Residents are 100 percent literate and generally show their literacy by writing on window panes of buses, cars, and the walls of their houses. They know many scripts, including Tulu, Kannada, and Roman. This means that their scrawls are done in "alternative script theory," where a single bit of graffiti earns style points by using multiple scripts. This technique earned the vandals of Tulu Nadu the Nobel Prize for physics, prompting even Barack Obama to remark defensively that he was not the only recipient of an undeserved Prize.