The Hindu Business Line : Technology inspired by Gandhiji

Welcome to the Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum, “a technological and design milestone in culturally rooted computing,” as Ranjit Makkuni writes in Eternal Gandhi ( www.sacredworld.com). This is the fourth project of the Sacred World Research Laboratory, which has designed and developed the museum.

Earlier works of the lab had focused on the Buddha (‘the electronic sketch book of Thangka paintings’), Radha and Krishna (‘Geeta-Govinda’), and Shiva and the Ganges (‘Crossing Project’). Can Gandhiji’s messages animate and inspire modern product design and information access technology, asks Makkuni, the project director, in the opening essay titled ‘From play stations to prayer stations’. The museum is the answer, ‘located at the site where Mahatma Gandhi attained martyrdom’.

The technology used in the project does not stop with scanning Gandhian images; the exhibits interpret Gandhian forms and values, asserts the author. “In our attempt to create newer computer hardware, we explore traditional materials as an alternative to serve as products, artefacts, interfaces and ornamentation… Gandhiji’s commitment to recycling may reappear as power harvesting in electronics design, and open systems in software design.”

In a chapter on ‘tactile computing and hand-e-crafts’ the author explains the role of tactile dimension in learning. Bamboo pedestals in the museum’s lobby are ‘interactive musical instruments with embedded computation’. By touching the bamboo, the visitors can play back a phrase of ‘Vaishnava janato’ through sounds of ‘the sitar, santoor, sarangi and traditional instruments’.

There is percussion too. “Contact sensors in the bamboo record people’s taps and translate the taps into drum patterns in various sounds – tabla, earthen pot, dholak, etc.” A variation of the hyper instrument allows people to speak into the microphone and hear the same in Gandhiji’s voice!

GPRS in the museum is not General Packet Radio Service but ‘Gandhi Posture Recognition System’. This installation lets users copy five familiar postures of Gandhiji (such as the Noakhali walk, the Salt March, sitting in meditation or making a speech). “A camera captures the user’s own posture, the computer then processes it to match the user’s posture with that of Gandhiji. When a close match is identified, the corresponding video associated with that captured posture is replayed.” Then there is the ‘peace pillow’, squeezing which one can hear a message of Gandhiji on unity, peace, non-violence and god. “The pillow is an interesting ‘place’ as well as an artefact, as it represents symbolically the last object of rest before sleep and the first object of awareness when one wakes up.”

Awakening read.

“We call Scotland Yard. Better. In the UK, it is a crime to post such a video.”

May 2002… “They have just found Danny’s body. It was cut into ten pieces. Nobody told me this. I learned it in an email that had been attached by accident to another email being sent to me,” writes Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart ( www.crosswordbookstores.com), now a movie starring Angelina Jolie.

“Lately, every email I open, every phone call I answer, feels like a missile blowing up a little more of my life…” The book narrates the tragic story of Danny Pearl, The Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapp ed and killed in Pakistan, retold by his surviving wife. “The video of Danny’s murder is on the Internet for anybody to see. ‘We’ve tried to get it off,’ warns Bussey, ‘but there’s nothing that really can be done.’ I cannot believe that is the case. I call Attorney General Ashcroft, forgetting that it’s night in the US. ‘Call in the morning,’ says the guy at the other end of the line…” But there is Asra ‘putting all of her well-honed crisis-management skills to work.’ She finds that the Web host is Lycos.uk. “Assuming such a video runs afoul of any number of US statutes, we call the FBI. ‘I’m so sorry,’ says the agent. ‘Unfortunately, there’s no law that can be used to stop this. First Amendment… freedom of expression… you know?’ ‘But this is obscene,’ protests Asra. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but it’s not technically an obscenity.’” What happens then? “We call Scotland Yard. Better. In the UK, it is a crime to post such a video. ‘Violates the obscenity law, you know?’ With Scotland Yard’s help, we track down the Lycos officer responsible for Web content… We discover where the video is coming from: Saudi Arabia, posted in Riyadh. In roughly ten minutes, the video is off the Internet. For now.” Distressing.

Meet Fielding Wopuld, the great grandson of Henry Wopuld, who first dreamed up ‘Empire!’

Meet Fielding Wopuld, the great grandson of Henry Wopuld, who first dreamed up ‘Empire!’, the UK’s best-selling board game… in the novel by Iain Banks The Steep Approach to Garbadale ( www.iainbanks.net). The firm is so successful that the American Spraint Corp wants to buy it. Banks weaves the takeover game through a racy style that has his characters playing many other games. “Morningston Crescent, a game based on the map of the London underground with a complicated double-level board sold well in Britain… A more purely trade-based game called High Seas! did reasonable business. Another based on stocks and shares called Speculate! was a brief, faddish hit on both sides of the Atlantic, though in the States it was marketed purely as a children’s game on the basis that all the adults were feverishly engaged in the real thing, making a game of it superfluous…A very brief-lived game called Karma! based on a grotesque mishmash of misunderstood hippy gibberish and cereal-box Buddhism was an unmitigated disaster…”

Entertaining.

Tailpiece

“Gradually they realised they didn’t need us, the systems support guys.”

“Because they found you to be unresponsive to their complaints?”

“Exactly! And to add to our woes, we couldn’t tell them that we had no clue about setting right their problems!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in