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| K P Rao |
Presenting to you, a
special star whose birthday falls on 29th Feb, inventor of the first phonetic
keyboard driver for Indian languages, ‘Nadoja’, Prof. K P Rao (Read Prof. K P Rao biography)
The Shaping
My
upbringing was in a remote village near Mangalore, but it was blessed with
multiplicity of language and culture. I knew Sufi music, Catholic
Church service and temple
bajans. In School, we had the finest teachers who taught us to learn
by doing. I couldn’t afford text books till class 8. But it was not a
concern at all. I did my B.Sc. in Chemistry at St. Aloysius College, Mangalore, since there was no seat
available in Physics for me. But I enjoyed chemistry. After that I took
up a job in BARC. This place was blessed by two legendaries- Homi
Bhabha and D
D Kosambi. Those times were enchanting. Kosambi influenced me a
lot. His ideas of continuous learning laid the foundation for me. I was sent to Purdue
University. Part of sabbatical away, I took electric
engineering without real purpose
and incidentally, I was the topper after 3 semesters!
Chemistry to Computer
I
was aware of what would happen with computers. It is sort of story of 55 years
of love with gadgets for me. I was in the semiconductor department in BARC, so had hands on with
circuitries. I used to enjoy the concept of programming languages and its
abstraction, starting from FORTRAN to C and JAVA. My interest was in type
setting program. Later, I worked for TATA
press which was a forward
looking organization. I created fonts of my own, putting them in a grid
and creating layouts to help print Indus
Valley scripts in crude and
rudimentary machines.
Then
I worked as the director of an organization called Monotype during 1974 when use of laser beam to print in films was just
coming up. It was difficult to make fonts with special characters and
incorporate them in a keyboard and make it more logical. So I, along with my
friend, Deb Banerjee, wrote a logic in Pascal to process Telugu
text and use digital fonts
for a leading Daily in Hyderabad. It was very simple. It was done on a MPM
machine with 128K RAM. We wrote the complete editor and sorter that would
finally generate output to the Monotype Laser Printer machine. We tried to
print Indian languages on Dot Matrix printers for the purpose of proofing.
Sediyapu
An
attempt was made to print other Indian Scripts on dot matrix printers. This was
to simplify the illogical Indian language typewriters with a logical input from
a computer and a reasonably good output from a dot matrix printer. The editor
allowed all functions such as cut, paste, copy, mark, search and replace. The
final output was to the dot matrix printer. The input used the simple logical
input from the English keyboard. The computer, depending on the script
collected and arranged the right character shapes or fonts. The fonts were
script specific but not the input system. The system we developed was good enough
to print any
Indian language. At a later point of time, with a lot of rework I released
Sediyapu, catering to this need. I didn’t patent it for a reason- I
wanted to make it open source and wanted to see
others contribute to the linguistic development. Sediyapu, the program, named
after my teacher, was written in 72 hours in C. Sediayapu even today, runs in
Windows perfectly. This is the tribute to my teacher. All other language
processing tools also use the phonetic input system invented for use in
Sediyapu, even if the layout is slightly different.
Ideas: Ideals: India
Everyone
is interested in dilating a problem rather than solving it. I want to do
Natural Language Processing in Indian languages, on mathematical basis and
arrive at a universalized algorithm for the language. Panini/Patanjali
describe- grammar as the rules of assembling/disassembling or ordering of
Samjna’s to produce ‘Language’ – a mode of communication. I am trying to universalize
it. I don’t know what to do when I solve it, so I hope
it doesn’t yield a solution! Some mysteries with symbolism identified by Panini, 7 centuries before
Christ, still remain mysteries! As I see, the efforts that we can put are
insufficient for generating the knowledge required.
As a teacher, if there
was no textbook, no syllabus, no references for a particular course, I would
jump to take that subject up. At times, I used to meditate to think of content
that could be taught. I saw mutual learning there. These challenges motivate a
teacher. I taught in all kinds of institutions; post graduate and undergraduate
at Manipal and elsewhere but was happy teaching at IITs.. Now I am leading a
research oriented retired life. Learning never stops!
Today
we have information. Mindsets are set in a way where education is projected as
the climbing ladder for promotions. They don’t apply themselves to gain
knowledge.
I
am still a student, I attend classes, online open courses and attend workshop.
I do a course once in 2 months! Greek History to fMRI.
We were enchanted with this
conversation and delighted to see his down to earth nature. Numerous sparkles
we saw in his eyes promised us that there is more to come. We wished him health
and when we bid adieu, he concluded by saying-
I was only incidental in the
problem that I solved for Indian Language script layouts for computers. If not
me, someone else would have solved it. Meanwhile, I was awarded prestigious
D.Lit. by Kannada University. Once announced, believe me, I could not do much
learning. I hope to get back to work soon.
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