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by gnipgnip 3476 days ago
(Vernacular - "Language of the slave").

It's far more complicated that "need its own vernacular internet". The internet is an emergent thing, and what one sees are just the symptoms. This is also the reason India's literacy is so low (even compared to Africa/Middle East).

If India wasn't a linguistic apartheid regime, we'd already have seen a native ecosystem which is lacking quite badly. This needs fixing at the state and political levels, which I have exactly zero hope of ever happening. This despite having some nauseously xenophobic organizations like ShivSena (in Maharashtra), the DMKs (in TN), the KaRaVes (in KA). This is in addition to the "nationalistic" organizations like RSS and BJP at the central level.

These orgs are essentially vehicles which instrumentalize the widespread disaffection from the apartheid state, in order to put themselves in power (Advani's use of Ayodhya is a nice study). If you study their policies carefully however, you realize they plan to do precisely nothing that is the cause for the inequity.

This is not different from the independence movement, where a bunch of Brown folk wanted to run the colony.

Digital India, be in no doubt, is meant for the 200 million Brown sahibs, who do know English. The rest are peasants who have been at the losing side of the inflationary system today, and of the cruel taxation system of the British, kept at bay via endless subsidies (a dog hardly bites a master ?) and mutual bickering.

There is zero empathy from the former class, and these pretentious people are the source of endless pain for the red-pilled; it is very disappointing to live in communities where the kids start speaking English before anything native, and worse when the state hold such clones in such high regard.

May kek not have mercy on the clones (apologies for the 4ch lingo).

Technical:

I think Sailfish has better localization than Android. Keyboard is a disaster everywhere, since no one in India uses native language keyboard/input. They are very rare, if at all available, and next to no one knows they exist - it's in fact easier to find such resources in the US than within in India. Swarachakra is too crowded and very very information inefficient (unlike the 5-vowel Japanese system its based on), which leads me to believe even their creators don't use it actively.

The lack of feedback means that the ITRANS layout is very very bad, and unusable (xkeyboard moth-balled most layouts due to disuse).

Again, the roots of the problem lie with the education & state policies that are reinforced via state violence. China gets this right because India is a colony & it isn't.

(Downvote all you want clone people; सत्यमेवजयेत् !)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237411

3 comments

Agree completely. The Government of India, State Government of Tamil Nadu and Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha are actually institutional members of the Unicode consortium which makes decisions on behalf on India. Safe to say this has not gone well for Indians since the companies who are full members choose to ignore the basic encoding requirements for Indic languages. And oh, the membership fee to Unicode for full votes starts at $12,000 per year.

By the way, could you check out the Swalekh Android keyboard app and give me your honest feedback? Disclaimer: I work for Reverie and we made this keypad.

What do you mean by "linguistic apartheid regime"?
See,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/11/06/the-problem-...

The "socialist" state runs a systematic unwritten discrimination regime where every thing from higher education to state services are restricted only to English speaking class; yet, it is the remainder that get the boot due to the inflationary forces of the currency. It is by every meaning of the word, an apartheid; this state mandated scheme of slavery is kept in check by various schemes of cultural propaganda and distractions by the Anglical state. Of course, without education, feudalism becomes only too normalized.

This system is widespread all over former colonies in Africa and Asia.

Great points you made. Agree with the fact that Swarachakra is too crowded and huge scope of improvement there. Also agree that the root of problem lie with education and state policies. But even with the huge push that english gets in this country, the reality is more than billion people don't understand it. This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.

Didn't know about Sailfish. Will check it out.

> This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.

Perhaps, but to paraphrase a comment in the attached thread, I'd be more worried about feeding the cow before milking it. I mean, for a linguistic population comparable to native English speaking population of the entire world, there exists not a single school teaching Engineering of Medicine in Hindi (not to speak of other far older languages) - these people barely have any money to subsist on on average (and arguably also why medicine and infrastructure suck).

Also see,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZwq4JnCZ4A

http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

Completely agree with you on this one. The situation is much more worse than what we living in a bubble imagine. The video really touches your heart. Reminds me of a couple of my friends in my college, and the struggle they went through - Shifting from one language to another.
The bubble thing is very real.

Isn't it interesting then that all our intelligensia is engaged in the whole apochryphal "caste-system" narrative [1] [2], while essentially being the gate keepers of a state/violence sanctioned system of linguistic apartheid ?

Even Chomsky, when questioned about his accomplice Roy, seemed perfectly okay with the current state of things. My entire schooling/conditioning has been turned on its head - I can't recommend S N Balagangadhara & Dharampal's works enough.

[1] http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/04/02/mantras-of-anti-brahmanism...

[2] https://archive.org/details/DharampalCollectedWritingsIn5Vol...