Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/43

Remarks of Dr. Sam Pitroda We all spent a day thinking about how do we take Gandhian thought outside? How do we bring non-violence in homes, communities, cities, states, countries, between countries?

Unfortunately, in the world, there are hardly any institutions on non-violence. All of the people who discuss peace at the table are basically from military. They have no interest in non-violence. Non-violence is never taught.

I live in Chicago. I lived in Chicago for 53 years. Let me tell you that with all the technology and wealth, with all the expertise, Chicago hasn’t changed at all in 53 years. There are more gun shootings in all sides of Chicago than ever before.

There is absolutely no reason for it.

You will be surprised to know that in US, almost one percent of the population is in prison. Largest number of prisoners per hundred people are in the US. I am told world average is about one person per thousand, and the US is one person per 100, which is unthinkable.

Through information technology, through all of the stuff we are doing today, I think we need to spread knowledge to large number of people. Equip them with the right tools, and that’s what we are trying to do here.

To take 500,000 books from India and put it on Internet Archive is a massive task. I know that there are some great books in Indian languages in Gujarati, Bengali, Odia, Tamil, Hindi, which the world audience doesn’t get to read.

They don’t even know that this literature is meaningful. Every time people talk about literature, it’s all about English literature. No one even thinks about Tamil literature.

Two months ago, I met a friend of mine. He said he found a book in the library in Tamil Nadu, a 600-year-old book written where he said he read through a chapter on child-rearing. He said, “If I translated that chapter today in English, all of the doctors would be surprised,” but somehow that literature is lost because it’s in the local language.

We need machine translation capabilities which can take a lot of the good books out of these different languages and put it in English. What Carl has tried to do is also put in some of the Indian language books on the Internet Archive, which