Page:Code Swaraj - Carl Malamud - Sam Pitroda.djvu/86

Code Swaraj And so, I put them online. I also decided, since we were doing that collection, all 100 volumes—and you can search inside of them, and you can download them as an e-book—I went to another government server, and I found the selected works of Nehru. But they were missing three volumes, so I got all those, found the other three volumes. Those are online.

We now have the most complete collection of the works of Nehru. The complete works of Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar was on the Maharashtra server, but again, they were missing the six most current volumes. I took the docs off the server, bought the remaining volumes, and we now have the most complete collection of the works of Ambedkar, again, on the Internet archive, in the Hind Swaraj collection”.

There are also 129 speeches from All India Radio, of Gandhi-Ji speaking. The last year of his life, every couple days, he would speak after a prayer meeting. So you can actually listen to him speak, in the last year of that amazing life. You can then go into the collected works, and see the English version of that speech, and then, you can go to the next day, and see the letters he wrote, go see the next speech he gave. It’s an amazing walk through his life. We went to the Doordarshan Archives, and posted Bharat Ek Khoj, the Discovery of India as told by Nehru, a series from the 1980s. All those episodes are now online. For several of those, we’ve added subtitles in Telugu, in Urdu, and we have five languages available as subtitles. We’d like to do the whole thing that way.

But I want to talk about the Digital Library of India, because that’s the current hot button that we’re working on. So, there was this government server, that had 550,000 books. At least, that’s what they said they had.

A year ago, I was sitting with Sam, and we had just finished our one week hectic barnstorming tour of India, and we were waiting for our late night flight to go back to the United States, and I was sick. Sam was doing a million meetings, people coming to see him, and I was looking around, and I found this Digital Library of India thing.

I looked at it, and it seemed like it was harvestable. The books were there. It wasn’t very convenient, so I wrote a little script, and it worked. Then, when I got home, off the airplane ride, I went back to my server, and sure enough, we had collected some books, and for the next three months, I started grabbing books.