hindi

I recently set the ‘question paper’ for the Hindi Word Games General Championship (GC) 1 at IIT Bombay. Here are the links to the question set and the solutions. As part of the competition, I decided to put in a round of Hindi Cryptic Puzzles. Cryptic Crosswords are very popular in English, but haven’t got much of a traction in the Hindi world. Regular crossword puzzles are fairly common—I remember solving the crossword in the Dainik Bhaskar growing up, but cryptics are relatively unchartered territory.

As you may have read, Facebook has attracted the anger of—and I swear there is no other way to put it—the Chutiya community from Assam by blocking many Facebook profiles which mentioned Chutiya as their last name. This is of course a bit ironic coming from a company who’s CEO’s sister is named Randi (Hindi insult meaning prostitute), but let’s not digress. For those who don’t know Hindi, Chutiya is an expletive that means fool/idiot but is pretty offensive and insulting.

Back in November, I discussed what happened when Tom Cruise used machine translation to connect to his Indians fans. Since I am in Japan, I come across bad English translations on a daily basis. I hadn’t posted any on Linguistrix because Chinglish/Janglish is very common stuff and you get them dime by the dozen. But today I found this one that is incomprehensible in at least two languages (I have to check up my Chinese friend to find out whether it makes any more sense in Chinese than it does in English/Hindi.