One of the newest online time sucks, playing Scrabble against your friends on Facebook, was built by twentysomethings in the Anglophilic city of Calcutta (thanks, Sapna):

Freudian for 15 points

Scrabulous… has attracted 300K players every day… “A Facebook team member said it is a favourite at their office… The Agarwalla brothers run Scrabulous from the offices of their home-grown software company in an office in Calcutta…

Rajat Agarwalla, 26, holds a degree in business administration and launched the software company in Calcutta seven years ago. Jayant, 21, an under-graduate, has won numerous Scrabble tournaments in the city… The brothers say they hit upon the idea… when a site where they used to play… decided to charge its users… they make “a little bit of money” through advertising… enough to cover server costs… [Link]

The only downside to playing online Scrabble, aside from settling the fact that all your friends are smarter than you, is that their word choices can reveal their true feelings about you. It’s the devil’s Ouija board.

Here are two Scrabbler must-haves: crossword dictionary and anagram generator. The most useful non-word words: x₈u, q₁₀i and that perennial point sniper, the letter ’s.’

Related posts: Grand Theft India: Desi City, ‘Flyover’, The fanny state, Why isn’t gold farming big in India?, Yaaran, start your engines