 This is where I live in New York. I took this photograph from the roof of the building I live in. Like many Indians, I left home for the United States on a journey of fortune and adventure. While New York is an exhilarating city, there are a few things about my core that are clearly rooted elsewhere. On occasion, I experience a sentiment I've called nostalgia India. When this happens, I feel a certain wistfulness for the 80s and 90s in India, and I pick up the phone and call my sister. When we laugh and joke about the rich cultural idiosyncrasies that made up our lives coming of age in India, we look back fondly at Dock Room, the innocent game of hide and seek we would play in the Dock, when the current went off due to load shedding. Goal spot, the zing thing. Videocon washing machine, which I don't know if you guys remember this, washes, rinses, and even dries your clothes. It's pretty amazing. The green Onida TV devil, whose low pitched rasping voice would say, neighbor's envy, owner's pride. The little Doudarshan logo that would rotate on your black and white television screen, half apocalyptic and half melancholic. Supandi's bizarre comb-over from Tinko, scenes of gore from Amachitra Kata comics, and of course my favorite, the safari suit. In my mind, this is the low point of Indian men's fashion. Would I one day become a potbellied uncle in a safari suit? It's no exaggeration that the possibility recently made me run a marathon, at which point I was called an end to cutlet by my close friends and family. We look back fondly at eating mango duet ice creams in summer, our round and reliable ambassador car, our ambi, and of course my kinetic Honda, enabler of my youthful courtships and fun rides to the streets of Bangalore. And of course there were words like, fatty, fatty, bumble addy, shame, shame, puppy shame. I'm sorry, one plate puri and mother promise. Now, it occurred to me one day that these words and phrases and cultural constructs that brought my sister and I so much joy, needed to be captured and celebrated in one place for posterity. And so my good friend Arun and I, my chatty buddy, we teamed up and we conducted a small experiment. We reached out to our friends around the world and we asked them to give us words and expressions just like these that were most evocative of intriguing Indian lingo. And we were amazed by the response. In less than three days we received about 200 well written entries, a small but rich anthology of South Asian writing, funny and informative and centered around words. What we were looking at was a bit of a cultural treasure trove. This gave me pause. A little bit of research revealed that the last attempt at capturing language and slang at a very large scale for this region was the Hobson Jobson. The Hobson Jobson was written by Henry Yule and Arthur Bernal. It was just focused on Anglo-Indian slang and most strikingly was written in 1886. So for a region with over a billion people, with hundreds of dialects and languages and words intermingling in such beautiful and rich ways, all we had to show was a little book written by two Englishmen over 125 years ago. Now there have been some experiments since then, but in our opinion they've all been remarkably reminiscent of colony and conquest and an attempt to study the natives. And so my chuddy buddy Arun and I, we got a team together. This is Braxton and Arvind on our rooftop in attention stand at his position. And we launched the Mosopedia, the definitive guide to South Asian lingo. We called it the Mosopedia because on one hand we wanted to capture the gravitas and comprehensiveness of those 14 volume Britannica encyclopedias that adorned many in Indian living room. But on the other hand, we wanted it to capture the kind of joy, irreverence, and playfulness associated with bunking class and eating hot samosas on a wet monsoon day in a college canteen somewhere in India. South Asia, because we felt that our linguistic heritage transcended our national boundaries, we wanted Indians and Pakistanis on the site. Samosapedia is built by the people. The cultural cartographers of this century who wake up every morning and build our regions shared encyclopedia are in this room, in IIT campuses, in the bustling cities of Bangalore and Mumbai, and in expatriate settlements in places like Tunedad, Uganda, Kenya, Australia and England. And they have given us thousands and thousands of words. Now while the inspiration for this site came from my need to connect with the past, to connect with the memories of my childhood. The site is as much about the past as it is about the present. The Lokpal Bill gets dubbed the Jokpal Bill on the site. When famous rapper Akon showed up in India to make Chamak Chaloo and when he asked his co-producers what Chamak Chaloo meant, his co-producers looked at him vaguely, but someone on Samosapedia defined Chamak Chaloo clearly. And then we have words like Adhar that stand for foundation and represent one of the most ambitious projects to date to give every Indian a unique identification. And of course, when the entire country was transfixed and mystified by this epidemic, Kolawe, why this Kolawe, Kolawe Deep and Soup Boys were all clearly defined on the site. Now there's nothing innovative about Samosapedia. It would be hubristic to suggest that any of the core ingredients of the site were not in existence before us. However, what is interesting is what the site represents and what it says about where we are in our cultural evolution. You see, I went to school at St. Joseph's, a school that was built during British times with a triumph of English as the ticket to a good life was celebrated every day. And we looked down upon our vernis, a term on Samosapedia that refers to those who spoke their vernacular. And I failed Canada for six years in a row. However, things are dramatically different now. What Samosapedia stands for is the sense of pride and the celebration of the distinct tongues of our vernis that merged to form a Hindi Kannada Urdu Telugu English patwa that is uniquely and authentically ours. What Samosapedia stands for is this new South Asian identity that is brimming with confidence, that is self-aware and self-actualized, and most importantly, one that can look at itself and laugh. Because laughing at yourself, we believe, is the truest sign of social and cultural progress. Working on this project is like having the same conversation I used to have with my sister, except now with thousands, if not millions of people, just like the two of us. Thank you. Thank you.