The symbiotic relationship that social media and its user base enjoys is indeed the core concept of many a web based enterprise. It is yet to determine if users leverage the internet as a platform to establish their own forte or there is a strange kind of digital kinship that binds this internet savvy generation. The crowd-sourced South Asian language and culture website 'Samosapedia', happens to be one of my favourite and most visited websites, simply for the fact that it dove into the phenomenon of user generated content and came out with side-splitting results.
It was probably correctly said about digital enterprises, by one of the Winklevoss twins in the Hollywood blockbuster “The Social Network” that ‘reaching there first is all that matters’. Samosapedia, for that matter, is the world’s first and so far the largest repository of South Asian Lingo, thanks to some quirky brain storming by its founders - Vikram Bhaskaran, Arun Ranganathan, Braxton Robbason and Arvind Thyagarajan. The website founded in 2011 is a definitive guide to South Asian Lingo, available in a dictionary format with some hilarious citations. Whether you’re in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Trinidad, Queens or Uganda, or grew up near Brick Lane in London or the Bay Area, South Asian English is bindaas; Samosapedia is the absolute stop where you can pick up this lingo and be the grandmaster in it.
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| Photo by Parmita Borah |
Named after the most famous snack in Indian cuisine Samosa, Samosapedia is a part dictionary, part inside joke for more than 1.5 billion people. It provides the exact meaning, synonym and usage of “Frainship” and what it means when your mother is ‘eating your head’. The ability to speak in English holds a direct pass to upward social mobility in India, thanks to two centuries of British Raj. Mastering the phonetics and vocabulary in the queen’s language is a prestige issue in this part of the world, and of utmost importance. However, English has encountered ‘hazaar tweakings’ ranging from funny, to absolute bizarre. Samosapedia is probably best described as an encyclopaedia to those dialects.
So while meetings get postponed all over the world, only in South Asia do they get "preponed," instead of moved ahead of schedule. If your South Asian friend wants to tell you a "non-veg" joke, be prepared for some dirty humor.
Samosapedia’s ‘Jhakaas’ content and ‘bindaas’ attitude has earned it visibility in CNN, Huffington Post, The Globe and Mail, Live Mint, Wall Street Journal and a range of other media outlets. Lage Raho guys!
-by Parmita Borah