This week the popular parody site Onion is featuring India in its Our Dumb World series. The series is basically a caricature (or call it a skin developed by Onion) built on top of Google Earth with funny, and at times quite outlandish, quips about various Points Of Interest around the world.

As expected, when it comes to western humor on India, the stereotypes run galore. India gained prominence in the western popular culture by riding primarily on its success in tech related services. Among other things, this handle was seized by the professional joke writers as well who used it as creative fodder in their businesses. Popular examples are most Indian jokes in shows like Jay Leno/David Lettermen, Dilbert’s Asok or as we see in this case, Onion. indian fun, offshoring india, onion article on india, tech call india, tech support funny

Given the excruciating circumstances of our nation’s birth, Indians everywhere today can be proud of their country and its achievements. (Although we still have a long way to go). But if somebody makes fun of things Indian, our success has given us this much strength that we can take the ribbing in good humor and specifically, without getting offensive about it.

Onion doesn’t have a reputation of mincing its words. So if you read their articles for the first time, it may seem like they are making pointed, offensive remarks. But rest assured, I have been reading them for a long time and can definitely vouch that they are an equal opportunity butt kicker with no agenda except spoofs. funny indian article, funny indian news report, india around the world, india outsource funny,

 

Here’s another gem on the site – For nearly 200 years, England ruled over 500 million people on six continents-a time in which it was commonly said that the sun never set on the British Empire. Today, however, the sun sets on the British Empire at precisely 5:47 p.m. GMT.

Head over to Onion for more of this.

Ratan Tata has done it again. The whole country is damn proud of what he has accomplished.

Some time back I had seen this funny captioned image at the Lolcat website which depicts another perspective of what it means to be riding a Jaguar.

 

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The new 3-D search engine on the block SearchMe is giving out Beta invites. You might wanna quickly grab one while they are still out there.

SearchMe is a totally different way to search for information on the internet. Right now their indexed database is relatively small, about a billion documents but going by their capabilities in the introductory video, they sure seem to be on their way to revolutionize the whole Search game plan.

Watch their video or go to their site directly and sign up for a beta invite.

[youtube:http://www./watch?v=BZSpjXEvy1I]

A few days back I had profiled a new Digg like service called Blogsvine. They have been kind enough to respond favorably by putting my site on their home page. Blogsvine is just couple of weeks/months old but personally I get more traffic directed from them than any other news aggregator.

By building a great startup and managing to sell it for a cool €3.2 million. Along with their partners, Kulveer and Harjet started  an online service Auctomatic that describes its mission as empowering online sellers through various features. The tools proffered by Auctomatic asssit a user in maximizing their potential in online selling sites like eBay, Amazon, Overstock etc.

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Guess how much do the founders Sergey and Larry, and CEO of Google Eric Schmidt pay themselves?

Finally the search engine giant has filed its 2008 proxy statement which shows what insane amounts these guys pay themselves as Salary at Google:

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Indian government has given Research In Motion, the makers of Blackberry, and country’s telecom companies an ultimatum – enable the state security agencies to monitor contents transmitted on Blackberry within 15 days or face license suspension.

RIM apparently has a “fool-proof” security system in place to encrypt the messages when they are transmitted from one user to another and government agencies have so far been unable to crack this beast.

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When I started TechBanyan, calculated in blog years, I was a bit of a green horn and shortsighted. To me then, starting a blog meant getting the domain name, installing WordPress and from then on concentrating on the posts.

However to maximize the potential of your blog, there’s a lot of in-between that you need to perform. For instance, there are some tweaks and absolute must-have plugins that would go a long way in making your blog a huge success.

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Apple Mac Air commercial is one of the best ads in recent memory. Because of its phenomenal appeal, from Yael Naim’s background score to using that distinct manila envelope, it should come as no surprise that many would be inspired to carry it further by directing their own version of it, and a funny one at that.

There were a little over 250 parodies of it on Youtube when we went live with this post. More are being continually added every day. After studying a whole bunch of them over a period of couple of days (it would be insane to commit to check out all of them) and ranking them using the following benchmarks – Funny, Originality, Slick video editing, Youtube views, comments and favorited, I have short listed the following videos.

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Most of you must be familiar with news and links aggregator sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StummbleUpon etc. Another peer web service called Blogsvine has been launched and which can be used by Bloggers to increase traffic to their sites.

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