Honourable Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, Professor Arun Nigavekar , Professor. KP Mohanan, Dr. Raimond Doctor and all of our distinguished guests, welcome.
We are delighted to have you here to participate and share your thoughts in the 2nd FUEL GILT Conference 2014 hosted by Red Hat and C-DAC and supportd by Mozilla. Thank you all for sparing your time and coming here. The fact that many of you have travelled long distances and it indicates how much you all love FUEL Project.
You all know that FUEL Project works to create standardized linguistic resource needed for localization. FUEL Project believes in the wisdom of crowd. We added consensus into it. It creates consistency. 'Many Are Smarter Than the Few' and 'Collective Wisdom has the ability to shape Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'. Crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization. And language is such an area. Pure/impure-correct/incorrect often become insignificant.
Recently a great poet Ahsok Vajpeyi was here in the great city of Pune in a program organized in the memory of great Hindustani classical singer Kumar Gandharva. He told one incidence showing the importance of the wisdom of a common people. He has used a word चमकतार in two of his poems. He listened this word during a train journey in the zone of Malwa. The person in the train used that word for the appearance of rain drops when mixing with sun light. उस व्यक्ति ने मालवा में कहा, देखो देखो, चमक-तार बरसा। After enquiry Mr Vajpeyi found that the word was not even present in the Boli of Malwa, actually just after the mesmerising effect of raindrops, he instantly coined. A new word was created.
We worship words. Tukaram lived most of his life in Dehu, Pune, the पुण्यनगरी. And before I handover the mic to Ani Peter, our awesome compeerer for the event, I want to repeat the words of Sant Tukaram:
आम्हां घरी धन शब्दांचीच
शब्दांचीच शस्त्रें यत्न करूं
शब्द चि आमुच्या जीवाचें जीवन
शब्दें वांटूं धन जनलोकां।
This year we have changed the structure of the conference. We are going to have talks as well as Workshops running parallel . So, prepare yourself to be challenged, excited and inspired.
I want to say once more on behalf of FUEL Project, welcome. It's a pleasure to see so many of you here.
Thank You!
Welcome address by me @ FUEL GILT Conference 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment