Used instead of 'me', 'I' or 'I am'

A pencil sharpner.

A bunch of veteran filim personalities who form the jury to decide if a new movie is fit for the masses, the shadows or the dustbin. They are a fickle lot as their judgement is often impaired by having coffee with politicians, religious leaders and moral policemen and women. Many a filim producer has bled to bankruptcy over disputes with the board. The censar board will award certification such as A, U, R & U/A. Everyone in modern India may not agree with the "cuts" specially in Hollywood movies as the Bollywood counterparts can get away with worse and still come with with a "U"

In the days before photocopying a.k.a. Xeroxing and computers, mass printing/producing paper materials involved either carbon paper and a typewriter (many times over with a patient and accurate typist) or a cyclostyle machine. Headmasters and principals' offices in schools and colleges around the country buzzed with a familiar metal-meets-paper thwacking sound as dreaded exam papers were produced, under the watchful eye of a peon or administrative assistant (usually named something like Murugan or Philomena).

The process was thus:
1. Create the master stencil by using a pen with a little toothed wheel on it that perforates the paper creating small holes under the text. For really important exams (e.g. national boards like the ICSE) the governing body would splurge on the typewriter equivalent of the same, substituting poorly typeset text for poorly written text.
2. Fill the cyclostyle machine with printers ink, attach the master stencil (whose holes get filled with said ink), and start cranking.
3. Mostly legible copies of exam papers, syllabi, legal documents, ekc. (ekcetera) are spat out, with the illegible parts written over with a pen at a later time (sometimes during the exam when students raise the issue of not being able to read the question for whom an answer is being asked).

While a novel solution to a common academic and legal problem, the cyclostyle machine had some distinct...uhh, shortcomings - the process was messy (picture school peons with their hands & arms/uniforms covered in ink), imprecise (text would get smudged as the master stencil's holes wore out), and for some Godforsaken reason the process required the use of substandard copy paper which more closely resembled paper mache produced in an SUPW class than that befitting an important exam paper. Picture your pen puncturing a hole in a soft spot in the paper precisely on the elusive 'x' you just solved for in your final exam maths paper, or your pen's ink involuntarily blotting itself on your answer that explains the dagger scene in Macbeth.

Keeping with the grand Indian tradition of referring to horrific medical conditions with casual nonchalance, piles & fistula clinics abound, dotting the countryside with their speculum wizardry and promising to reverse the downside of eating spicy carb-heavy food that tax your gastrointestinal system to the max. Aiyo!

phrase used in the 80s to check on the quality of VHS Cassette tapes. In India, it was common place to rent a VCP/R over the holidays and watch movies non-stop until your eyes turned blue. Movies also had to be rented and the one question that must be asked is about the "print".

As movies became available in VHS format and then in VCD and now the wothla DVDs, the latest movies that are released in the theatres will be available in the black market (dimly lit pavement shops and in certain video parlours). However, these will be recorded in the theatre with a video camera and copies made. So you will typically get very poor quality video and audio and also enjoy all the conversations around as well as silhouettes of people walking in front of the camera.

For the English... eh... Britisher, evening is till sundown... er ... sunset. But for us Indians it is till bedtime only.

A particular type of finish on denims that would produce white spots, stripes or other bizzare patterns on blue jeans. Was quite a rage in the early 90s. Technical details on the used of the acid etc were trade secrets, thus no information is available.

Short for Bermuda shorts. Trousers that are cut just below the knee, with many useless pockets. The transition to berms happened in the 90s from the hugely popular baggy pants.