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"Old Kannada inscription dated 981 CE in Vindyagiri hill at Shravanabelagola"  Based on my efforts to learn Kannada, I have come to realize that there is a disconnect between the resources available and resources required for learning the language. While there is a steady stream of apps to help Kannada learners, they all seem to be based on the same basic pattern which I believe is not useful. When learning Kannada, a speaker of another Indian language is presented with two difficulties. One is the language and other is the script. In the absence of reading, the sole source of language data being absorbed is spoken. With spoken data, the learner can neither control the speed of the incoming data nor can he reliably repeat it. This severely slows down the vocabulary acquisition process. Without knowing the script, he cannot read the newspaper which is a good cheap source of plenty of reading material. Reading the newspaper in a language also provides a good sense of ...

पिछले शुक्रवार को तकरीबन १ माह से चल रहे NIST Machine Translation Evaluation का अंत हो गया और बहुत दिनों बाद चैन की सांस मिली। वैसे जो काम चल रहा था वह भी कुछ कम मज़ेदार नही था, काम था एक उर्दू से English मे अनुवाद करने का सिस्टम बनाना। इसी बहाने मैने उर्दू लिपी को थोडा बहुत पडना सीख लिया। इस पर आगे काम होगा कि नही यह तो नही पता पर अभी के नतीजों का बेसब्री से इंतज़ार है। इतने दिन बाद मिले अवकाश का फ़ायदा उठाते हुये मैने जमा हो गये ई-मेल और ब्लाग पड डाले। उसी मे से एक ब्लाग से पी. साईनाथ का मैगासेसे अवार्ड मिलने के अवसर पर दिया गया व्क्तव्य पडने को मिला जिसने पूरे दिल-ओ-दिमाग को हिला दिया। किसानों की आत्महत्याओं के बारे मे पहले भी पडा था और तब भी बुरा लगा था पर उस वक्तव्य को पडने के बाद एक ऐसी बेचैनी का अनुभव होता है कि फ़ौरन ही इसके बारे मे कुछ किया जाये। मुझे पता नही मैं कब और क्या कर पाऊंगा पर अब मन मे ये बात अटक तो गयी है एक लम्बे समय के लिये । आप लोगों के लिये भी ये रही वो लिंक - http://subalternstudies.com/?p=153 और करेले को नीम चडाते हुये आज मैने हल्ला बोल फ़िल्म देख ली। फ़िल्म कई स्तर...

.. and dude too ! While somebody calling me a "dude" is merely annoying, somebody calling me "dear" (like in "How are you dear?" and not "Dear Abhaya, how are you?") feels downright cheesy to me. Of course the previous statement needs to be qualified with the assertion that both the addresses might be ok in some contexts or when used as part of the rhetoric. What I am complaining about is the stock version. It is hard to pinpoint the root of these annoyances. Dude perhaps has to do with the mental images of dudes from college days and the slight negative connotation it carried in college lingo. With dear , things are not so simple. One visual image associated with dear is of nuns or teachers from convent schools or governances calling the children dear . Another one is of Jitender calling his better half as dear as in "tum abhi tak tayaar nahi huin dear? hum party ke liye late ho jaayenge !". It is hard to blame either of them for my b...

These are some heady days in my life. Lots of things happening and at times I get the feeling that everything might just slip away. And often times I remind myself that what you have is not what you hold in your fist but that which rests on your open palm. So the big news is that I am going back to India next year. Things moved fast and there are chances of a startup looming on the horizon, already threatening to block the sun of rationality and rob the clarity out of life. Let us see where it goes. Back from the future, in the present, there are some more things to be excited about. For next few months I am going to work on a Urdu to English Machine Translation System. Now given the state of the art, you can be sure that this MT system will be pretty useless for almost any use. What is exciting however is that it may produce as a side effect some nice tools for Urdu, conversion of Urdu script into Devanagari being one of them, an issue close to my heart . For the starters though, Bhom...

I have often read/heard people rant about the bad status of Urdu in Hindi heartland, place where it originated and from where some of its best poets and writers came. Cities like Aligarh, Lucknow used to be centers of Urdu adab but no longer. As usual blame goes to the government, a claim of systematic bias against Urdu due to which it was removed as a medium of instruction by the early governments of UP. It was only in the last decade that Urdu was again given the status of official language in UP and that too because of political considerations and not any love for the language. I have no reason or evidence to doubt that indeed there might have been bias against Urdu in the years right after Independence. Partition and creation of Pakistan, the usual association of Muslims and Urdu, adoption of Urdu as the official language in Pakistan may all have played out in the minds of early policy makers, consciously or unconsciously. But even before partition, Hindi literature saw very strong...

Call centers and BPOs are the poster material for many people these days who firmly believe that English is the way to go forward. I have been trying to see how far their stand goes. To me the whole hoopla about the necessity of learning English seems more like a rather short sighted view. the BPO and the call center industry primarily serves US and UK now a days. Together they constitute a very small part of the world population. Two of the major developing countries of the world, China and India still have only a rather small portion of their population using English for their daily transactions. The huge number of English speaking population that are reported are a little misleading in this respect. Consider that India is estimated to have 35 crore English users. For example my father would qualify as a English user since he is able to use it on purpose but he is not comfortable using it in his daily life. Now consider that the developing economies of these countries are creating a ...

Today morning started with the much awaited news of the conviction in Priyadarshani Matoo case. I feel happy but not relieved. This was only the high court. There is still supreme court to appeal to. And while the re-trial in High Court got on the fast track because of the public out cry, I do not know what will happen in SC. May be another 5-6 years followed by a public outcry will be the cycle there also with the only difference being that SC may consider the public outcry as a interference in court's working and pass a gag order barring discussion of the matter in the public. No, I don't think that our justice system has gone to dogs completely but I do think that our SC takes itself a little too seriously. But anyway, today's conviction should bring some cheer to the Matoo family. I was particularly interested in this case because of another reason. To give some background, CBI filed an appeal in high court way back in 2000. And although it is not a big deal for a case ...