Winning the Internet with A Job Announcement
Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey may have won the internet on the day he announced that he had been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Shared widely on social media, his job announcement was a poster satirizing the election victory banners in India. It shows Pandey with a garland around his neck and his left hand raised, his fingers forming a ‘V.’ The poster includes images of his academic supporters and congratulatory messages in Marathi, as well as a photo showing his former PhD classmate, Celeste Wagner, feeding him an Indian sweet.
“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or vote for you,” commented one person on the social media site X, while another wrote, “This is probably the best announcement post I have ever seen.”
It’s no surprise, considering Pandey’s background, that he combined politics and humor in his announcement. According to his bio on the UCSB website, he specializes in political communication and uses various methods to “investigate the effects of political entertainment, especially humor and satire, on democratic participation, news sharing, and individual political agency, with comparative focus between the United States and South Asian contexts.”
Pandey completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He also performed and taught improvisational comedy in Philadelphia.
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
[Comments? Contributions? We would love to hear from you about Chai Time. If you have contributions, please email us at melvin@melvindurai.com. We welcome jokes, quotes, online clips, and more.]
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