User talk:Mowgli

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[edit] A long-overdue welcome

Hello, Mowgli, and welcome to Uncyclopedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If not, the door's right over there... no, a little more to your left... yeah. Anyway, here are a few good links for nooblets:

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Lenoxus 03:41, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ganges

Hello, Mowgli! I just read your additions to Ganges, and hope you can clarify your intent in adding the comment and the template. My concern is that the article is not doing approximately what it was intended to do, or, to put it another way, that readers are not understanding anything of what I had intended to say. (Alternatively, I could be reading something into your additions which you had not meant to say!) Anyway, please tell me what prompted you to put the comment and template at the top of the article. Thanks, ----OEJ 20:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

the first addition was just to provoke you :-p. i'll remove it. i read it in snatches earlier, when you were still writing it, and i thought the narrator's voice was some 60s hippy. i read it in entirety today. its neither hippy nor white trash. it has a colonial tone to it but it's not even that or else fails if that's the ambiance it was attempting to recreate. the second addition was a bit of a confusion on my part. that template is actually a variant of the {{pov}} template. i thought the template would buttress the first comment. and i thought that the ganges originated in mansarovar -- in china today. but it doesn't. it does so only in myth (it sprung from shiva's locks when shiva was seated in mansarovar). but i had already posted the template by then. i'll delete it too. what were you trying to do with the article that you think you have not (approximately) succeeded in doing? -- mowgli 06:56, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

I was trying to make the narrator, Dirk Snyddering, an example of cultural arrogance and idiocy. I wanted everything he said to be so completely stupid and offensive that by the end of the piece the reader would be thinking, "What an asshole that guy is! I hope Mohat punches him!" But of course Mohat is too enlightened and wise to punch anybody. Mohat is the "voice of reason" in the article. Dirk makes nothing but mistakes -- confusing the Hooghly with the lower Ganges, Bhutan with Bangladesh, Egyptian gods with Hindu deities, the Farakka Barrage with a work of the Victorian British, etc -- but mostly he is completely, willfully blind to India and Indian people.

I have a problem with the article's identification of source of the Ganges. As you say it is not in Tibet, still less under the walls of the Potala Palace as in the frog picture. I like the frog but he may have to go.

The really difficult thing about creating a narrator who is both unreliable and not very pleasant is that most readers usually start out thinking that the narrator is the voice of the author. The "narrator-as-author's-voice" is such a natural pattern in writing that it's easy for an amateur writer like me to screw up when I try to change the pattern. I might think I am clearly demonstrating that the narrator is NOT to be trusted, that I am actually mocking people like Dirk, but I may be letting readers down by not being clear enough. That is what I may have not succeeded in doing.

So, anyway, I think I will put this on Pee Review and see what other people think. If it's necessary I could pull a couple of tricks in the introduction to make it clearer that the reader is not to trust Dirk. Thanks for your thoughts on this. It really helps -- I grope around on most articles and never really know what the heck other people are going to read into the material I write, so it is great for me to have some honest feedback. ----OEJ 14:10, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

i liked your Mount Everest; especially the hilarious introduction. yes, feedback can be a problem here (or anywhere). put it on pee review. i might post some comments there, or even add to the piece, now that i know what you wished to do (which, incidentally, is quite a clever idea). needless to say, feel free to revert if i ever come around to adding anything. -- mowgli 16:04, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hindi

Hi Mowgli. I need your assistance. I have started an interactive web based hindi course on a swedish site. Can you mail me in private? Thanks -- Swami A. Suresh 08:05, 28 May 2007 (UTC)