‘Congratulations India, you made it to Buzzfeed,” reads a website’s headline. It is referring to a humorous list of ‘Indianisms’, the linguistic faux pas and spelling mistakes unique to our country which have found pride of place on Buzzfeed.
Titled ‘29 Spelling Mistakes From India That Will Make You Laugh, Cry, And Gag,’ the post, like everything else on the website, offers a quickly-consumable easy laugh. ‘Launch’ instead of ‘lunch’, ‘Moms’ instead of momos, ‘Cock’ instead of Coke – these are spelling mistakes we’ve all seen in menus and hoardings, especially in small, cheap shops, salons, and restaurants.
It’s great, it’s funny, and everyone has a quick snigger – but don’t fool yourself. You’re not ‘in on the joke’. You’re not ‘laughing at yourself’. You’re not the opposite of those ‘PC Indians’ who can’t take a bit of ribbing.
Many will argue that a lot of self-deprecatory humour is based on making fun of ourselves. That laughing at ourselves is a key element towards the move to a more mature and enlightened society. And it’s true that the thin-skinned nationalism which made us bristle at the slightest jab at our culture has mostly disappeared in the online world. But it has been replaced instead by an elitism that makes us – the hip, educated Indian – A-okay with laughing at the grammatical fumblings of a subsection of society that isn’t quite as fluent in English. A class of Indians we are so separated from, they might as well be from another country. The online Indians, however, see no humour in jokes that make fun of middle class aspirations, or the language we use to express them.
CNN last month featured an article called ‘Ten classic Indianisms: Doing the needful, and more’. The article featured turn of phrases that are astonishingly common amongst all of us – ‘passing out’ to describe graduation not extreme intoxication, ‘years back’ instead of ‘years ago’, and ‘ordering for’ a pizza, as opposed to just ordering one. The list hit too close to the bone for many and the well-written article was instantly besieged in the comments section attacking it as ‘uninformed’ and ‘prejudiced’.
Anger over the article even prompted some to go off into lyrical tangents about the nature of English. “English is a beautiful language because it is like a river, it absorbs, it synthesises and creates flavours that are not found in any other language,” said one commenter. Indeed.
It’s alright to mock an underpaid sign painter’s poor grasp of English spelling, but how about we share a chuckle over ‘The 29 Mistakes the Indian Call Centre Guy Made While Trying to Sound American.’ Or may be we can giggle at ‘The 29 fashion faux pas of Indian tourists in Europe.’ These ideas will outrage the very same people who laughed at the grammatical mistakes. Because no, we don’t laugh at ourselves. We only laugh at others.
The kind of language-based humour used by the Buzzfeed article is hardly unique. Making fun of bad English is an upper class pastime in India. But the article itself deserves attention because it’s on Buzzfeed. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Buzzfeed on the internet landscape today. While some have hailed it as the ‘new journalism,’ at the moment it consists mostly of humourous GIFs and images which are shared and liked at dizzying speed. Almost everything on the site goes viral across the globe.
When an Indian-based humour piece is shared hundreds of time on the site, how we respond reveals the face we like to present to an ironic, self-deprecating internet society. So, of course, the Buzzfeed article couldn’t find a single person to defend the virtues of confusing ‘prone’ with ‘porn’. ‘Indians are not PC’ said one commenter benignly to the lone voice that protested through a Facebook comment. Of course they’re not – as long as you don’t laugh at them.
Here’s how you tell if a joke at the expense of a community is good or not. View it from both sides – from the side of the person telling the joke, and from the point of view of the person the joke is on. In the Buzzfeed case, when it’s viewed from the other perspective, it reveals itself as arrogant at best, and needlessly cruel at worst.
