It isn't much of trouble when switching languages while typing. All it needs is a toggle that after sometime becomes quite instinctive for the mind, not that easier though it seems when it comes to switching the languages while speaking.

Well, at least for me it has not been easier. Everyday I interact with so many people in Kannada that switching back to English sometimes gets me staggering.

So, I got around to sketch this today:

This is for an article that questions the prudence of State Government's decision to allocate funds for providing free Electricity to Farmers in this year's budget.

It was a surprise news that almost ended up being short of a shocker. While Unicode is being adapted increasingly world-wide, our Karnataka Government seems to be heading the other way. The state government issued a notification earlier this week for a possibility of a 'bi-lingual font' for Kannada script.

The worry is not the weird idea insisting on a requirement of bi-lingual font (since we already have multi-lingual fonts in Unicode), it is the state government's decision to stick around with the old encoding in ASCII. While the encoding format is not well supported anywhere else other than the Nudi software (which is distributed as a freeware by the state government), it is definitely not path for the future.

The India Water Portal initiated by Arghyam is now available in Kannada.

The Kannada version of the portal is intended towards creating awareness about Water usage, Rainwater Harvesting and several issues, aspects surrounding Water.

Readers can ask questions, take part in the discussions, contribute articles and information.

Image Courtesy: AmarChitraKatha.com

True to its name, Amar Chitra Katha has always been the lively comic book with the tinge of Indian culture. When I was a kid, these books were unaffordable to my Mom (and my father never bothered to buy me books), so I always had to read them at libraries. But for my nephew, that is not the case. All of us keep buying Amar Chitra Katha whenever we catch them at the book store. But funny side is that he fancies watching Hattori (!) on Nick, Noddy and Mr. Bean on Pogo rather than read something!
The lovely digital pictures that Tata Sky puts directly to home from the satellite without interruptions isn't helping him much, either.

Looking at this little announcement of sorts on The Hindu today, I remembered how we used to search corners of the library to fish out the unread titles. The number of titles released in this series is huge. I used to enjoy the Kannada translations of these books the most. Apparently, the translations had gone into good hands and we never felt that it was actually a translated version that we were reading. The then ignorance and quality of Kannada on the translated books sometimes made me believe that Amar Chitra Katha first came out in Kannada and was then translated to English (which clearly was not).

It was a long time since I installed debian on my laptop. Unsupported hardware issues dogged it the last time I tried it on this (which seems years back). But this time, it was really worth giving a shot.

I found Debian sleek, more nostalgic than any other present distribution. It is probably the best distribution to work with.

But the old kernel that is shipped with etch had some ACPI related issues. And sound wasn't there. I had to download and compile the latest Kernel after which everything is good. Pidgin has to be compiled if you don't fancy gaim. iwp2200 wasn't working fine, but did after installing the firmware. And that is about my log of installing Debian etch on my old laptop. :-)

It was a sunny day and the usual Bangalore pollution was in the air. We were headed through the freaky traffic of Mysore Road towards Kengeri with our own imagination of how a farm near the city would be like. For me, it turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. It was an atmosphere very different from the city and that too just few Kms away from here; almost as if we were teleported to somewhere much inside Karnataka! This was the "Maithri Farm" we visited on a Sunday in January to record a podcast with rare thinker, environmentalist - Nagesh Hegde.