...
Ravikant explores the
generation gap
DID
YOU KNOW?
Speaking
In Tongues
Of India’s Internet users, 44% would prefer Hindi to English
on the net.
another 25% want other regional languages.
Chinese search engine
Baidu ranks fifth among the world’s most visited sites;
India’s Raftaar.com hopes to catch up
The Hindi blogosphere,
running into something like 500 blogs today, is reminiscent of the formative
years of the language when it made the transition from the oral and
handwritten mode to the print media.
But the similarity between the
two eras and the two technologies ends here.
And, given the Hindi language’s
notoriously fraught relationship with technology in general and mass-media
in particular, it is not surprising that the Hindi bloggers on the Internet
are all young — mostly in their twenties and thirties.
It is almost a
given to think of Hindi as an embattled language, but the fact remains
that it has managed to erase its arch-rival Urdu, has almost devoured
‘its’ various dialects and has pretty much made peace with
the status of English as the post-colonial global language of this country.
Hindiwallahs feel let down by the State, but they have always loathed
Commerce equally.
Ironically, it
is the content-hungry and numbers-driven media bazaar, in the form of
print since the early-19th century...
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