India is incredible. Gujarat is Vibrant. Chhattisgarh is credible. Uttar Pradesh, however, just like its own name will not settle for just one word. Uttar Pradesh is an unbeaten transcendent abode of inestimable panache. Or something like that. On Thursday, the UP tourism board put out a tweet that featured a significant number of multi-syllabic words.
It was soon taken down, after much mockery on Twitter, but this is the internet, where things do not go away.
That's right – one sentence with unbeaten, sagacious, astuteness, figurine and rectitude. And another with seizure, quietude, engraved and transcendent. Some of these words you could probably understand on their own but when put together they mean almost nothing. The city of Varanasi is "astute"? And it's also a "figurine" of "rectitude"? The only appropriate word in that entire package appears to be seizure.
Naturally, Twitter couldn't let this go unanswered – and there was more than one reference to Amar Akbar Anthony.
Although the UP tourism account deleted the tweet quickly enough, others decided to start examining other posts to see if there were more gems to be unearthed. A few did emerge, including a rather earnest attempt to label Allahabad the "city of sagacity."
Haven't you ever lazed around a purlieu with a chum?
UP might actually have to resort to grandiose wordplay to attract people to the state, considering its reputation for law and order problems and revelations that even its prized attractions – like the Taj Mahal – are steadily deteriorating.
The state has pulled off other advertisements that are quite beautiful because they focus on the visuals (even if they suffer from the more common Indian English issue of not including any definite articles).
But it's no wonder that Uttar Pradesh under the Samajwadi Party regime ended up putting out tweets and a campaign that sounds as overwrought as this. After all, this is the same government that repurposed Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire to sell Mulayam Singh Yadav.
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