Saturday, April 12, 2008

primetime Devanagari

I'm a little bit addicted to Numb3rs (or Dumb3rs, as a physicist and Hindi-speaking friend calls it) and was more than delighted to see one of the lead characters, Amita Ramanujan (played by Ravi Nawat, whom I love from The OC *as well),

writing Devanagari on a blackboard.

The story had something to do with gang killings, chess, finding a cipher, and a comparison to the Rosetta Stone; to illustrate this last idea, she wrote the word "numbers" in English and French and transliterated it in Devanagari. Before the final close-up of the words, we can see portions of them from a distance.



As a side note, I also caught some continuity errors. This shot of another character walking in front of the blackboard with only English on it

shows up after the photos above, in which we saw that the Devanagari was already there. A moment later, Amita walks to the board and writes the French and Devanagari

even though the latter was already on the blackboard earlier in the scene. Amita is so smart that she can skip around the space-time continuum! Woot!

You can watch this episode, "Checkmate," online here.

* Speaking of now-defunct tv shows I was hooked on, Numb3rs also stars Rob Morrow and Peter MacNicol! What's not to love?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

थोढ़ा बहुत, देवनागरी में भी क्यों नहीं लिखते।

Anonymous said...

शायद इसी लिए की अभी यह ट्रांस्लितेरेशन गलतियां बहुत करता है ?

debashish said...

बहुत बढ़िया! दुनिया उगते सूरज को सलाम करती है, भारत का कद बढ़ रहा है, हिन्दी का भी। ज़ाहिर है हमें खुश होना चाहिये, हमारा वक्त अब आया है ;)