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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

#91
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I said that "much of the problems in the deep South in the United States are due to the prominence of Christianity in their culture" nobody would bat an eye, and nobody would read it as being anti-Christian. Denying that there are very real problems within the Islamic world, some of which are core to the religion, is an example of naivete, ignorance, or propaganda.

Consider my eye batted. I don't think Jesus was a huge proponent of slaves.

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

#92
No ad will ever beat this diet coke ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmBDeswu2dI

Now diet coke, IMHO, is crap and I won't drink the stuff but I can watch this ad over and over again. Can one of you marketing geniuses in the audience tell me why it is so awesome? :)

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

#93
The India Pakistan separation has left a scar on the hearts of several generations. Power hungry and religious fanatics caused this separation. Today's youth view the separation as a boon, but the million people killed in the riots and other millions made homeless still haunts and affects the geopolitics of the region.

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

#94
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a very different take on this book - instead of copy pasting, I'll just point you to my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/627096724

Sounds like you were looking for a polemic and were disappointed to documentary work instead. Strangely enough I lerned a great deal about colonial misrule of India from reading the same book, but that doesn't make the viewpoints of the pro-empire participants less interesting.

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

#95

The Ad also has short sequels as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0lzSb0m1cs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYVoM8tgbvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltXy9tGqlT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_Ke3iyfac

Thanks for these links.

Just a bit unlikely that Ali would be able to read 'saunf' in Devanagari, isn't it?

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

#97
post #41
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…

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

Try Serbo-Croatian[1]. But OTOH, most Slavic languages are fairly similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

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

#98
post #46

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…

> and much of their problems are due Islam having such a central role in the identify of the country. Not really. The East Pakistan/West Pakistan war (which resulted in an independant Bangladesh) was between Muslim groups with little religious difference, but huge language, class, and cultral bigotry, with the Urdu-speaking West Pakistani-dominated millitary having a significant role. Islam was pretty irrelevant. And…

It brings me memories of the violent riots because certain stores were celebrating Valentines Day in India.

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

#99
post #41
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…

Hindi and Urdu are two completely different languages. Hindi has more words from Sanskrit. Urdu borrows more words from Farsi (If I am not wrong) and due to political reasons covers some holes with words from English. I am a native Hindi speaker. I can understand 80-90% of Urdu but cannot appreciate Urdu poetry etc. To give an analogy its like African Elephant & Indian Elephant. Different species.

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

#100
post #3

This is a beautiful ad and will make you emotional. As a person of Indian background I was able to relate to it easily but I wonder what others think of it? Are you able to feel the strong emotions based on reading subtitles or does language hamper the feelings and it loses its impact. Kudos to the team involved in this and thanks for posting this.

The feeling of being separated from someone you love and missing them deeply is pretty universal. I tear up every time I see the ad.
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