[Background: Kannada, like probably many other Indian languages, has seen its days run out completely as the primary language used to store, record knowledge. It may have been due to several factors, but back to local view of the world: local news, local language, local perspectives and everything local has now been catching up. Even FM radios in the city have switched back to the local language as the primary language of broadcast. Well, is it time the local language is also used more and more to document knowledge? and to think back about those aspects of knowledge that stays beautiful when written in local language, the aspects that make people more comfortable with it to sit back and listen, or grab a book or news paper to read. Whatever is, people thronging in the local language communities on-line or otherwise would have certainly observed this change of discussing certain aspects of technology, science or software (that make their presence felt in everyone's lives) in local languages just because the conversations happen effectively.
Localized software, support for languages on software has added up to this. These are most definitely good signs for that large mass of rural students who are primarily educated in local language and for those people who are more at comfy with their mother tongue. Since this percentage of population who are more at ease with the local language is more in the rural areas, towns and smaller cities, it becomes even more important to log technology, science or the basic knowledge surrounding it in local languages to spread it across the state, create awareness about the sea of change that is sweeping each day with new technologies, concepts and innovations.
A good instance would be going about creating awareness about free software (free as in freedom) and the alternative it provides for a free world and about how the rural India could benefit from it.]
It *is* a challenge to reach out to people from our own community, an informal community bound by a common factor - the language surrounding which we grew up. Although we were let down by numbers in terms of how many participated in the discussion, we had some excellent discussion about 'Writing Technology, Science in Kannada". The focus was obviously on using Internet to do that and gradually taking it from there to elsewhere, where Internet reach is minimal. The discussion happened at Center for Internet and Society, Cunningham Road on Sunday, 29th.
