Since the Dashain - Tihar festival season started, I've noticed these Pepsi signs appearing over storefronts. It is an interesting marketing campaign by Pepsi to capitalize on the Christmas-like festivity of the season. Check it out:
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| da-shaí ti-ha-r |
I've never seen iconic "American-style" graffiti like that anywhere in Kathmandu, not in Roman letters or in Devanagari. I guess it is pretty instantly recognizable as American, though. And the figures along the left and right (in the first picture) are all wearing Western-style clothing but one of them is doing a traditional Dashain activity: he is holding a spool attached to a kite.
This recent set of posts is awesome--just got the chance to read through them all. I'm glad that you're thinking so much about the stuff you like thinking about, and getting paid for it!
ReplyDeleteDo you think you'd like working on marketing campaigns like this?
ReplyDeleteI read an article yesterday about a British man who travels the world to advise cell phone companies. He studies people and thinks of ways cell phones could be helpful to people on a daily basis. In one example, cell phone minutes, which can be exchanged, are used as currency in places where there is no infrastructure to transfer money any other way.
Dude! What you say about cell phones is pretty cool. I got the cheapest cell phone I could buy here, but it has one thing on it that is essential in Nepal but that I have never seen on a cell phone before: a flashlight. We're up to five hours a day of blackouts and by February it will be 16, so this is something that is uniquely necessary in Nepal. The money transfer thing I have heard of but don't really know how it would work.
ReplyDeleteI was at a Linguistics conference where people were talking about crowdsourcing the compilation of dictionaries of undescribed languages. They did it with computers set up in village centers but mentioned that cellphones might be the way to go. The guy said that these days up to a third of the people in some of these villages use cellphones. A native speaker interested in documenting the language can take pictures and record the sounds of a word (and maybe get paid for it in cellphone minutes? that would be super hard to regulate).