Much has been written by my friends at Indiaspecial on the ongoing split and hate that today divides (or at least tries to) us in the name of politics, religion, region, caste, creed and so much more. It appears that we just about find a way to segregate everything into sets – I guess we owe part of that to our amazing mathematical and scientific abilities.

Of late, I had many an opportunity to observe a set of students (I presume) of African origin who have a small community a little away from my place. Most of them are about the same age as me and my friends.

I love to see them engage in a  game of football – rain, cold, sweltering heat – no matter what, they just love to play in that small ground with four stones marking the goal posts and vividly drawn boundaries – much as any of us did when we were at school. Half the team wear T-shirts and half dont, distinctly marking the two different teams. Expressions of excitement, fun, tension and victory evident in their faces, they were no different from any of us.

But there was a big difference!!!

There was not one Indian in that group. They just didn’t seem to have any Indian friends. None at all.

And I have seen these folks in the gym, at the bakery and in the shopping stores. Again – there is that element missing. It really does strike hard! Its not like they dont talk, maybe, its more like they make aquaintance, but thats when there is something that we have to do to accept them into our community too!

Coming to think of it, many of us have our own cultural bias… Dont trust a Madraasi, A Mallu is always business minded, Dilli walahs are all show, Punjabis eat a lot, Bengalis are shrewd … blah blah… No kidding! I have heard this from too many a place to say this is an individual opinion. If we can differentiate, classify and typecast our own countrymen, its not really a surprise that my African friends are farther than I ever thought!

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

Who in this land is racist of all?

Popularity: 14%

Worldwide, computers communicate in native languages, at least figuratively. The Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Europeans and the Russians have long had their own local language applications running on supported or native operating systems for many years now.

Albeit a late entrant, looks like we are catching up. C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) launched the latest version of our desi (GNU) linux edition BOSS version 3.0 codename Tejas. This version features GNOME 2.20 ,KDE 3.5 with Kernel 2.6.22-3-486. Developed by the NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software) team, BOSS stands for Bharat Operating Systems Solutions.

The 3D desktop screen look neat and retains the ease and convenience of a GUI. This edition features a full Graphical mode installer and simplified menus. Office productivity will be provided by BharatheeyaaOO, which is a desi version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.1. There is a bulk document converter for added convenience. PDF reader, instant messaging , Firefox 3.0, firewall, samba, ftp et all are standard.

Multimedia support is good with support for video playback, removable media, TV tuner and plug and play devices. Connectivity includes wired and wireless networks and Bluetooth.

Currently BOSS GNU/Linux Desktop is available in almost all the Indian Languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Urdu, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani and Manipuri.

So finally it does look like Information Technology will reach even the majority of our non-English countrymen. Share your experience with this edition! You can download the linux distro from http://bosslinux.in/downloads .

Popularity: 32%