Booknomics

Book Review: Kashmiryat at Crossroads

Kashmiryat at Crossroads – The search for a destiny
by P Parimoo

Type: Print Book
Genre: Politics and Society
Price: Rs 325.00 + shipping

Of the many special places in India, Kashmir is surely one of the most beautiful. It is fascinating for many reasons including its proximity to the Himalayas, the snow and its other-worldly scenery. Now, a further reason draws our interest to the place: the political situation. This book brings alive Kashmir right from the early years of the last century up to the present.

Based on the diaries of the Late Pandit Dina Nath Parimoo who was born in Srinagar in 1911, this book is full of vivid descriptions of his first-hand experiences in Kashmir until the middle of 20th century. It takes the reader to Kashmir in the olden days with rich glimpses into the life of an ordinary Kashmiri, the culture, history, social and economic conditions, the political scenario, spirituality and religion of Kashmir. The book includes photographs, song lyrics and details of Kashmiri ceremonies and food that make for delightful reading.

“Frequent cups of kehwa chai were sipped till late at night by all the participants and the elderly onlookers. This whole leaf tea is specially prepared in Samovars, a central Asian contraption adopted in Kashmir since ages. Small cinnamon pieces and small cardamom are used to flavour the brew; lightly crushed almond imparts a garnishing. No milk is added to this tea. The tradition bound Pandit would have his kehwa or Mogal chai only from a khasu, a brass cup without a handle, edges gently tapered outwards to facilitate very slow sipping.

We also catch glimpses of ancient Kashmir, its kings and other influential people, the fascinating things they did including conservation of nature, something the present government has undertaken only recently. Alongside we discover the desperately poor health conditions that prevailed early on and the disease this brought about. We see how Buddhism and Islam made their presence here and how the religious battles began and continue.

The book is written by the Pandit’s son, P Parimoo, who, though a technocrat by training, is an avid reader of history, particularly the history of religions.

This is a work of a lifetime for the family involved in putting it together as well as for anyone interested in learning about Kashmir. Although well written and very readable, the text could have been further improved with a round of professional editing.

– Hasmita Chander

Six Tips for Indian Writers on How to Write Better

For people whose native tongue is an Indian language, it is difficult to write error-free English. Even those who speak English all the time but live in India cannot avoid the Indian-ness that seeps into their language, both spoken and written.

Avoid literal translation
For new Indian writers, there is a strong tendency to literally translate from their mother tongue into English.Each language has a specific structure, without which the language would collapse or turn into something ridiculous. For example, in French, most adjectives are placed after the noun, such as ‘une chaise bleue’. If translated word-for-word into English, this becomes ‘a chair blue’ instead of what it should be: a blue chair. Imagine reading a sentence like this:“There were chairs blue, tables of wood, cushions red and music soft playing.”

This is how a reader feels while reading English that has been directly translated from an Indian language. The result is confused, sometimes hilarious, meaning.

You may have read these often:
- “Don’t eat my head!”
  (Kannada: Nanna thale thinnbeda)
  Try: “Stop it. You’re getting on my nerves!”
- “Don’t be angry on me.”
  (Hindi: Mujhpe gussa mat karo)
  Use: “Don’t be angry with me.”
- “We all are going out.”
  (Hindi: Hum sab bahar ja rahe hain)
  Use: “We are all going out.”
Keep a watch on these literal translations.
Original idioms, please
English has its own set of idioms and sayings—use them and not the translation of Indian ones. Idioms have a strong cultural and historical root, so they are best used word for word and in the original language.The Hindi ‘Daal mein kuchh kaala hai’ has the English idiom equivalent: ‘There’s something fishy going on’. Instead of the Tamil ‘Kazhudaikki theriyuma karpoora vaasanai’ use ‘To cast pearls before swine’. Not all sayings have equivalents, however. The best way to become familiar with what’s available is to read a lot. Looking up a book of English proverbs doesn’t always help unless there are a few examples for each included and the author is a reliable one. Online, have a look at Idiom Dictionary (http://www.idiomdictionary.com).
Keep track of time
Till a sentence back, you ‘were’ thinking. Suddenly you ‘are’ feeling. You may not realize it while writing and this switch may even sound natural because we often think haphazardly, but while writing, you need to maintain consistency in tense or you’ll distract or confuse the reader about whether something happened in the past or is happening in the present.Take a look at this example:

Veena walked up the path to Mr Wood’s house. She is thinking she should knock but what if he is sleeping? She doesn’t want to disturb him and get him in a bad mood. That is why she could not make a sale. She had irritated him.

Is Veena walking to Mr Wood’s door as we read? Or has she already walked and come back after a failed attempt at making a sale?

Double check if you’re switching tenses in your writing without the story demanding it. Sometimes it is necessary to change tenses, say for a time when you’re narrating a scene in a flashback as if it’s happening right before the reader. But if you’re a new writer, stick to a single choice of tense throughout and you won’t go wrong. Once you become confident of using tenses properly, you can try using more than one.
Unclutter your punctuation
There is a tendency to use exclamations in proportion to the amount of surprise or shock.

E.g. A mountain gorilla was standing before him!!!!!!!!!

Another is to intersperse the exclamations with question marks.

E.g. Was the hunk eyeing her?!?!?!

Please. Stick to one punctuation mark. “A mountain gorilla was standing before him!” shows surprise enough. “Was the hunk eyeing her?” will do. Trust readers to get the quantity of shock or wonder you intend. And trust your writing skills to convey the situation so that they do.

English punctuation rules do not accept a combination of ? and ! or multiple exclamations. A few style books have begun to accept one pair of ?! but most do not.

Many new writers like to create an ‘effect’ by trailing dots after a sentence.

E.g. She stood before him……………in the black dress he had given her……

The punctuation that uses dots is called an ellipsis and consists of three dots (…). No more, no less. Sometimes, you want to trail off a sentence and end it that way. Then you follow the ellipsis with a full stop, which then totals four dots.

E.g. And there she waited for him every day….

Multiple exclamation marks and generous strings of dots reek of amateur writing. Knock them off. These are simple ways to make your writing look professional.
Articles gone AWOL
Can you eat a curry with no salt? Similarly, you cannot write without articles. If you’ve forgotten the basics of when to use ‘the’ or ‘a’ or ‘an,’ please pick up a simple grammar book and leaf through it (you can do it with a torch, hiding in a cupboard if you like—but do it). Simpler still, visit a grammar site online, bookmark it and refer to it when in doubt. You don’t visit Taj Mahal, you visit THE Taj Mahal.It’s never too late to learn, and these are simple rules that, when followed, make your writing come alive. The rules exist to help you remember, not to make your life difficult.
Remove redundancy
Find the repetitious words in the following:
1. That store sells many delights such as cookies, cakes, toffees, chocolates, etc.
2. I have never heard of this before.
3. I will read this and return it back to you.
4. Keep this money, in case you may need it later.
5. I bought a red colour dress.
In the first example, when you say ‘such as,’ you don’t need the etcetera. ‘Such as’ means this is only an indicative list. In the next, ‘never’ and ‘before’ are saying the same thing. If you’ve never seen it, there’s no need to say ‘before’. In the third sentence, if you’re going to return something, you’re obviously giving it back, so ‘back’ is redundant. ‘In case’ indicates a possibility, so use ‘in case’ OR ‘may’ – in case you need it later – or Keep this money, you may need it later. Red is a colour. Duh.

But new writers love to inject their writing with crystal clarity by providing extra words to help their slow readers. These writers will make you enter into a room, not just enter it, just as they’ll help you exit from the story instead of quickly exiting it.

Here’s a secret: there is no shortcut to writing happiness.

Read that again.

You can’t press a key and make it happen. Anyone can write, but to write well and communicate effectively, you need to put in effort, just as you would for any other skill. Read a lot and read books of quality writing. Reading even prize-winning children’s books can help you build familiarity with the language. Newspapers are not literature, so use those to get the news, not to improve your reading habits.

Write a lot, and get feedback from someone whose English is good, or at least better than yours. Get your writing edited by a professional editor and learn from the feedback and comments.

However, there is one place for weak English, even Indian English, and that is in dialogue. If your character speaks that way, you can use ‘Don’t eat my head’ in his dialogue. As long as you don’t use it yourself in the narration!

Destination for Book Lovers

Quiz question for bibliophiles: What’s better than browsing books in your favourite bookstore?

Answer: Browsing a million books in the Bangalore Book Festival!

Yes, that’s right, a million books. The Bangalore Book Festival is a synonym for book mania! Visit stall after stall of books, get introduced to new publishers, get juicy discounts, and take in the fragrance of newly printed books fresh off the press.

For the eighth year, the annual Bangalore Book Festival is set to occupy Palace Grounds in Bangalore from 12-21 November 2010. Only second to Kolkata, the Bangalore Book Festival, organised by the Bangalore Booksellers and Publishers Association and Klub Class, is the largest book fair in the country. Over 300 stalls have been taken by publishers, bookstores and distributors from all over India and will have on offer publications in English, Kannada and other Indian languages. That’s not all, there will be entertainment as well, with light music, folk dances, book reading sessions and special poet meets being held after six every evening of the fair.

Authors, you get to put your books before a huge number of book lovers—organisers expect 2 lakh visitors this year. Mr B S Raghuram, BBF programme director, says he expects a business of Rs 15 crore to be generated this year.

Pothi.com has been a regular participant at the Bangalore Book Festival since 2008 and will be there this year, too. The Pothi.com stall will help independent and self-published authors showcase their books to increase visibility and generate sales.

This is a rare opportunity for authors because people come to the fair from far and wide expressly to look for new reading material and with money to buy it. There is fierce competition, so authors should get their books out there where people can see them. Authors published through Pothi.com can visit here for more details. Other authors, head here. Book your space quickly so you don’t lose this special opportunity.

Announcing e-book publishing

e-books have finally arrived on Pothi.com

—

From our Press Release

Pothi.com Launches free e-book publishing platform with social DRM for authors and publishers

Pothi.com, India’s leading Print-on-Demand backed publishing platform has launched e-book publishing and selling for independent authors and publisher. The platform is free to use and authors get 75% of MRP as royalty.

Bangalore, July 12, 2010: Taking another step towards its mission of making publishing accessible to all, Bangalore based Pothi.com has added e-book publishing and selling to its publishing platform. The platform allows authors to sell e-books starting at Rs. 50/- or even give them away for free as a marketing tool. All the books sold through the store will use Social DRM which will allow tracking of the source in case of piracy.

Publishing through the platform is as simple as creating a word or openoffice file according to the guidelines provided and submitting it online. The platform takes care of generating the e-book files. There are no upfront costs and the authors get 75% of the MRP as royalty on sales from the Pothi.com store. They retain all the rights on the book as well as get full control over the pricing and availability. An online dashboard provides real time statistics of sales and earnings for all their books.

“E-books are gaining momentum all over the world. They represent an excellent opportunity for the authors and publishers to connect directly with the readers. Our aim is to enable them to make best use of the medium without getting overwhelmed with the technicalities”, says Jaya Jha, one of the co-founders of the company.

One of the common concerns regarding e-books is of piracy. To address piracy, a variety of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions are available from different vendors. DRM typically refers to the technologies which restrict the use of e-book in various ways to prevent piracy. However, existing DRM technologies are incompatible with each other and using DRMed e-books can become a hassle for the genuine buyers.

As an alternative to using vendor specific DRM, Pothi.com is offering social DRM. Social DRM puts no restrictions on the usage of the e-book but embeds some personal information of the buyer in the files. One common example is the name and contact information of the buyer. This discourages people from sharing the files on p2p networks while still giving them full flexibility of copying between their own devices. Thus Social DRM creates a win-win situation for both the parties. When a buyer downloads the purchased e-book from Pothi.com, his e-mail id is stamped in a non-obtrusive way on every page. It discourages piracy while still being convenient to the genuine buyers.

“Since e-books are available for immediate downloads, it is particularly helpful in situations where a reader needs instant access to the book’s content. Many international readers also prefer to buy e-books because they don’t want to wait out the shipping time. We were regularly receiving enquiries from our authors, who wanted to be able to provide e-books to such readers.” explains Abhaya Agarwal, who is also the co-founder of the company.

Further details and the catalog of books already published through the platform are available on Pothi.com’s website http://pothi.com

COMIX.INDIA Vol. II on Preorder (20% Discount)

COMIX.INDIA Vol II is now available for Preorder. There are a total of 12 entries in the volume containing 320 pages. Preorders are open till July 12, 2010. You can use the coupon code POCICOL and get a 20% discount!

Since this vol has grown up to 320 pages, we also created 2 smaller books each having 6 entries. If you want, you can buy one of the two smaller volumes which contain 164 pages each. These smaller books are available at 10% discount.

Check out more about COMIX.INDIA on their website.

COMIX.INDIA Vol II only became possible because of the combined effort of a dozen contributors, an editor and a designer. Read on to know more about this awesome bunch. Should we call them the Daring Dozensome?

Continue reading “COMIX.INDIA Vol. II on Preorder (20% Discount)”

Pothiz – July 2010 issue is out!

Pothiz - July 2010 Check it out at http://pothi.com/pothi/magazine/issue/july-2010/

Here is a reproduction of “From the Publisher’s Desk” section –

Dear Readers,

It goes without saying that we take immense pleasure in presenting to you the inaugural issue of Pothiz – Pothi.com’s online magazine. We see Pothiz as a natural extension to our efforts of providing the young and unheard voices a platform where they could engage, be heard, get valuable feedback directly from their readers and flourish into wonderful wordsmiths. While Pothi.com remains an open platform for a variety of publishing endeavors, Pothiz is going to be a more curated collection of creative writings. Our hope is that this collection will encourage readers to delve into and discover the hidden gems in the proverbial “long tail” of writing.

We received close to a hundred entries and selecting a few for your reading pleasure was not an easy task. At Pothi.com, we particularly respect the fact the each individual has his or her own taste in reading and writing. So, apart from the entries that made it to the main issue, we are also going to put up some of the other entries we have received on the website. Do read them and give your praises or constructive feedback to the authors through comments.

Coming to the entries included in the issue, the Featured entry ‘The Soul is a Battery’ delighted us with its interesting and novel take on ghost stories. It entertains, it frightens and it leaves you nodding in agreement with the feelings of the characters. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Amongst other stories, ‘The Matrimonial Clock’ will resonate particularly well with the urban career oriented professionals. It is a story of how they have to cope with the conflicting needs of matrimony and career. ‘Thirteen Hours of Fame’, ‘Practical Lessons’ and ‘The idiot’ are the stories about the opportunism, the hypocrisy, the good and the bad in common people – just like you and me.

While ‘Barberic Times’ and ‘God Promise’ are there to tickle you, ‘Goodbye Mrs. Boa’ is a sweet, but profound tribute to Boa Sr., the last speaker of Bo Language in Andaman islands. She died earlier this year. Other poems ‘City’s seasons’, ‘Elegy’, ‘Divine Sisterhood’, ‘बेटी होना का दर्द’ (The Pain of being a Daughter/Girl, Hindi) and ‘सूना बचपन‘ (Empty Childhood, Hindi) touch on the various stories, pleasures and pains of our human existence. ‘Oops! I made you a Daddy’ is a cute, little autobiography by a day old baby (ghost written by his father).

Finally, as you all battle with the fever of Football, do not forget to read the review for ‘Inverting the Pyramid’ by Jonathan Wilson. The book provides an interesting insight into how the gameplay has evolved over time and how the game is not just about the magical players!

We hope you enjoy the collection. Do send your feedback on the magazine and also on the individual entries. Entries are also invited for the next issue of the magazine. The deadline is July 16, 2010.

Pothi.com Team

The Cycle of Inspiration

Meena R. Shankar is a happy home-maker. A Sociology graduate with Masters in Social Work, she worked as an Asst. Professor before becoming a full time home-maker.

It was 25 years ago, when she was pregnant with her daughter, that she started writing. Over years, the poems she wrote covered a variety of subject and emotions. Her father and her husband encouraged her with their appreciation, expectations as well as critical feedback. Her husband Ramesh even compiled her poems as spiral bound diaries couple of years back.

Her daughter Aparna went a step ahead and decided to publish the book as a gift on her mother’s 50th birthday, completing the cycle of inspiration!

As she celebrates her 50 happy years in this world on June 18, 2010, with her husband Ramesh, son Vignesh, daughter Aparna, son-in-law Vikash and her soon-to-be-born grand child, we also join in to wish her a very Happy Birthday! May she continue to spread the song of life through her poetry for many years to come. Her poetry collection is available on Pothi.com.

The Hurdle in Unicode Adoption in Indian Languages – Print and Unicode Fonts

There is a dearth of quality User Generated Content in Indian Languages on Internet. There is User Generated Content, primarily created by techie enthusiasts. The newspapers have now come online. Some of them have actually moved to Unicode text, but many of them are still just converting their print papers to e-papers! Not a great way to putting discoverable content on Internet.

The content that is actually consumed by the Indian Language Market is mostly created for Print. Books, Newspapers etc. And the Unicode adoption there is low. There are historical reasons for that of course. Desktop Publishing Technologies came to publishing before Unicode had become prevalent. So, people in the industry got used to the non-standard fonts. Now if you move to Unicode, all the typists and the editors who work on typed content need to relearn the typing. Obviously, there is resistance. Plus many of the Desktop Publishing Software, still do not support the Complex Text Layout (CTL) needed for displaying Indian Languages correctly (see the previous post for understanding Complex Text Layout).

But there is another issue too. It is difficult to sell the idea to even the people higher up (who could possibly mandate the staff to relearn things and sanction purchase of right software), because good Unicode compatible fonts are not available. Speaking of Hindi, Mangal and Arial Unicode MS are two fonts available on Windows machine. Mangal just does not look good in print. Arial Unicode is slightly better, but people want more choices, while designing. A lot of Unicode fonts available from CDAC and other sites are downright ugly.

I am not sure of why better fonts are not coming to the market. Is it some kind of chicken and egg situation? The users would resist the change and hence not asking for the Unicode fonts. Companies making fonts, therefore, do not feel there is a market for Unicode Fonts. And there probably aren’t those techies around who understand both font design and Indian Languages well enough to create some beautiful, free fonts for Indian Languages.

Print adopting Unicode is very important for meaningful Unicode adoption for Indian Languages. Where do we start?

Indian Language typing on Computer

Characters and Fonts

Before getting into Indian Language typing, let’s understand how does the computer understand what we type. We will understand this with the help of examples from English typing, since that is the language best handled by and understood on computers.

Computer understands individual characters. All letters, numbers, symbols are a character to the computer. ‘A’ is a character, ‘a’ is another character, “,” (comma) is another character and so on.

Then there are fonts, which tell the computer how to display a particular character. So, the same set of characters “Pothi.com” will appear different in different fonts.

As you can see, “P” is displayed by the font “Times New Roman” is different from the “P” displayed by the font “Arial”, which in turn is different from the “P” displayed by the font “Monotype Corsiva”. Similar is the case with other characters like “o”, “t” etc.

What is important here is that computer still knows that a “P” is a “P”, irrespective of the font it is displayed in. That’s why when you use the “Find” or “Search” feature while typing, it will find you the word/character you searched for, irrespective of how the font displays it. In fact, the underlying system that recognizes what character it is, does not care at all as to how the font displays it. In the following image, the first line in “Pothi.com” in a font called “MT Extra”. The second line is the name of the font!

As you can see, the display makes no sense for an English reading human. But the computer does not care.

What this means is, that you can design a font, that displays certain English characters as certain letter in one of the Indian languages. We’ll take Hindi as an example.

The same set of characters “Pothi.com” in a font called “Kruti Dev 010” become the following

Of course, it does not look anything like “Pothi.com” to English readers. Hindi readers can see Hindi alphabets (it’s not a meaningful combination). But to the computer, it is “Pothi.com”.

However, with this font to my aide, I can now concoct certain character combination, which would look like meaningful Hindi words to Hindi Readers. For example character set “dje #i” generated the following

Hindi Readers can identify meaningful words here. Even though for the computer it is just “dje #i”.

This is one way of typing Hindi. And most of the Hindi Books are typeset in this way, using one of the fonts, that display an English character as a Hindi letter.

When the ultimate aim is to print, this method works just fine. Once the book is printed, nobody cares what the original character stored in the computer was.

But this method has issues – big ones. For example

No standardization: When you don’t have characters assigned for the letters of your language in the computer, each font developer is free to decide which character should be displayed like which letter. So, one font decides to display “A” as “अ” and the other font decides to display “d” as “अ”. What do you do then? In English, you can write something and then change the font at the click on a button. But in Hindi, if you change the font after writing, you will get totally different letters displaying on the screen, which are likely to be meaningless. Plus for each font you have to learn the typing all over again!Lack of standardization is also a problem in the Internet World. If you type the content in one font and send it to someone, the recipient has to have the same font on his computer, in order to see the meaningful text you have written. Any other font will not do. Compare this to English, where you may type in one font and the other person may not have that font. But he can still read it, because whatever English font he has understands the underlying characters and displays the correct letters for an English reader.
Not searchable: In this system, the computer does not understand underlying characters of Hindi language. It is just the English language characters wearing a different look as far as the computer is concerned. So, there is no good way of searching through this content. In the Internet age, this is a major disadvantage. A lot of content available on Internet today is discovered only by search and if you want your content to be discovered, it is important that it is typed in a way so that it is searchable.

Unicode

It is to solve such problems that Unicode has come into picture. You can think of Unicode as something which enables computers to understand characters beyond English language. So, if your computer supports Unicode, it starts understanding not only the characters corresponding to “A”, “d”, “,” etc. but also the ones for “क्”, “अ” etc. And it’s not just the Indian languages, but it starts understanding characters corresponding to Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and most other major languages of the world!

So, with this you do not need to represent a random English character as a Hindi letter. The characters are available for Hindi and the font can now display those characters as the corresponding Hindi letters. Such fonts are called “Unicode compatible fonts”. To repeat, Unicode compatible Hindi fonts are the ones which do not represent an English characters as a Hindi letter, but which represent the Hindi characters as corresponding Hindi letters.

Typing and Input Method Editors (IMEs)

So far, so good. Computer, somehow, understands the characters for Hindi and other languages. But how do you type in those languages? Your keyboard still has only English letters on it. So, when you press the key labeled “A”, the computer knows that you want to type the character “a”. But how do you tell the computer that you want to type the character “अ”.

Multi-language keyboards are a design challenge, and at least for Indian languages, nothing great has come out. So, different ways have been devised to use the same English keyboard for inputting non-English characters. To understand how these work, let’s consider this. As far as the computer is concerned (“A” and “a”) are two different characters. But from the keyboard, the same button is used to type either of them. How? “A” gets typed if either CAPS LOCK is on or the Shift key is pressed. Otherwise, it is “a” that gets typed. So, the computer decides that the character typed is “A” or “a” depending not only on the key pressed, but also depending on the state of CAPS LOCK and Shift key.

Following a similar tactic, we can give the computer some other signal that when the key labeled “A” is pressed, you have to enter neither “a”, nor “A”, but “अ”. How to give that signal? For that there are multiple methods. Basically computer programs have been created, that come in between the keyboard and computer storing the characters and depending on certain signals tell the computer which character has been entered. These programs are typically called “Input Method Editor (IME)”.

These IMEs do two things

They give you a way to specify the language you will be typing in
They assign particular keys on the keyboard to particular characters, depending on the language selected

Two examples of IMEs for Indian Languages are

I have the first one installed on my computer and I’d use that as an example to illustrate how IME works. Once I install and configure Microsoft’s Indic IME for Hindi, I get a language selection button my taskbar

If I select, English here, then things work as usual. If I select Hindi, then pressing Shift+D on my keyboard types “अ” instead of “D”. Pressing “j” types “र” and so on. I can keep switching the language and type a piece of text which uses both the languages (as I am doing now).

To use an Indic IME like this, you still need to learn the key combinations that type the right characters for you. This combination may vary between different IMEs. In fact, even the same IME may provide you with different options for mapping of keys to characters. Microsoft’s Indic IME provides at least two such combinations for Hindi. One is called “INSCRIPT” layout, which I use (the key-character combinations I described in the previous paragraph was according to this layout). The other is Phonetic and as the name suggests, its key-character bindings are more phonetic; e.g. (A will “अ”, R will be “र” and so on).

But the advantage over the earlier scheme of using non-Unicode compatible font is that once you have learned to use one IME, you can use any Unicode compatible font. You don’t need to learn the map for every font separately. Plus you text is standard compliant and searchable!

Google’s Transliteration Technology – Saviour for beginners!

If you are a beginner with Hindi typing, you would probably want to use an IME with Phonetic key-character combination. For example, where “A” typed “अ”, R types “र” etc. It is easier than using other combinations where the mapping may be very arbitrary.

But you still need to learn the exact key combinations for typing something. If you need to type Pothi (पोथी) in Hindi, do you type “Pothi” or “Pothee” or “Pothii”. With most IMEs only one of these will work.

Google’s IME is different here. It works more intelligently. Instead of assigning fix keys to the characters, it guesses the correct word from the combination you have entered. Basically from the various words you could possibly write, it guesses the word based on grammatical correctness and frequency of use in languages. If it guesses the wrong word, you have a way to change it to different word. In Google Transliteration all three “Pothi”, “Pothee” and “Pothii” produce the same (and correct) word पोथी.

So, you can essentially type words and so long as it is close phonetically, this IME will find the suitable word for you. This makes it a great tool for beginners. You can get started right away, write Hindi the way you do while chatting with your friends or in SMS and start getting output in a Unicode compatible font.

Google actually has an online service for this – http://www.google.co.in/transliterate . So you don’t even have to download and install anything.

All is not well here though. Once you start typing in Hindi regularly, you will start feeling the limitations of Google Transliteration. We will not get into the details here. But if that happens at some point, it may make sense to invest some time in learning another IME, which uses fixed combinations.

Complex Text Layout (CTL)

There is one major difference between Hindi (most Indian Languages) and English. In fact even between Hindi and Russian, Hindi and Chinese or Hindi and Japanese. The representation of a character changes depending on the context in Hindi and many other Indian languages. The representation of “द्”, for example is different in words तद्भव and विद्या. One has “द्” before “भ” and the other has “द्” before “य”. Compare this to English where how “d” is displayed does not depend on which letter comes before and after it. So, for displaying Hindi correctly the computer needs to understand all possible ways of displaying the characters under different contexts. The technical term for this is “Complex Text Layout”. Most computers with modern operating systems have this ability now and in all likelihood, you will not have to do anything special about it. But if you find a problem in display where a character is identified correctly, but is not displayed correctly, then you would know that it is an issue with computer not understanding “Complex Text Layout”.

In Windows XP and Vista, the complex text layout is enabled by default. In Windows 2000, you needed to enable it specifically. I have not tested it on Windows 7, but hopefully things should not go retrograde.

Finally

The description here is intended for a non-technical audience. Many concepts have been simplified and a purist technical person may be tempted to correct my usage of various terms (“You mean OS when you say computer!”). Let me just clarify that it is totally intentional. I just hope it has not become too technical for the non-technical audience

Questions are welcome as comments!

50 years later, son publishes father’s writings!

Sachendra Garg ‘Rashmi’ grew up listening to the poets in various kavi-sammelans/Mushairas during his formative years in 1950s. Be it the ones organized at Lal-Quila and broadcasted on radio on the occasion of Republic day, or the annual ones at Dayal Singh College Karnal. With this exposure and encouragement from his teachers, he was soon writing poems himself, which were published in many contemporary magazines and anthologies with the pen-name Rashmi. He wrote a lot in the period of 1955-62. A dream of publishing them as a collection was born at that point of time, but other callings of life took precedence and it never materialized.

Some 50 years later, his son Shaleen Garg decided to re-collect the poems he regarded as the “most valuable property the family has” and publish the collection.

The dream is now a reality. The book “Vihaan” (a name that poet had thought of way back in early 1960s) was launched in Yamunanagar, Haryana in presence of more than 150 people. The vimochan of the book was done by Dr. Ramesh Kumar, General Secretary of Mukund group of educational institutions. The four hours programme also rightfully included a kavi sammelan. Some photographs are below. The book is available on Pothi.com.