The first Kannada PC on Republic Day

BANGALORE: Kannada lovers, besides people who wish to uphold their language and culture, can take pride in this development in the technology world-- A Bangalore based scientist and his team has designed India’s first Kannada/ English computer.

If all goes well, the computers named ‘Brahmi’, designed by the 47-year-old Mahesh Jayachandra and his team, after years of research and what he calls ‘sweat capital’ will be out in the market next Republic Day.

The first Brahmi computer to be rolled out will be the Hindi version followed by Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Oriya and other regional languages.

It all began a decade ago when Mahesh had returned from the US to India and was ‘building super computers’.

In 1999, while participating in Bangalore’s ICT event Bangaloreit.com, the interest of local-language speaking population in computers and technology astonished Mahesh.

Quick to realise the potential and the needs of the vast rural population, Mahesh went on to design the Brahmi Keyboard for which he now holds US and Indian patents.

Mahesh said, “In any linguistic grouping, there is a high language and low language.

High being the one used in government offices and television news among others, and low being the one used in normal conversations.

In Europe, for example, the computers are in low language with simple menus and buttons (like open, close, start). In the case of computers in Indian languages the usage is cryptic. Like a scenario where all Eurpoean computers used Latin words. This is one of the problems which is being addressed here.’’ The computers, that Mahesh and his team are building will have a custom-built keyboard, an operating system built on a Linux kernel, and more importantly the simple but huge advantage of being able to use a computer in ones own language.

Mahesh, who spent some of his early days with the father of free software movement, Richard Stallman, roaming the historical Hampi and exchanging ideas on free software, says, “Proprietary software works on the crack (Cocaine) model. You get the users addicted to it and then start charging for the product.’’ There are places where it is convenient to use proprietary software, but there is still a large segment like schools, institutions etc, which does not need it, he said.

“The developers of Facebook and Twitter were on to coding and computers very early in their lives. Imagine what kind of difference it will make to the Indian kid. Kids are really one of our main targets,’’ he added.

 jayadevan@expressbuzzz.com