A contestant uses the new '50/50 wifeline'
MUMBAI: KBC contestant Mr. R. Thaneja was in for a big surprise when his wife answered the phone at his best friends house. Not to be outdone by the brief awkward moment that followed, the couple quickly got their priorities straight and pulled through with a sterling performance. A transcript of the conversation is reproduced for the benefit of our readers:
BigB: Guptaji, mein Amitabh Bachchan KBC se bol raha hun…
Mrs.T: Amitabhji! Mein aapka bahut bada pankha hun! Boliye sir.
BigB: Madam, Kya Guptaji ghar pe nahin hain?
Mrs.T: Nahin, woh bahar gaye hain… Bisleri khareedne ke liye.
BigB: Achcha theek hain. Mr.Thaneja aap se ek sawal puchenge. Aglee awaaz unki hogi.
Mrs.T: Thaneja? Kaun Thaneja, Mere Pathi ® ???!!!
Mr.T: (brief pause) Haan darling, Mein hun…
Mrs.T: Jaldi boliye, aap ke paas sirf 30 seconds hain.
Mr.T: Achcha suno: What is the spelling of ‘Faux Pas’? (A)Foxpass, (B)Faux Pas, (C)Hauz Khas (D)Katmandu ?
Mrs.T: Question dubara padiye – sawal mein hi jawab likha hoga!
Mr.T: Idea bahut achcha hai. Thank you darling.
Speaking to newsmen after coolly walking away with a 10,000 rupee prize he said, “It was sheer luck that my wife picked up the phone. Gupta would probably have panicked and given the wrong answer”. Mr. Gupta admitted that he most likely would have wasted those 30 seconds on some totally unhelpful guilt trip.
Parliament to have more caps, less impact.
NEW DELHI: Lok Sabha speaker Mr. Balayogi has come down strongly on house members who insist on using Impact to get across their point. “The current trend of using uppercase Impact for dramatic effect is most disturbing. Kindly desist from using it while discussing matters of national importance and confine yourselves to something less obvious like Arial or Times New Roman,” Mr. Balayogi ruled.
Speaking in alternately in Book Antiqua and Goudy Heavyface, CPI(M) leader Mr. Somnath Chatterjee protested that neither Arial nor Times New Roman reflected the true aspirations of the Indian people. “while arial is cold and corporate, times new roman cruelly mocks the masses with its elitist elegance. i submit that only courier new has enough bureaucratic splendour to express the quiet desperation of the indian ethos,” he observed. The speaker then questioned Mr. Chatterjee as to why he was not using capitals for pronouns and while beginning sentences. A defiant Mr. Chatterjee then held up a copy of Das Capital and thundered, “because i’m not a stinking capitalist, thats why”. Pandemonium ensued, with members rushing to the well of the house chanting slogans in Garamond and Tigerteeth. It was then up to Mr. Vajpayee who muttered something witty in Comic Sans MS, provoking peals of laughter even from the opposition benches. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi was heard to titter in Helvetica. The MPs finally adopted a resolution to refrain from using Impact and to be more case sensitive in future.
The Borsuk-Ulam Theorem says that any odd map f from Sn to itself has odd degree. Here f is called odd if it is equivariant with respect to the antipodal map: f(-s)=–f(s).
Visit the egg math site for the full proof and more exciting results as they happen.
(Issued in the public interest)
NEW DELHI: Cable news channels have turned the tables on the government by asking it to impose stricter guidelines on a society that was obscene, full of violence, and clearly unfit for television. A representative says: “Just look at the kind of news we’re forced to broadcast. Caste violence, dowry deaths, corruption in high places, police complicity, and if that was not enough, match-fixing and lachrymose cricketers. Society has single-handedly ruined the news, which we originally positioned as a ‘feel good’ type of show meant for younger viewers. The govt needs to take into account these young impressionable minds and restrict the perverse content of society, otherwise television is never going to improve.”
NEW DELHI: The Don King of Indian Software has again rejected pleas from various sections of the media to get that haircut. Photographers have been complaining about how difficult it is to get a close-up of Mr. Mehta without abruptly truncating a good part of his hairdo. A well known landscape photographer observes: “Its making all of us miserable and hurting our pride. It poses an open challenge to all forms of visual media and to civil society in general”. Mr. Mehta is however dismissive: “There are ways to get around the problem. For example, you could use a wide-angle lens and take a vertical snap. Or you could take a high resolution snap from a good distance and then use an image editor to zoom-in. Its really not that big a deal.”
