The National Curriculum Framework (2005), released by the Indian National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) states:

If ET (educational technology) is to become a means of enhancing curricular reform, it must treat the majority of teachers and children not merely as consumers but also as active producers.

A computing device can be an ideal medium for learners to construct and explore knowledge, through the active manipulation and production of digital artifacts, and I sincerely hope that the next set of ideas that come up around Aakash (or a similar program) take this into account.

Relevant disclosure: I have been in the past, involved with the One Laptop Per Child project. My current research involves exploring computation as a medium for expression and creativity.

Way back in 2002, I was just getting started contributing to FOSS, and one of the things I was excited about was local language computing, especially supporting Bangla in Free and Open Source Software. I had very little clue about what had to be done, but it was an exciting and meaningful project to work on, and I had found people from other parts of the world who were interested in collaborating with me over email and IRC, so we were slowly making some progress. I was still in high-school. In August 2002, I suddenly got contacted by a group of people (among whom was Venky Hariharan), inviting me to join a Indic Computing Workshop in Bangalore. After a bit of back and forth which looked like “oh, but I’m just a high-school student”, “that’s fine, we want you to be here”, etc. I finally found myself in a plane to Bangalore (tickets courtesy the organizers). Once in the workshop though, I started to have a major attack of what I would now probably describe as impostor complex. I was definitely the youngest attendee in the workshop — most of the other participants were either professional developers, or established members of the open source community. There were a significant presence from academia as well. The anxiety eased a bit over the next couple of days — it was an incredibly fun and friendly community, and I was glad to find people who shared the same passion around Indic Computing that I did at that time. However, the nicest moment came when I was leaving. I had an early flight, so I was leaving in the middle of a session and I suddenly noticed Karunakar, who was already quite a “rockstar” in the local-language computing space, running towards me. He stopped me as I was leaving, shook my hands, and in his usual quiet style, mentioned that he was really glad to have met me face-to-face, and that he hoped to continue our interactions online. It was a small gesture, but a very significant one for me personally. It made me feel much more welcome and comfortable in the community, and ultimately, made me much more enthusiastic about being a participant.

So, after nearly 10 years, to Karunakar, a long overdue thanks!

When I was in India earlier this year, I tried to renew my passport, and while using the new system, it was clear that things were not working out as expected.

Lack of clear communication
To begin with, there was no clear communication about the new system. The official passport department website had very little information about the new system — I discovered that there was a separate website almost by accident through a link hidden away deep in the webpages of the old site. The new website, for some mysterious reason, only allowed access to the online application between 6:00 to 7:00 PM in the evening, and it wasn’t very clearly stated anywhere. Later I figured out that it was a way to throttle application submission — I’m still not sure why that was done through a time-limit instead of setting a per day quota. The result of this however was, the site would be DOS-ed everyday from 6:00–7:00, and I had to use quite a few tricks to “jump the line” and get my application in.

Lack of a fallback system
It wasn’t very clear to me how people without access to computers would fill up the application. I was not the only one — on the day I went to physically submit my documents, I saw a number of people, some of whom had probably never touched a computer before, lined up at the information counter, trying to understand how they could get their passport applications in. I’m still not sure what the architects and engineers behind the system were thinking during their design process.

Lack of training of the staff
The staff were courteous and nice, and tried to be helpful, but it was painfully evident that they had received inadequate training. They got confused with any any sort of deviation from the absolute basic scenario and went off to ask their colleagues and seniors. As they were entering my address data — I noticed that they put my entire address in the city field. I asked them about it — and they said it wouldn’t matter. I wonder how lookups are done in that system. They also took the photograph for the passport themselves, and the quality of the photograph was substandard, to put it mildly. For the next ten years I need to worry about being denied entry at some border crossing because my passport photo is hazy and does not resemble me.

Lack of coordination between the government agencies and the outsourcing company
When the process was finished, I asked the officer about the time it would take for my new passport to be mailed to me. I had applied through the expedited (“tatkal”) system, where the stated time required was three working days. The response, to my surprise and alarm (I was flying back to the US the week after) was, two weeks. In the end, I did get the passport in three days, so it seemed that there was something wrong with the communication happening between the back-end processing office and the citizen-service center.

Overall though, I was pretty happy with the service I had got (despite the temporary anxiety it had caused me). Things were smoother, and I really hoped that the problems outlined above would be resolved with time. However, from the recent newspaper reports, it looks like things have taken a turn for the worse, and that’s a real pity. It goes on to show how for most ICT systems software/hardware is only a very small part of the problem. The human factors are as, if not more, important as the technological innovations that goes into a project, and sadly, that’s something a lot of us often tend to forget.

All this is nothing new for my usual circle of friends and co-workers. However, seeing the comments and discussions online reminded me that we need to do a better job of spreading these ideas.

These meetings, half-way around the world from where we grew up and became friends, makes me happy (it’s always fun to catch up, and have long adda sessions), but also makes me reflect about how people are migrating away from West Bengal and India. Growing up, I used to hear about the “brain-drain”, and over the last 3–4 years, I encountered the term “reverse brain-drain” a number of times. However, my personal experience still points towards an overall brain drain, especially for friends who have gone or are going for advanced (post-graduate) studies. It’s entirely possible that this is too early to make a comment, and perhaps many of us will return (and contribute to the “reverse brain-drain”), but I’m not that optimistic. I guess only time will tell…

The reason I was reminded of the incident is the recent news about the shutdown of library.nu, a popular ebook downloading portal. Before going into the details, I should state upfront that I do not endorse or support the way library.nu operated. I would certainly want to see publishers and authors and booksellers fairly compensated for their efforts. However, the basic problem here was (and still is), that many publishers simply did not and do not care about certain markets, and I’m sure, if library.nu’s access logs were to be analyzed, these markets would come out in overwhelming majority.

“We will not tolerate free-loaders who make unearned profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due compensation. This is an important step towards more transparent, honest, and fair trade of digital content on the Internet.“

This was a part of a statement from Jens Bammel of the International Publishers Association. What Mr Bammel (and many others) seem to conveniently ignore is the fact that sometimes publishers simply do not have their content in digital formats, or even if they do, the content is restricted to limited geographies, effectively depriving billions (the so-called “free-loaders”) of access to creativity, knowledge and information. When I was reading the Lions Book, mass-market ebook-readers did not exist. Now they do — and I feel incredibly frustrated when I recommend a book to my friends in India (many of whom own ebook-readers), only to find that a ebook version does not exist, or even if it does, it is not available to customers outside of a certain geographical region (usually the United States). A case in point would be Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer — the book that pushed me to apply to grad-school at MIT. There’s no ebook edition of that book — at least not for the most popular ebook-reader brand that’s out there. For someone in India, this would mean paying the rupee-equivalent of the US dollar price of the book (which would be quite expensive — especially if you are a student) and then waiting for quite a bit of time before getting it. In such a situation, isn’t it natural for someone to just go to one of these ebook download portals, and then download a “pirated” copy instead of going through all the hassle? And it is not just India, in fact, the situation in India is a lot better than many other countries in the world. One of the most vivid memories of my trip to Birmingham, UK for GUADEC 2007 is the visual of the stacks of O’Reilly books that Dulmandakh Sukhbaatar, the GNOME developer from Mongolia had bought to carry back home. He didn’t get O’Reilly books in Mongolia, he said, and wanted to carry back as much as he could. (I should probably mention here that as far as my personal experience goes, O’Reilly is one of the publishers who do a much better job of reaching out to non US/Western markets — and I would also say that it goes on to prove that there is a market for legitimate copies of books outside of the Western hemisphere, and not everyone in the rest of the world is a “free-loader”.)

Of course — all this is nothing new. The story is largely similar with movies. It’s just that I feel more passionately about books, and I feel sad, that after what happened last week, a lot of people out there lost their only viable option for accessing a large chunk of human creativity and knowledge. Part (2) of article 27 of the UN Universal declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

while part (1) states:

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Indeed, it is a sad situation when the two statements above are pitched against each other.

”নিজে চিন্তা করিবে, নিজে সন্ধান করিবে, নিজে কাজ করিবে, এমনতরো মানুষ তৈরি করবার প্রণালী এক, আর পরের হুকুম মানিয়া চলিবে, পরের মতের প্রতিবাদ করিবে না, ও পরের কাজে জোগানদার হইয়া থাকিবে মাত্র, এমন মানুষ তৈরির বিধান অন্যরূপ।“

Translated roughly into English, this would be, “the process for enabling a person for independent thought, independent inquiry and independent work is different from the rules for building someone who follows orders, does not protest someone else’s opinions and is only a contributor to someone else’s work.”

However, towards the end of the talk, Chomsky mentions an incident that reminded me of my own experiences growing up — he mentions a teacher who had to discourage a student from pursuing a specific sub-area that she was interested in, as that would potentially interfere with her preparations for the upcoming national exams. I went through a very similar experience in the final years of high-school. I had managed to find my own interest and passion in computers, and even a community that could support me (the Free/Open Source Software community), but I was faced with potentially disastrous results in my school leaving examinations. I chose to follow my interests, and as expected, my school leaving examination scores were terrible. I somehow managed to keep doing whatever I was interested in, and through various twists and turns, found myself in a place that celebrates the idea of following one’s own passions and interests. But I think I have been lucky — lucky to have people around me who did not freak out when my test results came in (though understandably, they were worried), lucky to have a supportive community, both local and global, who shared my interests, and lucky to have a few incredible mentors and supervisors along the way. I wonder how many people are that lucky.

Update: I had a short chat with Mitch about this, and I realized, that I was also lucky to have a passion that could be translated into employable skills. A lot of people are interested in things which do not bring in easy employment, and the situation is much more worse for them.