T h e T e m p l e

"Behind the holy premises of the temple, runs a gushing torrent. Since the dawn of time, piligrims have held these pure waters with the power of cleansing the ills of mind."

Claire lifts her head out of the booklet.

"Anvesh, You have to believe me. I had the strangest feeling yesterday after drinking these waters."

Anvesh turns his head nonchalently.

Jacques comes up towards them. "There is a possibility. These waters can contain some drifting neurotoxins.", he says.

They look at him with surprise. "How ? "

"Maybe some produce of a plant. Seeds perhaps. From the mountains."

They look up, the sun shines brilliantly over the snow-capped peaks. They are standing at the foot of an enormous mountain.

"Okay. Quit trying to impress me.", Claire smiles.

They laugh together at the silliness of the idea.

Standing witness is an ancient temple, at the banks of the river. Without a priest or a consistent flow of piligrims, it waits in anonymity. Inside the temple is a sculpture of Nataraja Shiva, carved in stone.

"This is very strange. A temple for the Nataraja to be found at the foot of a mountain."

Nataraja is a form of the Shiva, the destructor. Divinity is understood in the Brahmanic religion as the trinity of Brahma - the creator, Vishnu - the preserver and Shiva - the destroyer. Different facets of the one single God.

Nataraja symbolifies Shiva in his cosmic dance with Maaya - or the myth of reality. He is carved at the center of a perfect circle with four arms, each depicting the several phases of creation and destruction of the universe. In this form, he is worshipped by aspiring dancers and musicians, to lend them the gift of creativity - the divine inspiration of replicating, of trying to mimic the cosmic creation.

"You are right. Which dancer would get an audience at the foot of these mountains ? Is this really a temple ? Does it have any other function ?", Jacques questions.

Anvesh is equally lost. He is entertaining his friends from France. A talented artist, he has been finishing his studies at the academy in Paris. Jacques and Claire decide to spend the summer trekking in the Himalayas, and Anvesh has been the host, helping them swim through the barriers of language and bureaucracy.

"This could have been a school, or even a university. Lost in time, it may have become a temple.", he makes a guess.

They peer inside the dark chamber. The statue of the Nataraja stands serene at the center of the wide hall.

"It is beautiful.", Claire remarks.

Jacques looks at the overwhelming symmetry in the statue.

"You are true. But on another note, isn't it futile to capture the Divine on a stone ? ", Jacques wonders.

"Well, man never quits trying.", Anvesh answers.

"What do you mean ? Have you been painting something ?", they ask aloud.

Anvesh looks at the graceful pose of the Nataraja. "I am very scared to admit it. But I making an oil on the canvas. I have some musings, and some dreams."

"Wait, this is going somewhere. You never told us about this", Claire exclaims in alert.

"I wouldn't have told you. I am too afraid to admit - even to myself."

"But maybe you should learn to deal with it", Jacques remarks.

"Deal with what ?"

"Your fear", Jacques responds.

Then they hear something from the dark corner of the chamber.
"Only the fearless have seen the Asrapushpa."

The abruptness of this intrusion is so alarming that the three jump onto their heels. It was a bearded fellow covered in rags, who was resting quietly in the far end of the room.

"Who are you ? ", Anvesh demands.

"That is of no consequence. You should have demanded about what the Asrapushpa is."

"What is it ?"

"A flower of celestial beauty. It grows only on the peaks sorrounding this temple - the flower that only few have seen."

"How does it look ?"

"I cannot say. But it is said to be of the brightest red colour. The colour of blood. That is why it is called Asrapushpa."

"But why would anyone go find it ?"

"You fool", the bearded man glows in anger. "Then why are you here ? The place only the most fearless of sages have come to ?"

The bearded man comes out to light. Looking at him, Claire goes extremely pale. The man is carrying a white object in his hand - the skull of a dead man.

The man is a member of the Aghoris - violent sages who practice an ascetic life in extremely harsh conditions. A sect of the Samana religion, they worship the destructor Shiva in his real abode - the burial place.

"We are extremely sorry. We are not aware. We will return immediately.", Anvesh mutters quickly.

The three are still in a state of shock by when they reached their lodgings. Jacques says "We should return to Shimla. I believe Claire has seen enough that her nerves can take."

"Please wait for me at Shimla. You can get in touch with Mr. Verma of the tourist department. He remembers you."

"Why ? What are you going to do ? "

"Climb some of the peaks around the temple. ", Anvesh replies.

"You are out of your mind ! You are going to look for the blood flower ?" Jacques exclaims in disdain.

"Jacques, I have to confess something to you. I have tasted the waters from the stream."

Jacques looks in silence.

"I want to find out."

Jacques continues to stare in silence.

"I will return in two weeks. Please wait for me."

P o l l e n

One should strive to be a mountain amongst men. Lending beauty and pride to everyone around, but not possessed by even one of them.

Anvesh comes out of his musings and looks up at the sunset. Basked in the evening light, the snow peaks are radiating in gold.

He has been disappointed for two weeks. The peaks have proved to be too steep to climb in most places. He has scarcely found any vegetation on the high slopes, the rock being too hard to support any growth of plants. But next to glaciers, the rock gets eroded into fine gravel - supporting some vegetation, mostly bryophytes.

He did not find any flowering plants. But at the very top of some peaks, he found the surface completely even, resembling a plateau - the region being exposed to direct sunlight throughout the day. He has reason to suspect that he would find some flowering plants in such a place, provided there is enough supply of water.

Anvesh takes a deep breath to gather more oxygen. In front of him stands an extremely steep climb. It is not too difficult to go up. But it would be exceedingly dangerous to return. He has been avoiding such passages for the last two weeks.

"What if I have been thinking this wrong ? "

Then a realization hits upon him. "What if the way to return does not reveal itself until he climbs to the top ? "

He starts climbing.

He tries not to look down into the valley below, but the temptation is hard to resist.

As he gets climbs up, he hears a familiar sound - that of water rushing on the rocks. The sound gets intense as he gets closer. Soon, he finds himself on top of the summit.

He is staring into an enormous red flower. Sorrounded by the whites and the greys of the mountain, the flower dazzles in bright contrast, attracting attention from every direction.

"Is this the blood flower that has eluded every one ? "

He laughs heartily and congratulates himself on the success.

But then the realization dawns on him.

"Maybe the flower does not elude anyone."

The suddenness of this realization sinks hard into him. What if there is no way of getting down ?

"I will not give up."

He plucks the flowers carefully from the stalks and puts them in his backpack. They emenate a powerful scent, something heavenly.

"Why would a plant growing in these heights strive this hard to attract attention ? Why is it so brightly colored ? Why is it so strongly scented ?"

He tries to consult Darwin, thinking from the theory of evolution. He does not find a straightforward answer.

The scent of the flowers is overwhelming. He looks inside the bud of a flower. Tiny strands of pollen rise up in a bright red colour. He puts it back in his sack and starts descending.

"What if I die now ? What purpose would it serve for the flower ?"

He stops for a minute and looks into the flower. At a sudden inexplicable urge, he starts to nibble at the petals. He finds them immensely sweet. Then he eats the entire flower. He finds that his fatigue has strangely disappeared.

Feeling contended, he resumes his journey. He looks up towards the peak. But what he finds there gives him goosebumps.

Because there is no mountain. The valley is looking down at him from the heavens !

Then he looks down, but he does not find the ravine below. Instead he finds the peak turned upside down. He trips down and finds himself going up the peak.

He finds a man. But it is not another man, he is looking at his own person from the past, a couple of hours ago, climbing up the mountain.

Then the realization dawns on him.

"What I am seeing could not be what my eyes are seeing."

"What I am feeling is not what my limbs are feeling."

Soon he finds himself drifting in several images of his past. He finds himself in his hotel room. He sees himself talking with Jacques and Claire.

"Yes. The flower contains a neurotoxin. I should be intoxicated now."

He sees himself as young man making a journey abroad. Then he sees him studying in the academy at Paris, making his friends, getting his heart-breaks. He also finds images from his childhood, him making his first sketches on paper, his first days in school, his grandmother reading to him in his bed.

But there is a question.

"What is my real body doing ? "

He knows the answer.

"It is doing the bidding of the flower."

But what is the bidding ?

Then he understands completely - why the flower has been so attractive, why it has been so strongly scented, and why he has eaten its petals.

The answer presents itself in all its simplicity, "The pollen. It has to escape the flower.".

Finding himself incapable of taking control of his real senses, he resigns himself to observing the intoxicated images of his past that he has been drifting into.

He finds himself capable of summoning any image from his past, but all these images are engulfed in a sea of blackness. He tries peering into the dark, into the beyond, staring intensely to find clues. But he finds himself getting tired.. feeling drowsy...

----
The clerk in the tourist office raises his hands in dismay. "We have not recorded any accidant in the region, Sir. But you must understand these mountains are vast. "

Jacques sighs in disappointment.

Anvesh has been missing for the last four weeks. For several days, they have been fearing the worst - of finding him dead, body covered in a blood bath under a cliff. But now, they have started to doubt if they will recover his body at all. He has simply disappeeared. Never to be heard of again.

----

Anvesh wakes up with a jolt. His head is smarting with a bad pain.

"Ahh.. When did I fall asleep ? "

He remembers he is in a journey, and that the bus should be going somewhere. He looks up at his backpack and his suitcase - they are safe in the baggage compartment above.

"Good. I have a seat next to the window."

D r e a m s

Sleep has never been kind to me. It is extremely rare that I get pleasant or even neutral dreams. Most of the dreams that come to me are very terrifying. What causes me fear is not ghosts or death. The underlying element is always madness. Something which is taken for granted no longer appears to be vaild. Going mad is the scariest thing that can happen to me.

I do not know if there is any difference between thinking and dreaming. Most of my dreams are built in a very intelligent manner. They are built as if a super-intelligent mind lays down the entire plot, provides me all the herrings and ultimately lures me into a trap. The ends of the dreams are usually bone-chilling.

The mental impact of these dreams is tremendous, but strangely, they disappear very rapidly out of my memory ! It is for this reason that I cannot recollect many of my scariest dreams. However, today I will try narrating one.

I had this dream, where I was a marine biologist. I was studying the ocean waters - the variations in salinity and their impact on the marine eco-system. This seems so weird to me because I have never been interested in chemistry or environmental biology. I have never even seen a movie/novel which resembles that dream. But there I was - dressed in blue lab-coats, conducting experiments very seriously. The entire laboratory is positioned inside a small ship which is navigating the ocean.

Typical to my dreams, I do not see any faces of people. The faces are entirely vague and very fuzzy.

In this particular lab, I make good friends with my colleagues, and there is one person who is a best friend of mine. One day, both of us (him and me) dive together into the ocean to collect fresh samples of water. I cannot explain why but I feel very strongly that this person and me are extremely close friends.

Soon I become engrossed in the study of the samples, when my friend tells me we should get back into the glass chamber. The glass chamber is a huge room at the bottom of the ship, through which we get into the sea.

I swim into the chamber and look back to see how my friend is doing. But he doesn't swim in along with me.

Instead, he quickly shuts the door to the glass chamber with a bang ! I give him a puzzled look.

And he returns it with a cold stare. Other colleagues of my lab appear next to him - all dressed in diving-suits and some carrying underwater telescopes. All of them are observing me coldly.

I turn back, and then I see it - a white shark is swimming rapidly towards me.

[This entire laboratory and the underwater equipment was just a farce. They were actually studying the attack patterns of sharks. And I was used for this purpose.]

J o i e - d e - l a - f r a n ç a i s

Do you know that in French,
the word for library is "bibliotheque" (letter count = 12)
the word for wine is "vin" (letter count = 3)
the word for nude is "nu" (letter count = 2)

In computer science terminology, this is called Huffmann Coding. The words used most often will get the shortest-length code !

A propos, j'apprendre francais.

We had some 7 classes of instruction and sadly that's got finished. Now I am on my own to pick up some more decent communication skills before leaving to France in May. I wish I'm rather going to Spain or Italy, where people are known to be very effusive. Better chances of me picking up a girlfriend there :) But not so easy in the suave and the jingoistically-culturally-refined France. But this is the land of Guy de Maupassant (my favorite writer). And that of Pascal and Fourier. There's some sense behind that pride of those French people, after all.

With its sharp and precise sounds, English is the language of logic. With all its zest, Spanish is the language of emotions. And what about French ? It is the language of sweet love making. Every sound in this language is impossibly coquettish. (not surprisingly, the word coquette - il est un mot francais)

I am watching (in a loop) this movie - Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie, for short). This film is so addictive - I have already begun to see the world in bright colours - bathed in yellows and greens, like how they show it in the film.

I have pretty much no hopes of finding a girl like Amelie in my life. Somebody who likes me not for my bank balance or for my market-standing. But who likes me, like Nino, for my maverickness ! Ahhh, life is a bitch and hope is its pimp :))

L e J a r d i n

The world is a garden
Loved by some
Loathed by some
Ignored by the rest of them

B o b H a n s e n ' s F a n

The following are snapshots of a plot that I had in mind for a long time. Written now lest I forget later. The title of the story would be Permission to Die (if I ever get to write it completely). I wrote the first chapter on this blog sometime ago. I never got to write the remaining chapters.

---

It is a crumpled piece of paper. Marks of blue ink are littered over the piece - showing words scribbled in a sense of urgency. But now, some of the words are smudged into blue swatches, owing to droplets of sweat trickling down the paper.

His mother clutches the paper tightly with her nails, and her hand goes limp. He looks into her empty and colorless face, and then looks up at the ceiling.

He looks at the nylon rope hanging down into a noose, and at the paralyzed body suspended in lifelessness. The body of his father.

At the age of twelve, Shiva begins life as an orphan. People say that his father commited suicide over financial burden. And that his mother died a few months later.

---

8 years later

This day, the small town clerical office is not its usual self. A tiny stereo player is plugged at the corner - playing music in full volume.

"What is this music ? ", Shiva asks.

"This should be a disc of my nephew. He came down for holidays. I do not know how it got mixed up with my stuff."

"Do you know who the artist is ?"

"No"

But the name is etched onto the disc. Bob Hansen - Crosswords.

"I am going to meet this man.", Shiva declares.

The colleague guffaws in reply. "But where would you raise the money to journey to the USA !"

---

3 years later

"This doesn't work any longer, Bob. These strange noises don't make sense any more. You owe this to us Bob. So buckle up your chords and do what you should do."

It has been three years since he had that conversation with the recording company. It still haunts him.

Rupert Hansen tries to steady himself. The stadium is roaring with the din of the crowd. They are in hysteria.

"We want more. Yeah, we want more."

Rupert flings the guitar around his neck and walks down the podium.

"Yes bitches. I am your whore. I am your whore forever."

---

7 years later

The bottle contains a colorless liquid. It emits no smell. A needle quickly sucks it up into a syringe.

Again the void appears.

Why doesn't he take that instead - which would put an end to everything. Poison.

He lost track of time now. He doesn't remember the time he had any food or any sleep. But he needs money. For this, he has to do that odd piece of work - for paying his rent. For bribing the cops. For getting what he needs.

He picks up his satchel and starts walking.

"Hey you ! You come here. You tramp ! What's your name ?"

He moves towards the cop who is beckoning towards him.

"Rupert"

"Rupert what"

"..."

Because Rupert Hansen no longer exists.

---

The next day

"You are mistaken, Indian fellow. I don't play music."

"No. I know who you are. You are Bob Hansen."

"How do you know ? " Rupert jumps up in alert. "I'd rather die than play for you, shit. "

"Please. I just want you to play one single tune. "

Rupert picks up his guitar and strums on it violently.

"What do you want eh ? Bamboozled ? Midnight fever ? eh ? "

"No Bob. I want you to play one from Crosswords."

Rupert twitches. Then he picks up the guitar and starts playing. He starts playing with rank contempt. But he soon gets immersed. Then he plays with a vengeance. The air reverberates with rising crescendos. He plays for thirty minutes without break.

"Are you satisfied ? Now get the fuck out of here !"

Shiva doesn't stir. He then produces an ancient Shehnai from inside his bag.

"No. I want you to listen."

He draws air into his lungs and starts playing on the wind instrument. He reproduces the music exactly, copying note to note with matching tempo. Then he starts to improvize. He starts playing unexpected combinations. The music starts sounding totally new with very novel permutations. But magically, they all fall in place with the tune.

Bob stands there in a state of shock. He has never listened to anyone playing like this before. He has never imagined this music before, though he invented that tune years ago. Shiva completes the final crescendo.

"Now Bob you piece of shit ! You can fucking die !"

Then he leaves.

---

1 year later

"Mr. Bob Hansen, you are asking us to do the impossible. How can we trace a man in a country of one billion people, without a name and without a picture? But sure Sir, we will do everything that is possible."

"Thank you officer. "

Bob Hansen doesn't carry any hopes that he would rediscover the man that walked into his apartment last winter. But he knows that he can reach him.

Because wherever he is, that man would be listening - to what Bob Hansen plays.

---

There exists no lover, there exists no beloved. There exists no fan, there exists no favorite. All that a man needs to motivate him in life is a challenger. Without a challenge, life is worthless.

---

A N e w H o p e

A long time ago, in a neuron ensemble far far away.

It is a period of civil war. Rebel neurons, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Hypothalamic Empire.

During the battle, rebel neurons managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Thought, an armored psychological trauma with enough power to destroy an entire brain.

Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Idea races home aboard her electromagnetic pulse, the custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the entire Central Nervous System.

(Yeah I should go to sleep now :)) Lack of sleep is kinda like dope !)

G o d O n R a d i o

Once I believed in friends
And love and hope and wonder
Once I believed in dreams
Of magic sea and thunder

Until I met ennui
Until I knew The Vacant
There's nothing - It's just me
There's no one - I'm just me

Off to your clanking glasses
Off to your jarring laughs
Off you fleeting apparitions
You never will save me

And talking is a transaction
It's stupid to keep on trying
And life is but a game
But I don't feel like playing

There's a rhythm on the radio
Soft and old, undying
Yes, life is just this beat
You let it keep on playing

I come here to my wintry forest
Where death smiles and lies waiting
I see the ice, I see dark barrens
But the tune in my ear keeps ringing

A n i m a t e d I n I n d i a

Rajan has tempted me to blog about this contentsutra post.

... From outsourced sweat shops to co-production deals, that's the way to go for Indian animation companies. India's animation talent cannot be underestimated. For instance, Walt Disney’s 2005 blockbuster Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was done out of India. It was executed by a 700-strong team in the Los Angeles and Mumbai offices of animation and visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues. ...

I am a computer graphics researcher and am very interested in the entertainment industry. I would even like to take a job in India but I haven't done so ! The reason ? I disagree to the fact that Indian animation industry has come of age.

This is a problem not just with the animation industry, but with the Indian industry in general. Most of the revenue that India earns through software is by offering services. In fact, major companies such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro etc. have hardly developed any products !

Sometime last year, I had the opportunity to ask a question to the very vice-presidents of TCS, Infosys, Satyam and Wipro themselves. This was during a seminar in ISB on the expected rates of growth for the Indian software industry.

"Sir, inspite of making huge dollar profits, your company doesn't develop any products. Why ? What problems do you face in building an image and marketing the product ? Why doesn't your company see this as a good source of earning revenue ?"

This question made them all uneasy. The VPs of Infosys and TCS mentioned the names of a few products that their companies built.

"But what is the percentage of revenue that these products are earning for your company ? What is the corresponding ratio for companies of similar size in the Silicon Valley ? "

At this point, the VP of Satyam was visibly angry. He beckoned me and said, "The conditions in Hyderabad and in the Silicon Valley are very different. They have good universities up there and they have a totally different mode of thinking."

Then I replied, "Sir, I belong to IIIT which is just next door. Our university is research oriented and we have good developers in our student community."

Then he said, "Yes, I know. Why don't you meet me in person and we can talk this over during lunch ?"

But I didn't/couldn't meet him during lunch :)

Even though none of the VPs admitted the reason to me, I knew it already. Indian companies are notorious for averting risks ! Developing a product has several inherent risks and invites ferocious competition on the global scale. Indian companies want to play it safe. In other words, they are chickened out ! I am not saying that chickening out is a bad thing, it surely has some merit from the perspective of the chicken. :))

So where am I ? Yeah, this is the same reason why I don't expect Indian animation companies to do anything wonderful on the global scale. These companies are too scared to take any risks and to develop any products (in this case, a movie or a videogame). During the inception and the development phases, they are wont do cut down costs, overwork the employees, use terrible/incapable managers and miss deadlines. No client is waiting for the work to get done, and thus nobody becomes accountable for the product ! After all, nobody has believed in the first place that the product would be any good anyway !

The first 3D animation movie to come out of India "Pandavas" was so bad - not only in artistic detail but also in script and animatics ! Though relesed years later (in terms of graphics, years = ages), this movie pales in comparison to the first 3D movie ever produced "Toy Story". Can we ever expect the magic of Disney such as "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" to come out of India ? Would anybody ever conceptualize a sequence such as the birds chirping and dancing, as snowwhite draws water from the well ?

In India, animation houses are equivalents of BPOs and sweatshops. They grow laterally rather than vertically. They accept too many work-assignments, and they overwork their employees. And their workplaces are too crampy with very little space per employee. (Not that it is a bad thing, they are solving the unemployment problem after all)

I have recently visited an animation house which also offers training to novices who want to get into the business. "Why don't you encourage short-movies from your employees/students so that they can send them to SIGGRAPH ? This will show good on their portfolio and will be good for your publicity." To this, the HR has replied "What is SIGGRAPH ?"

I have also recently visited a very good art school - the JNTU school of fine arts. I was trying to build a partnership with the art-students for my students in the computer graphics course. Such partnerships are commonplace in the USA but are virtually unheard of in India. The art students were super-cool and they were pretty interested in our ideas. But they were also clueless - "What is SIGGRAPH ? "

The major complaint that is heard from animation houses is that there is a lack of technical talent / motivation etc. in India. This sounds suspiciously close to what I heard from the VPs of Satyam, Infosys etc.

Rhythm & Hues is an exception to the rule. Firstly, their Los Angeles unit is extremely good. I have visited their LA quarters when I've been to SIGGRAPH in 2005.




I have observed some work-in-progress for "The Chronicles of Narnia" too ! R&H has a breezy workspace and an ultra-cool work culture. This will prove to be in stark contrast to my later experiences with Indian animation houses. Secondly, they truly trust their unit in Mumbai and are cheerleading it very much. Indeed, I am very happy that the Mumbai unit has participated in the production of the "Narnia". But personaly, the Narnia movie didn't please me much. I would be surprised if it wins the Academy award. The biggest killer in the movie is the sloppy editing - the VFX are pretty cool, though there are some lighting mismatches (bad cinematography). And also, the credits for this movie include ILM and Sony Imageworks along with R&H.

Some MNCs (such as Google, Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft) are doing product development in software at their Bangalore offices. But this is mostly in conjuction with the main team in the USA, similar to how R&H has executed the Narnia movie.


Do I see a time when an entire movie/videogame is conceptualized in India for a major production house and then receives world-wide acclaim ? Do I see a time when the art-schools incorporate a radically-upto-date syllabus ? Do I see a time when short-movies from India get accepted to the SIGGRAPH animation festival (France had 6 movies last year, and India had zero. Sounds like the Olympics ?) Do I see a time when Indian animation houses tend to attract & to keep really talented people ?

The answers to all the above questions are "No, not in the near future."

I n d i a n L a n g u a g e T r a n s l a t i o n

During my undergraduate days, I have worked in a state-of-the-art research lab on machine translation from English to Indian languages. One of the main motivations for our work was that we would be bringing the WWW to the 90% of the Indian population which is illiterate in English. Owing to this experience, I obtained a fair knowledge of the key problems in this area and the main technical hurdles to be overcome.

But I believe many of the R & D teams that are working on this are missing the holistic view.

Most of the people in India are illiterate, but they can speak native languages such as Telugu and Hindi. Further, many of the people who are literate are not computer literate. And amongst the computer literate people, most of them are already comfortable with English.

Keeping this in view, of what effectiveness would be a new Desktop Manager with arcane Telugu words for terms such as "Start", "My Computer" and "Control Panel" ?

In places such as China and Japan, communication in English is purely impossible. In other places such as France and Germany, there is a strong linguistic pride and awareness. But in India, both of these are absent. Still I believe there is a target audience in India, albeit of a different variety.

In order to clarify this, let me narrate an experience of mine.

Once during my UG days, I had another strange and unique opportunity. My father, a teacher, has invited me to give a few lectures on Modern Physics and Atomic Theory to the outgoing students of the high school. The medium of instruction was Telugu, not English, as had been mine during my school days. I had great fun teaching, and the students liked me very much as an instructor. Also, I had to put some effort in studying the equivalent Telugu words for the scientific terms. But this experience of teaching in the native language had been very benificial for me - in understanding the subject much clearer.

The fact remains that several of the students in Indian high schools are not literate/comfortable in the English language. This is a major hurdle for them to pick up and read the vast majority of the available literature. Even if they are fairly conversant in the rudimentary English language, they are not accustomed to reading large books in English. This section of people includes, surprisingly, both of my own parents - who are much more comfortable in reading books in Telugu.

But ofcourse, the most informative literature is currently available only in English. A sizeable portion of this is present on the web, and the rest is available in print. The key factors are the relevance and the importance of the information that is available.

A good example for such informative texts are the essays from the Edge Foundation.

The state of the art in machine translation research is well behind producing a reasonable output for real texts such as these. But this output can very well be a good starting point for a human translator.

Ideally, such information should be available in differnt formats (audio, images. video, summarized audio, detailed translated text ..) to cater to the needs of the varied audience. The important thing to note is that the needs of the audience are very different.

• Some people might need to know the latest weather forecasts / stock prices / news headlines in summarized Telugu text.
  
• Some people might need to know about the latest agricultural techniques in video format.
  
• Some people might need to report/publish websites or blogs using simplistic Telugu interface and video.
  
• Students in several schools might need to communicate on their class projects using audio and images.
  
• Some students (or elders) might need to read books such as "Selfish Gene" and "The End of Poverty" (two personal favorites of mine) in clear Telugu language. Or they might need video and images in an accompanying website.
  

In my point of view, these are the issues that are really pertinent for the emancipation of education in the Indian scenario.

Issues such as these should be tackled individually and with special care. There are no magic bullets, such as Indian language GUIs, for solving all these problems in one shot.

These problems will be solved, both by building good computer systems and by massive human effort. These twin efforts should go hand in hand.

Particularly, I want to highlight one issue - that of translation of some informative books (such as The Selfish Gene, The End of Poverty etc) which are written by highly skilled scientists for a general audience. This is the kind of information that needs to be available for high school students. But unfortunately, neither of these books are translated into Telugu, so far, to my knowledge.

This kind of information is currently being published at a rapid pace, both on and off the world wide web. In order to make this available for the general Indian audience, I think it should be encouraged in universities for UG/PG students to translate these literature into regional languages, and course-credit assigned for such efforts. (For example, a group of economics students might translate The End of Poverty)

And by translation, the output need not be a book in Telugu. It can be a website or a series of lectures in images and audio. From my experience (of teaching modern physics in my dad's school), I can say that this will be truly rewarding for the translator too.

Interested people might even maintain weblogs where they post the translated text of specific domains (sometimes translate it as an audio file through speech). Should we call them transblogs ?

These will provide a true breakthrough in bridging the information divide in India.