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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

#231

Post by GrinningFool »

wavefunction wrote: post #227
GrinningFool wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) They aren't? Why not? b) You seem to be changing the nature of your objection. First you imply that they're under fire now because of privacy issues, then when GP points out they're always under fire for something you say that's no excuse to let them off the hook. If you believe they're releasing this specifically because they're under fire, by that criteria it's never OK for them to release a "feelgood" ad. As I…

>>Google has been releasing feelgood ads for years Starting with "don't be evil." Whether Google has lived up to those lofty goals in the intervening years of working with the Chinese Government, the NSA, etc., I will leave to the reader to decide.

A bit of a deflection. My point is that advertising is released to advertise (a brand in this case) and there doesn't necessarily need to be nefarious purpose - beyond the basic manipulation of emotions to sell product.

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

#233

Post by swatkat »

known wrote: post #194

Are these Actors from Pakistan?

No, they're are Indians. It's made by Ogilvy & Mather, India.

Cast info: http://www.missmalini.com/2013/11/15/have-you-watched-the-go...

Production info: http://www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/November-2013-Camp...

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

#234

Post by dmytrish »

phillc73 wrote: post #172
dsrguru wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not convinced your Polish-Russian-Ukrainian example is correct. My wife is from the west of Ukraine, and her home language is Ukrainian. However, she is totally fluent in Russian, as to be expected from someone growing up during the Soviet era. Both Ukrainian and Russian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Polish uses Roman letters. She finds Polish fairly easy to understand, from an aural point of v…

I'm agree that the grandparent example is, uhm, weird: it rather reflects Poles' and Ukrainians' knowledge of Russian language than some unbiased inter-intelligibility.

Polish language is quite close to Ukrainian in regard of vocabulary and maybe grammar, but is quite different phonetically and does not use Cyrillic like Russian.

Still, I can't agree that Ukraine is _ethnically_ divided in halves, ethnic Russians are near 17% of the population. Language question is much more vague, I think that more than 50% of Ukrainian population use Russian on daily basis (though it's hard to say how many of them use a mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect, surzhyk and a lot of people actively use both languages) and it's very hard to find someone who does not understand Ukrainian and Russian at the same time.

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

#235

Post by drivingmenuts »

devnetfx wrote: 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.

Texan here. The ad series is great - I don't necessarily relate to the India/Pakistan split well, but the emotion presented in the ad is quite easy to relate to.

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

#236

Post by driverdan »

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…

> Dude, that's like a guy from Alabama saying someone from England speaks a different language.

Related story: I grew up in northeastern USA. When I was young someone from Scotland came in for business. I went fishing with him and my dad. I had a hard time understanding most of what he said.

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

#237

Post by mnazim »

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…

The irony with Hindi/Urdu is that both nations(or people of the nations) made it an issue of National pride.

India Sanskrit-ized it, Pakistan Persian-ized and Arab-ized it. Otherwise both were basically the same languages with different scripts.

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

#239

Post by san86 »

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

Probably not all across India. I am from the south and neither me nor my ancestors have any personal experiences from the partition. Don't get me wrong.. this is a great ad and I understand the emotion behind it. but this is only as moving as a similar story on the Israel-Palestine border(ok maybe a little more because of my high school history books and representation in popular culture). Culturally, South India is more seperated from the North compared with North India (Punjab, Delhi, Kashmir) and Western regions of Pakistan.

To me this is a well produced ad which highlights the troubles of a particularly cruel time in India's history. Nothing personal about it.

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