What do you do to keep your identity, when in a group? Some people have the god gifted originality and they always show up. Let's not talk about them, but the rest.
Now there are two subgroups in this category. They both lack in originality, though one of them manages to device some unique (and hence their original) way to shine up themselves. To give you a feel of what we are upto: Consider you are in a group of 6-7 people chatting on the zulu culture in the southern honolulu. The discussion is on gas, when suddenly one of you, who was silent all along starts making un-humanly voices meaning something like "Eureka, now I know how to quantize the YM gauge theory in conformaly flat SxR(n) space." And he is gone even before we realise his more than zuluish performance. They are never our cup of tea..so let's forget about them, too.
The second subgroup is far more interesting. They lack in originality and still seek importance very badly. Now, if you can't be the longest of the lines, try to make others shorter....not original: Birbal's idea. Or as Mr. Khera says "Great people don't do different things, they do things differently". If one says "this is north", they will point opposite, saying "I don't know if that is true, but for sure this has to be south".
how will you write today's date? The most logical way, devised long back by the british was equivalent of saying it is twentieth day of the third month of the year 2006, 20.03.2006, in short. So a british will write a date according to day/month/year. Later came USA. Though late comer, important. Also, it has a protesting, rebel image in the world history. Now, they can't start with their own original calendar...thik hain...we do things differently.....they write the date according to month/day/year pattern. If not USA, who gives you good status?...right...Canada...ab, hum bhi kuchh kum nahi...a canadian will write the date following year/month/day pattern. Then comes europeans, japanese,...But, they don't understand english....that is their identity!
In all, I think Japanese is the most confused system. There are two streams. One believes in their self-sufficiency. The other takes the history a bit seriously....this stream knows why USA was the winner...and hence trying to copy and adopt to the US culture.....overall result is...they are confused....they don't know english...but enjoy uttering in english.
Here, one observes a co-existence of year/day/month and month/day/year system, with an added adventure of Japanese script, which will never reveal which one is month slot and which one is the day! If you are lucky you will celebrate your birthday twice a year.....alas, no chance for a double valentine's!
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8 comments:
I realized it is too difficult to juggle between these two date formats, when all work related mails (with overseas colleagues) used American format and rest dd/mm/yyyy format. Then I switched to
"dd Month-Name yyyy" format whereever possible.
Thankfully, most of the companies now print the instructions for filling date. Sounds funny, but extremely helpful!
actually its no so bad I think...
both mm/dd/yy and yy/dd/mm tell you the date accurately and unambiguously which is easy to forget. month and year we remember right.
so may be the japanese are very smart!
in fact the confusion that dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy creates is far more severe, imho
shashi
So you in stream, afterall...
that's is a good thing to instruct the user...but only when in a language user understands...:-)
certainly not the case here!
voice within
I paid my rentals here on 06th march 2006 and the date I was supposed to put was
(something) 06 (something) 03 (something) 06
(something)=japanese kanji symbols for day/onth/year etc.
Now, I can understand it is 2006/03/06...but a person, auditing after say almost one year will hardly be able to know, without prior info.
well, 06/03/06 is symmetric...so if one knows that its written as either yy/dd/mm or mm/dd/yy one will know that it was 3rd June 06...
i think you intended to write that the japanese use dd/mm/yy and yy/dd/mm or something like that?
6th June 2006 (06/06/06) should be declared as Global calender day or something like that!
Vivek
good point :-)
but then there are atleast 12 such days in each century
(i/i/i) for 0< i <13
Voice Within
my whole point was, unless you have the rule to read it, you won't know if it is dd/mm/yy or dd/yy/mm or yy/mm/dd or yy/dd/mm or mm/yy/dd or mm/dd/yy
and we remember month and year for today's date...what if you are a bank worker or rather a private auditor?
@Vivek: Sixth day of the six month of the two thousand sixth year of Anno Domini is my copyleft. That is my idea of "First Perfect Date" in Orkut. If you quote my idea, give appropriate attribution.
Amit
that way the most general expression came from me. So yours is just a special case of mine...doesn't count much on records:((
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