Aabhas Sharma visits a website that’s collecting desi lingo from across South Asia.
Sidey”, “Shame, shame, poppy shame”, “Izzat ka falooda” and “Mother Promise” are words or phrases which all of us have used at least once — or even more — in our lives. Words which caught on colloquially but never revealed their true meaning. Not anymore as www.samosapedia.com explains the meanings of words and phrases commonly used by South Asians.
Founded by Vikram Bhaskaran, Arun Ranganathan, Braxton Robbason and Arvind Thyagarajan, Samosapedia is, as Ranganathan puts it, “a community for the community.” It started off as a conversation between Rangarajan and Bhaskaran about creating a lexicon for desi lingo. From there it morphed into a portal for “nostalag(ind)ia” (Indian nostalgia). “We then enlisted two other goondas — Braxton Robasson who is an ace technologist and Arvind Thyagarajan a childhood friend and design guru, to make this happen,” adds Bhaskaran.
The founders have been involved in start-ups, strategy consulting, software engineering and other things. “We felt that the native language speakers have a sense of responsibility to pass on the dialects and the wonderful words they come up with,” says Ranganathan who “absconds in New York”. The founders keep in touch over mails and social networking sites and take turns to moderate the site.
The founders are located in San Francisco and New York. “We invite people to send their words and then we moderate them and put them on the website,” explains Ranganathan. “We want words to be funny, unique, creative and informative. We plan to expand it to other media — videos and pictures
The name samosapedia came along as all of them have a fondness for samosas, they say. “We want to build a cultural and language guide on the web that has the breadth and scope of Wikipedia but the lightness and fun of hot samosa,” says Bhaskaran. Add to that samosas are also universally loved across South Asia and also have global appeal, he adds. In Tamil, samosapedia means “hold the samosa”. The original name for the site was going to be “wonly.in” in the sense that it happens only in India.
If you browse through the site, you will see a lot of the words have south Indian influence, like “Arrust thum” — how a Malayali police officer would say arrest them — and “Aiyyo”. “No, we try to keep words from all over the country and beyond,” says Bhaskaran.
At the moment, the word bank at samosapedia has over 4,000 words and is growing by the day. “Sometimes people send inane words as well as racist words, so it takes time in weeding those out,” says Ranganathan.
But do they plan to monetise the site? “No plans at all and we are doing this for fun and the love for language,” says Bhaskaran. The idea is for people to have fun. So there are categories like “Daily Chutney” which are the words of the day. “We want people to contribute words and have fun at samosapedia.” The idea is as samosapedia would put it, “to chillofy” and have fun.
