Unlike its parent-organisation, the New Delhi-based Sarai.net is young, full of ideas and peppy. Not that the institution it grew out of is not full of ideas; but it has an old-world air about it, while Sarai fits in with the trendy, cyber-generation in an unusual way.
Sarai is a new media initiative of the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). It calls itself "a place for collaboration of social science researchers, media practitioners, artists and free software enthusiasts."
In Delhi, its office is cluttered with computers, audio equipment, posters and books. They have taken computers and blogging to a slum locality of the urban poor nearby. Sarai offers small-money fellowships to study urban issues and undertake free and open source software (FOSS) projects.
CSDS was set up by another generation, in 1963. A group of scholars called it into life to "create a capacity for theoretical and empirical research in social and political processes and to understand their implications for human choices".
But Sarai is more down-to-earth. Its research evolves around city life, media city, language and free software. Various aspects of city life it takes up includes "copy cultures", media as emerging cultural mechanism, film and related cultural, ethical and moral ethos.
Focusing on social software
"There is a lot of emphasis on the enabling of information and communication technology through enabling technology (in the) local language. Sarai works and encourages working on developing and supporting free software projects," says an introduction to it.
"We’re doing the work that academics are supposed to do. We’re focused on social software specially. On using free software. Doing art works using all kinds of free software. Using the free software philosophy to extend to other spheres. We are not very patient with policy, or very great with advocacy. We try to generate a lot of discussion, especially about the public domain, about what we are concerned," says Ravikant of Sarai.
Ravikant was one of those participating at the APC-organised South Asian consultation, held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in April 2006. In a brief but vociferous presentation he made, his focus was on localisation of free software in India.
"Whatever is the state of localisation in India, the government is definitely responsible (for attaining that). We, in India, have dreams of software superpowerdom yet basic tools (for local language computing) are still not there," he complains.
Ravikant (37) is an angry man: "They have spent millions, through governmental institutions like the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL), all in the name of Indic computing. This money was spent on the logic that computing would be ‘taken to the people’."
But, in his view, the people have effectively not used a single tool built via government initiatives. Instead, they have been "thrown in the dustbin", he complains, just as some dictionaries built with excessive Indian government zeal in the nineteen fifties.
"(Indian officials) don’t care a damn about Indian languages. They don’t care anything about the vernaculars. They remain as colonial as could be. They see computers as a privilege. Just as telephone was seen as a privilege once upon a time (not too long ago). They spread a fear of technology in the masses, with the message of ‘don’t touch it’," says Ravikant.
Ravikant sees this as part of India’s "cultural politics".
"It’s like the artificial type of language that was sought to be created in (post-Independence) India, but which failed miserably. Hindi films have shown what is the apt language to use. But the official view tends to be different. They see a need to ‘save’ Hindi from different languages – from some because they are too ‘foreign’ and from others because they are too ‘rural’," said Ravikant.
IndLinux volunteers
Ravikant points to the "very committed volunteers" of IndLinux, a project working to build local language solutions in the free software world. "They have symbolised a desire to do a job which is un-geeky, unfashionable, tough, and thankless," he says.
Ravikant points to anomalies in Indian language computing, and the many difficulties over the years. "In the late 1990s, there was the ASCII-encoded Susha script. You could use it phonetically. So anybody could write in Indian languages. It became very popular. But for people who didn’t have the fonts, their computer screen would look very odd. Every site would have a different font," he recalls.
Over the years, the project to translate free software into Indian languages has grown too. "Volunteers from different parts picked it up and they started translating. Of course, this work doesn’t require translating alone. There are rendering issues waiting to be solved. And keyboard issues too."
On the Indian language-computing front, in free software, Ravikant points to positive work being done in languages such as Bangla (see the Ankur project, http://www.bengalinux.org/), Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, and Urdu.
"IndLinux is a hydra-headed thing. We hope to collaborate a lot more with Pakistan. IndLinux has its discussion list, wiki, blog, newsletters," he adds.
Hindi technically workable
Undertaking a review of where the localisation of free software has reached so far, Ravikant says that "Hindi is technically workable. There’s an email client, browser, office suite. We need to refine spellcheckers, dictionaries. And the corporate world is now waking up to it. Where we need to do a lot of work is to stand up for smaller languages."
Ravikant is critical of politicians offering tokenistic measures. He points to the Indian-language CD of tools released by Indian politicians recently. "Politicians have themselves pointed out that we must be the only country where people have to buy fonts," he says.
Ravikant says Government of India organisations such as TDIL and CDAC are also guilty of having "wanted to earn as much as they could by selling as much as they could". This situation led to a series of anomalies, where the solutions were available but often unaffordable and not sufficiently widespread.
By contrast, a single volunteer started a network, which offers more realistic solutions, says, pointing to the Devnagri project: http://devnagri.net/
"Somebody (an Indian expat volunteer) sitting in the US working on a Linux machine would develop something for the Mozilla (browser). And you can read all those languages on the web, using just one browser," he points out. See http://padma.mozdev.org/
"Abhishekh Choudhary from Bihar (in eastern India) says he has written a programme in which you can write programmes (in regional languages). There are some hope, but we remain a beautiful failure, because we are still looking for users (to actually make use of the software we have created)," he says, with a tinge of bitterness. Maybe more work is needed before critical mass is actually attained.
Photo by FN for APCNews. April 2006. Ravikant.
