A professor of English from English and foreign language university corrected "do the needful" as "do what is necessary. some others say "do what needs to be done" I hope the native speakers of English will respond to my question and talk about the acceptability of all these expressions  Edit: it is not a duplicate because I wanted to know whether the expression is acceptable to native speakers.I did not ask why such an expression is asked instead of a question
Update: (Originally this was a comment, but I thought it was worth sharing here at the top.)   In the original question, I asked if there was a polite, socially-acceptable way to ask an Indian co-worker not to use the phrase "do the needful", as I didn't care for it.   In the years since I asked this question I've asked many people about the phrase. To the Indians I've asked in-person, it's not rude in any way. To Americans I've asked it varies anywhere from "I don't like it, but I don't mind it" to "It's very rude and makes me angry when I see it".   Through a long series of edits the question morphed and I wasn’t able to delete it because it had upvoted answers. The question, as it stands now, has no other answer.  I guess, though, if you're non-Indian and you find it rude, or if you're Indian and you've never realized someone might find it rude, this post may still have merit. Hopefully it does. It certainly has gotten a lot of views. Best wishes, folks.  End Update. See below for what's left of the actual question.    "Do the needful."   It's a phrase that I've only seen used in email, and I find it . . . presumptuous (maybe even rude). Regardless of prefacing with "please", one is commanding rather than asking for assistance.  I've only seen it used by those of Indian origin, so I've simply not mentioned it at all rather than worry about any cross-cultural offense that may come of bringing it up.  But still, I don't understand why it's used. Why not request rather than make two statements, one factual, one imperative?  For example, why would one use:        I'm told you have Jane's email address. Please do the needful.      instead of,        Would you send me Jane's email address?
When transiting Moscow (SVO), citizens of which countries need a transit visa? When I try to print a Unicode string in a Windows console, I get an error . UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character .... I assume this is because the Windows console does not accept Unicode-only characters. What's the best way around this? Is there any way I can make Python automatically print a ? instead of failing in this situation? Edit:  I'm using Python 2.5.  Note: @LasseV.Karlsen answer with the checkmark is sort of outdated (from 2008). Please use the solutions/answers/suggestions below with care!!  is more relevant as of today (6 Jan 2016). I'm just starting to learn linear algebra and I understand Gaussion elimination but I don't understand this proof:    Is the heart of this the fact that all the while when I've been row-reducing matrices to reduced row-echelon form... I've actually been multiplying a matrix by a series of a elementary matrices?  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Let $s$ be the least upper bound of $A,$ so we have that for each element $a$ of $A$, $a\leq s$, for being $s$ an upper bound. In particular, $a_0\leq s$, which implies that $s=a_0$.   Then, we have that $\sup(A)=\max(A)=a_0$, which is exactly what we wanted to prove.  Observation: this proof is true if $s \in A$   I'm not sure if my proof is correct. I will be thankful if someone tells me. A Polygon is inscribed in a circle $\Gamma$ A regular polygon P is inscribed in a circle $\Gamma$. Let A, B, and C, be three consecutive vertices on the polygon P, and let M be a point on the arc AC of $\Gamma$ that does not contain B. Prove that  $MA\cdot MC=MB^2-AB^2$  I inscribed the polygon P in the unit circle and let B=1. Past this, I'm not really sure how to proceed. It might be helpful to have M at 1 as well but given that the polygon would have the n-th roots of unity in it B seemed like a good choice. What would be a good way to proceed from here? Is it possible to enforce unique values in a column, excluding nulls? Matrix with labels nested in braces Insert distinct data into Combobox List Evolving Pokemon based on CP vs Moves Many people are evolving their pokemons based on the CP. However, there's a growing number of people evolving based on Moves instead of CP. In other words, choosing pokemons that have the highest Moves to keep, even if it isn't necessarily the highest CP. I am new to pokemon and don't quite understand the difference between the two. Thus, which strategy is better? I'm looking for a shapefile containing an 1000m or 2000m UTM grid ("graticule"). All I was about to find on the web is a 10000m UTM grid (here: ) and I am aware that a 1000m UTM grid for the whole world might be quite big.  That's why I'm now wondering if and how it would be possible to generate such a shapefile for a part of the world. I would prefer to use open source tools like gdal. Others output formats than a shapefile might be ok too.   Has anyone an idea? What are the technical differences between using a DSLR viewfinder and live view? The earlier question  asks for practical advantages of optical viewfinders. But what's the technical difference, and why does a camera behave differently in each mode?  For example, on my Nikon D5100:   Slower auto-focus — I saw this explained in the related issue, but just partially: "The other major drawback of live view is that because it requires the mirror to be locked up, it means that the auto focusing mechanism is unavailable."  option not available. No . The manual says that it's dangerous to shoot direct light, when it's on live-view. There's no range finder available.   Why are all these things different?  Live view also has some advantages, like:   automatic scene selection grid lines on the screen other smaller things, like possibly easier operation on a tripod where the viewfinder might be inconvenient to look through   Some of these things, like the tripod operation, are natural. But are there technical reasons the others can't be done with an optical finder? Are there other advantages enabled by live view for technical reasons? What is the difference between N and N-1 in calculating population variance? I did not get the why there are N and N-1 while calculating population variance. When we use N and when we use N-1?      It says that when population is very big there is no difference between N and N-1 but it does not tell why is there N-1 at the beginning.  Edit: Please don't confuse with n and n-1 which are used in estimating.  Edit2: I'm not talking about population estimation. How do the likely/unlikely macros in the Linux kernel work and what is their benefit? 'Possible duplicate' comment not appearing for questions with deleted comments containing the link Using Perl to change the url homepage for Internet Explorer