grip on those places. With lackeys, puppet governments et al.

Oh, and add Cyprus/Nothern Cyprus, Ethiopia/Eritrea etc to the mix.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#68

Post by IndianEngineer »

kunai wrote: post #51
JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

Urdu and Hindu are essentially the same thing -- except one is written in classic Indian devanagari Sanskrit-style script, and the other is written in Arabic script. And, of course, regional dialect -- but really, those distinctions are excusable in daily speaking. The related language families are just so related across the board -- Marathi, Punjabi, and Hindi -- that one can pick up the other with just a bit of pra…

Not really. Im Indian but not a native Hindi speaker. I have trouble understanding Urdu, where as Hindi seems more natural to me.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#69

Post by hrkristian »

dsrguru wrote: post #65
JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…

The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other.

However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May the same apply to Poland and the Ukraine?

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#70

Post by philthesong »

r0h1n wrote: post #64

Colour me cynical, but when a corporation is under fire from consumers, regulators and activists, a soppy and heartstring-tugging ad is exactly what the doctors order . It is literally Google saying, "Oh look, cute puppies!" when faced with a global barrage of criticism about its disdain for user privacy or its own past promises.

We'll promise you that we won't be evil...;)

= We have too much dangerous information that will turn us into a monster, so don't blame us when that happens

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