[Reader-list] Re: West Bengal-MS tie up

[Ravikant]

The postings on the WB-MS tie-up have confirmed my fears about the 
desperation the FS community feels. The desperation emerges from a sense of 
rootlessness, for the community does not show the vitality its passion should 
have revealed and generated.

I am with Shuddha's critique of the state, with Joy's frustration about the 
lack of linux efforts in the language domain, with Jeebesh's appeal to 
refresh the roots and Steef's futuristic optimism with regard to MS 
collapsing under its own weight. And Raju's gesture makes me sad.

Here is why:

While pointing fingers at others' amnesia and refusal to learn from history, 
we must recall our own. Knowledge and Power have been inextricably linked, 
colonialism should have taught us. Look at what happened to the communities 
that relied too much on the state. Sanskrit was never a people's tongue, nor 
was Persian. So, perehaps language can be seen as inhabiting a community and 
Hindi language is another case in point. The real estrangement of the 
language from the people did not come in the pre-independence period, though 
the effort was made even then to gain access to the royal corridors. Hindi 
becomes laughable only when it becomes the Rajbhasha (literally, the language 
of the state). It looses characters like Malaviya who constructed a whole 
university out of begging from the community. It looses its sense of purpose, 
the will to freedom, and the sense of diversity and dignity. It becomes 
dependent on the grants from the state in the guise of various Academies and 
Rajbhasha Vibhags (depts). It creates a vocabulary nobody uses, a canon 
everybody abhors, and a university pedagogy that has no more value than a 
pastime. The reason why it survives is that there is a community of users 
outside the narrow and wooden prisonhouse called nation-state. In the films, 
for example. Or, in the numerous local, short-lived yet always proliferating, 
world of small magazines (even after the big corporates like TOI and HT 
withdrew their publications). With the net and the web it has found a new 
energy, has witnessed an explosion of diverse creativity: the popular is 
writing the code, as it were, with passionate discussions and a self-
consciously inclusivist mode of refashioning against the English-dominated 
odds of the computer world. It could be true of other Indian languages.

The point is that the cyber-moment does provide an opportunity to disentangle 
technology from the close historical association it has had with the state, 
so much so that the two have been synonymous in popular memory. It was, and 
still is, in the Free Software philosophy and history to rehabilitate 
technology amongst the people, where it began its journey: remember the early 
artefacts of the pre-state days? Or the origins of domestication of plants 
and animals? When the state came and started owning technology, it created 
machines of mass destruction. Needless to say,it also destroyed Freedom. 


-- 
Ravikant
Sarai, CSDS
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi