More power to your fingers!

On 1st April, one can mourn over the poverty, illiteracy in our state; complain of the utter negligence that we have faced at the hands of the centre; deplore the lack of vision among the political leadership and conveniently forget everything by 2^nd April.

And this is not because we think nothing could be done, but because we simply don’t have the time. To do something substantial and visible for our state would require a higher level of commitment, both time and penny wise, which most of us are not allowed to dream of given the mundane demands of our day job.

This article is meant to prove all of us wrong at just one level.

Most of us who are reading this piece spend a lot of time on the internet, many of the time surfing around or waiting for that next interesting post on Orkut, Facebook or Twitter. Have you ever checked how much Odia content (written in Odia script) is available on the internet except those few newspaper websites? Close to nil. For a language which boasts to have 36.6 million speakers ahead of Malayalam and Punjabi, this is shameful information.

None of the e-mail, social networking websites provide the option to write in Odia. Google India site and Yahoo! Messenger are available in 9 Indian languages each; Facebook in 6 languages; MSN India as well as Windows Live Messenger in 5 languages; GTalk, Orkut in 5 languages. None of that include Odia. Rediff used to have an inbuilt Odia font in its mailing system and now they have done away with that too. And here I am not talking about “supporting” Odia font but “enabling you to write” in Odia font on their websites. The popular music website Raaga.com has music in 10 Indian languages including Bhojpuri, but no Odia is not worth it.

The only breather is, Google has now started experimenting with an Odia “On-screen keyboard” by which you can search the Odia content available on the internet. Here is the URL: http://labs.google.co.in/keyboards/oriya.html

You can also use this tool to write in Odia and use that at other e-mail/social networking sites. But try searching for ଓଡ଼ିଶା (Odisha) and see for yourself how much content is available and the quality there of.

There were a few glitches in this tool too. A few e-mail exchanges with Mr MT Raghunath, the person in charge of Google’s Indic language project at the company’s Bangalore centre have set a lot of things right. Still there are a few other glitches that I have discovered recently which I hope will be set right by Google soon.

The point I am trying to make here is in the era of social media, companies listen. Especially so when it comes to internet companies and social networking websites. All we need to do is speak up! Here is what Raaga wrote me back when I asked them to include an Odia songs channel on their website.

Raaga:

Absolutely. We will be making available an Oriya channel very shortly.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards

Raaga Team

It’s been six months since this exchange of mail happened. Unnecessary to say that no such channel is available on Raaga.com till now.

So here is the first thing we can do which will not take much of our time. Drop a request mail to Raaga, Google, Facebook, Orkut and every other website that supports Indian languages asking them to include Odia too. Raaga could ignore a single request, but not if it gets at least a few every day. Same holds true for everyone else.

The second point is how to increase Odia content on the web. Obviously the reason why it has not taken off is due to the difficulty associated with typing in Odia. I know some of you who are tech-savvy would say one can always download some of the free Odia fonts available, but somehow I have never found those very handy or error-proof. The Google Odia virtual keyboard partially solves that problem. But it is still strenuous to use that to type long sentences. So what is needed is a transliteration tool where you can type in English and it gets transliterated into Odia font. The good news is Google has started providing it in many Indian languages, bad news is, as expected, not in Odia. Here is the Google Hindi Transliteration tool: http://www.google.com/transliterate/

So our next step should be to urge Google to come out with an Odia Transliteration tool. That should not take much time only if many of you join me in troubling them. Once that is done, Google can easily integrate that to Gmail, GTalk and Orkut. That would be a great achievement for our language. The Odia Tranliteration tool will obviously encourage many of us to start our blogs, websites in our own lovely mother tongue and make it searchable on Google. That would be a virtual revolution for Odia language, literally.

We should also write to all the existing Odia newsportals like Samaja, Sambad, Dharitri to make the necessary changes in their software so that their content is searchable on Google (which is now possible through the Google Odia virtual keyboard). That would also give their news pages the life of eternity and help them generate more advertising revenue by putting Google AdSense on each web page.

The third point I want to make is this. Let’s also make effort towards increasing the volume of content about Odisha on Wikipedia, both in English and Odia (Yes, Wikipedia supports Odia language too: http://tinyurl.com/yhksq29). As we all know Wikipedia has become the first source of information for many around the world. If you look at the “Orissa” page in English Wikipedia, it is very badly written and gives a skewed portrait of our state. We don’t lack manpower or talent who can write a more balanced piece on Odisha. But for commoners like you and me who think we might be lacking the expertise to correct such errors, here is what we can all do. We can create/update our district/ village pages on Wikipedia. To have a brief on our village- the geographical and historical significance, the famous personality associated, the name of that ancient temple near that village pond-even that much information will also be sufficient to start with. Who has not searched the name of his/her village on Google only to find no or a few mentions! Why don’t you be the first and create a Wikipedia page for your village and ask your childhood friends to chip in. It surely will not take much of your time.

We can all think of doing something for our state “one day” or at least do something “now” even from inside our office cubicle and our own drawing room. It is also a kind of social networking where you collaborate with others to build or achieve a common goal, i.e. to increase the volume of Odia language content on the web and make it searchable so that everyone can access it.

Think of it!

Wishing more power to your fingers on this Odisha Divas.

ଜୟ ଓଡ଼ିଶା; ଜୟ ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ!

Asit Ranjan Mishra

asitmishra@gmail.com

(I don’t update this blog of mine anymore. So don’t come back expecting more. Didn’t have any other avenue to put this piece, so came back here)

When Will We Learn The Lesson?

Chamunda Devi stampede

It was no surprise that for many of the English news channels, today the lead story was not the Chamunda Devi stampede in Rajasthan. It was rather the rejection of the $700 billion package by the U.S. Congress or the Army being forced to accept the recommendations of the 6th Pay Commission. And my favourite Times Now and Arnab Goswami finds time even to “debate” these issues further.

But nobody has time ask a simple question: Why we have to live with one after another stampede? Is it just enough to just show some gory pictures and forget it as it was only a haadsa (accident)? (Remember Naina Devi and Mandradevi stampede which killed 162 and 340 devotees respectively) When will we realise that these are no less criminal acts? And the criminals are the temple management, the organisers and more so the local police administration which permitted such events to take place without properly varifying the preventive measures put in place. How different these incidences are from the Uphaar Cinema Hall trajedy which took 59 lives on June 13, 1997? Are the lives of those ‘killed” in such stampedes any less precious than a person killed in any other criminal act? If Ansal brothers could be trialed for their criminal negligence, why not the above-mentioned authorities in stampede cases?

Our immediate reaction to stamedes is sympathy and politicians doling out generous donations to the ill-fated and their relatives. They do order enquiries into such incidences, but nobody knows the fate of such reports. In a country where setting up a committee is the easiest way to ensure mass amnesia, asking to take corrective measures in the aftermath to such incidences is too much to ask for.

Religion has become a big business in India. And it is not only the case for South India temples (which anyway provide better facilities in return of a few extra pennies though), but all over the country. But nobody has the right to take innocent, fate-bound souls for granted. Rajasthan government must put the culprits of the Chamunda Devi stampede behind the bars and set an example.