CARTOON: "Mother Goose & Grimm" on Outsourcing
Here's "Mother Goose & Grimm," the popular daily cartoon strip by Mike Peters (it runs in more than 800 newspapers worldwide), for Thursday, July 26, 2007. Might be the first one to get Mahatma Gandhi into an outsourcing cartoon. Post your comments below.
Post your comments below. See a bunch of outsourcing cartoons at CartoonStock.com.
REQUEST: Cartoonists! Do you have an outsourcing cartoon? An author has contacted SAJA looking to buy some for his next book. E-mail us: saja[at]columbia.edu
EARLIER ON SAJAforum:
- OUTSOURCING: An Unusual Cartoon about Call Centers (see the 35+ comments, too)
- Coverage of the 2007 SAJA Convention & Job Fair
[ Welcome, SepiaMutineers! Love your remix of this cartoon! ]
i think it's kinda of odd to mix gandhi and call centers.
are these the only two images of india that the common americans recognize?
Posted by: nidhi | July 27, 2007 at 08:46 PM
I get the idea, but it's unnecessarily related to outsourcing, or for that matter, Mahatma Gandhi. What does Mahatma Gandhi got to do with outsourcing? He advocated shunning foreign goods, not business from foreign lands.
Also, if the mirror is supposed to tell the truth or confirm the truth, does this strip imply that Indians lie? Completely irrelevant. Thank god, the strip is not derogatory, at least. Otherwise, the Indian community in the US would be up in arms already.. like what happened when Mahatma Gandhi's cartoon was manhandled in Maxim mag a few years back, which I thought was totally funny.
Vivek
Posted by: Vivek Gupta | July 28, 2007 at 02:20 PM
Mildly amusing at best. Its almost as if Mike Peters is trying too hard and the effort shows ...
Posted by: Ratan Sethi | July 28, 2007 at 03:04 PM
You can interpret at best as a pun- the word 'fairest', Mahatma Gandhi" being 'fair' to entire human kind and thus thumbs up to 'Indian call centers'
In my experience, Indian call center people do wonderful job, have highly professional behavior and language, as compared to some poorly educated people answering queries in USA. I am delighted to have them as my answering service.
Posted by: Laxmi | July 28, 2007 at 10:50 PM
I agree with Nidhi. I think the poor attempt at the humor is because they've stuck to the most popular Indian icons/topics that Americans are familiar with, these days.
If this were published in the US, the mirror would've answered "Shilpa Shetty".
Posted by: Mahendra Palsule | July 30, 2007 at 06:32 AM
Whether these cartoons talk of caste, the Indian accent or Mahatma Gandhi, there is very little humour and a lot more of American prejudice here. The ignorance of things Indian and India in general emerges loud and clear!
Posted by: Rina Mukherji | January 20, 2008 at 10:48 AM
I don't know that its prejudiced necessarily, but it's poorly researched. The guy who wrote it got his knowledge of India likely from the back of a cereal box. If instead of Mahatma Gandhi, they had put hema malini or an indian actress of some kind, then the comic strip would have made more sense. The way it's written is idiotic, and shows ignorance of Indian matters on the part of the author and/or his readership and a bit of Yankee hubris.
Posted by: Srinivasa Raghavan | January 20, 2008 at 04:14 PM
haha
you gaz just can't have fun with anything.....always protesting. a malicious, assertive and entertaining jibe needs a malicious assertive and an entertaining jab back. do all you gaz trade in wholesale pessimism.
a pessmist is one who follows a man with a candle around just so he can blow it out and complain that it's dark and he can't see. laughter stretches age expectancy by 8 years. to earn those 8 unearned years you need a new mental habit called humor. forget making sense. master nonsense and live longer.
moral: would you rather be the head of a chicken rather than the tail of a cow?
Posted by: panditjugalkishoreshastri | January 20, 2008 at 07:00 PM
I'd laugh if it were funny. It's not that I'm even offended. I just think the mirror saying "Mahatma Gandhi" is kind of dumb. If you're gonna tell a joke, make it a good one.
Posted by: Srinivasa Raghavan | January 21, 2008 at 02:27 AM
I think Grimm is asking who is the most beautiful looking person, and the mirror replies with the name of someone with what you could call a beautiful soul. (Or, as someone already said, maybe it's a pun on the word "fair"). Basically, Grimm is kinda shallow, so he doesn't understand why the mirror would name someone who isn't a hot model type. If Grimm represents random non-Indian Americans and if the mirror represents an Indian call center, it's the random Americans who look dumb! Or maybe the strip is just about things getting lost in translation (again, maybe it's just a pun on "fair"), which can be funny.
Posted by: random American girl | September 21, 2008 at 02:25 PM
haha. got it. perfect advertising for call center.
Posted by: call center | September 25, 2008 at 12:17 AM