[FSF India] NEWS: GHAZALS ONLINE: CENTURIES-OLD POETRY GETS A LEG-UP FROM I.T.

[Frederick Noronha]

'GHAZALS' ONLINE: CENTURIES-OLD POETRY GETS A LEG-UP FROM I.T.

by Frederick Noronha
fred@bytesforall.org

MUMBAI: Modern-day powers of IT is teaming up with the age-old charm
of the 'ghazal' to breathe new life and interest in these captivating poems
set to music, that are widely popular in the South Asian language of Urdu.

A new website just launched from the central Indian city of Nagpur called
aaina-e-ghazal.com offers a trilingual dictionary of commonly used words in
'ghazals'. It is also accessible via the nagpurcity.net site.

To enhance the popularity of this site and help the 'ghazals' get a wider
reach, the Urdu text is written in Devnagri, the widely-used script of Hindi
and other North Indian languages.

Urdu is spoken by an estimated 104 million worldwide, and like Hindi have
proceeded from the same Khariboli speech source from the areas sorrounding
Delhi.

Ghazals -- like other Indian hymns called 'Thumris' or 'Bhajans' are also
-- addressed to God in terms of human love.  Some trace their
origins to 10th century Iran.

The meanings of the words used in the Ghazals are given in English, Hindi
and the regional language Marathi. Together with this, the site offers an
illustrative Urdu couplet or two-lined poem (which is known as 'Sher'),
according to Dr Tarique Sani.

Dr Sani, a pediatrician by training who shifted over to the world of
software and runs a firm called Sanisoft, is the founder of the site.

Sani told IANS in an interview: "The book (of ghazals) was authored by my
late parents and Dr Vinay Waikar and was in the fourth print edition when my
father passed away. I designed this site as a tribute to the memory of my
parents."

This site is an online version of the same book but, he said, includes "a
lots of enhancements, like dynamic cross-referenceing, site personalization,
an ability to Romanize the Devnagri-script part and vice versa, etc."

Incidentally, while undertaking this work, Dr Sani also build up a
English-to-Hindi transliterator, that could give a further push to Indian
language computing solutions.

To render the 'ghazals' into Hindi, he was looking around for suitable
software. Says he: "I was quoted Rs 250,000 for the software. I strongly
felt such a basic-necessity software in a country like India should be free.
So I just went ahead and designed my own and saved myself a quarter million
rupees." Today, he freely distributes this software.

This software Dr Sani wrote -- egged on by the peculiar needs of the site --
is a Roman-script to Devnagri transliterator. It allows you to type using
English alphabets and they are converted to Devnagri equivalent. In a
country like India where local-language computing is a pressing need, such
products could act as a useful bridge to a solution.

This product is available at the site for free download from 
http://www.sanisoft.com/rtod/index.php3

Other Indian sites -- like rediffmail.com, webduniya.com and mailjol.com --
also offer similar products. But unlike these products, Dr Sani's software
follows the new and innovative trend of putting out 'free' software. So, he
offers his own 'source-code' to anyone wanting to adapt or improve the
product, encouraging a cycle of further improvements.

"I am soliciting developers to modify the software for other Indian
languages. Particularly Urdu, as this is the most challenging task," said Dr
Sani. He says the framework is fairly modular and for someone who knows
other language mapping it will be an easy job.

"More needs to be done (to promote Indian-language computing)," says Dr
Sani. He believes that the low-cost computing device, the Simputer being put
together by scientists in Bangalore, could be an ideal device on this front. 

More websites are also required in Indian languages, with greater
co-operation among them, rather than an urge to grab-my-share-of-the-pie, as
he puts it. "India is a vast country the market is big enough for everyone
but to exploit this market we need co-operation," he says.

This software is available for free download from
http://www.sanisoft.com/rtod/index.php3 . It is provided under LGPL, or the
Lesser GNU Public License. A user is free to use the software even in his
commercial products. But if any modifications are made to the original code,
then the new code also has to be made public under LGPL.

Sani says it took two months for him to create this software "from
conceptualization to end-product". 

This is one in a small-but-growing trend of 'Open Source' and 'free'
software products now beginning to come up in a country like India which is
known to have vast software skills, but is only now beginning to see more
collaborative working thanks to a recent spurt in growth of the Internet.

FOOTNOTE: Contact Dr Sani at tarique@sanisoft.com

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Frederick Noronha | Freelance Journalist | 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India
Ph [0091] 832.409490 or 832.409783 Cell 9822 12.24.36 fred@bytesforall.org
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