Digitizing Indian freedom struggle writings

The Indian freedom struggle was not only a great story of patriotism, love for humanity and sacrifice, but also led to some great inspiring writings. These writings contain some of the Whereas there is always so much jingoism whenever we hear of Bhagat Singh and Netaji, few know that Bhagat was also an intellectual – one of his masterpiece being ‘Why am an atheist’. And there is so much to learn from Netaji – his autobiography ‘The Indian Pilgirm’, the ‘Indian Freedom Struggle’ – his view of the Indian freedom movement or well, the letters he wrote as a kid to his mother!

We need to digitize all these writings before they are lost, make them open, free, easily accessible and searchable, on an easy to use web platform. I guess, the government has already done this with the writings of the Mahatma. There is need to do it for all the many others, who spoke in voices of humanity, courage, love and morality: who had an idea of India – may be some those which we do not today agree to and some those which we haven’t been able to live up to.

Pros: Preserve the best traditions of the Indian freedom struggle; Make it available to all.

Cons: Do not want any politics on it!

Aligning the many ramayanas

There are so many different Ramayanas starting from that of Valmiki – each beautiful in its own way, sometimes an expression of human bias, but more often to find the perfect Bhagvan Ram.  As the master of simplicity, Tulsidas says – Jaaki rahi bhavna jaisi, prabhu murati dekhi tin taisi. Finding the perfection in Ram is to find the perfection in (wo)man.

It will be so wonderful to align all these Ramayanas, that of a Valmiki, a Kamban, a Tulsi, the Adhyatma Ramayana and some 400 more… I would want to be able to read all of these versions simultaneously; to know by a click of the button, what Bhagvan Ram said, when Dasratha/Kaikeyi first asked him to leave for the forest – did he blink an eyelid, and in which version? Or how did Bhagvan Ram explain the killing of Bali from hiding or when did first the incident of Hanumanjee opening his chest to show Sita-Ram appear. I will learn immensely from it and also enjoy – rasika of Ram, not Krishna!

In my mind this can be done by doing good natural language processing on the many Indian languages (one will have to see how to take care of ‘samaas’ and ‘sandhi’ of Sanskrit). Alignment algorithms are a plenty starting with dynamic programming with the more sophisticated ones in bioinformatics. A nice web platform can make it super easy to navigate through these many Ramayanas all aligned to each other.

Pros: Trace the history of Ramayana, Fun machine learning and visualization project

Cons: It is just for fun!

To reflect: Why has it not been done already!

Check out Ramayana for the 4 year old ... need to align this too!

Reading Hindi literature

There are lot of jewels in the Hindi language, be it poetry of Neeraj and Dinkar, or stories of Premchand and Manto. Unfortunately, the younger generation in metros doesn’t show much interest in it! May be this is because they haven't been exposed to it?

I would love to create program to expose school kids to hindi literature. It is for those, who if exposed, would get interested and make it a hobby of a life time. One way to do it is build a scholarship around it, say for grade 9 and 10 kids. They will be given three books to read and then participate in an exam, which will ultimately lead to selection for scholarship. (Remember Sanskrit scholarship in schools?) The idea is to create an initial incentive to read (seeding) and then let people continue with it, if it makes a lasting impact. They leave it if it was boring.

Book selection: one novel from yesteryears, one from now and one collection of poems.

Pros: Get more people to read; Exposure without forcing.

Cons: Another test, another scholarship L But for a lasting purpose.

To think: What will be a good fun test?