These days, when I'm bored at work, I'll often waste time by browsing the public mail folders in Microsoft Outlook. The bulletin board for our New York office is pretty boring (offers for baseball tickets, apartments for rent, that sort of thing) but the bulletin board for our systems development office in India is rather wonderful. It's an amazing mishmash of World Cup predictions, cricket jokes, and the usual netlore, except with a combined IT and Indian slant that can set your head spinning. Ever wonder what a forwarded joke list would look like in an Indian systems office? Now you know:

Subject: This is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face :-)

Brahma: Systems Installation 

Vishnu: Systems Support 

Lakshmi: Finance and Accounts consultant (SAP) 

Shiva: DBA (crash specialist) 

Ganesh: Documentation specialist 

Hanuman: RS6000 

Vali: Windows 98 

Sugreeva: Win 95 

Angadh: Win 3.1 

Jambhuvan: DOS 

Shakuni: Bill Gates 

Karna: Contract Programmer 

Shikandi: Steve Jobbs 

100 Kauravas: Microsoft Service Packs and Patches

This is just a small sample of the full list, which runs for about thirty entries. Having read some of the Mahabharata, I can get maybe a third of these jokes...but I still have no idea why Sugreeva is Windows 95.