UNSTOPPABLE ThesagaofthePaniniKeypad Thepoliticaleconomyofinnovation,entrepreneurship andheritageinadevelopingcountry.

AbhijitBhattacharjee

 Toallthepeoplewhotaughtme Andallthepeoplewhotriedtohelpus.

Proscenium
In 2013, India has over 800 million mobile phone users of which the vast majority cannot type on their phones because their own languages are not supported and theydonotknowEnglish. Theseusersfarmers,labourers,factoryworkers,cartvendors,domestichelp,small shop owners and everyone else, spread all over the rural and urban landscape, have been using their mobile phones just like a portable landline phone. To receive calls and dial out numbers from a piece of paper. They have scarcely stored an address bookontheirphonesandhaveneversentatextmessage. It is vitally important that the languages of India are supported on the phones to enabletheseusersformoreeffectiveuseofthephone.Itisalsovitallyimportantfor telecom operators because storing of address book will result in more calls and also SMS.AnditisimportantforthegovernmentforallitsMGovernanceplans. A technology developed in India to support effective input in all the languages and scripts of India on all kinds of phones which offers a means to type faster and easier thanEnglishbecameavailablein2009.Itwastheonlytechnologythroughwhichone could type on a basic phone in all Indian languages and it was hailed as a breakthroughbyeminentquartersworldwide. However the phone companies colluded secretly and refused to adopt the technology. All phones sold in the country are sourced from overseas suppliers and the support of Indian scripts on digital devices does not suit the strengths and roadmaps of these companies who wanted India to become a Roman script country like Philippines and Indonesia. They also did not want to be dependent on an external technology, which is called a turf war. No government, regulatory or civic pressure was put upon these manufacturers to support Indian languages as they successfully coopted the corrupt amongst our government functionaries, paid media and others to continue unhindered in their business. Ocassionally, a helpful misrepresentation of facts was put in place for public consumption. This was also helped by the apathy of our well heeled who are anglophiles themselves, ignorance and powerlessness of those who needed it and also the ever readiness in some of ourcountrymentoworkagainstoneofourownfromenvy,fearandforrewards. Hundreds of millions of people in India and the subcontinent continue to use their phoneswithouttheabililtytostorethecontactsoftheirnearanddearonesontheir phones. So they will not be able to make the call when they need it even though eachoneoftheirpeersownaphonetoday.Andtheywillhavenoinclusioninanyof the information services or Internet becoming available with the increase of bandwidthdescendingontothephone.

CONTENTS SectionI Chapter1 Introduction Aboutthebook.WhatisPaniniKeypad.FromLabto Life. Chapter2 Chapter3 Languageandtechnology Indianlanguagesindigitalinterface.Thequestionof fonts.Earlyexperiments. Chapter4 Invention&application Statisticsandserendipity.Earlyresponses.Prediction: dictionarybasedversusstatisticsbased.SMS compression.ThepriceofSMS.HomagetoPanini. Acrosstheuniverse.PaniniKeypadandthebrain. Excellence. Chapter5 Preparingtoventureout Discoveringthebusinessmodel.Creatingproducts. Softwareprotection&scratchcard.Evangelization. BusinessPlan.Ourtechnologyadvantage.Green technology. Inthebeginning Gettingstarted.

 SectionII Chapter6 Tomarket StartupCity.Businessdevelopment.Gettingknown. Theusabilitychallenge.Aperceptionchallenge.Not forruralmarketsonly.Firstretailexperiments. Creatingdemandforanonexistentproduct. DevelopmentforallIndianlanguages.Nasscom.Tech Crunch.SIMembedding.Proto.in.LockheedMartin IndianInnovationGrowthProgram.Anothershotat retail. Chapter7 Thepoliticsoftechnology CEWIT.SpecialInterestGroup.Anotherconflictof interest.ThepuffofMgovernance. Valuationandinvestment TheworldofVCfirms.Valuation.Arrivingataprice. Utility.Anominalprice.Findingourangel.Our investors. Chapter9 Pressingon Qualcomm.AtMicrosoftHQ.Nokia:Episode2 (Copenhagen).Technologyandpower.Handset manufacturers.Operators.Exclusivity.UIDAI.Akash. TheWorldTelecomDevelopmentConference.All platforms.DevelopmentforARMprocessor.Theright time.

Chapter8

 Chapter10 Theworldoflanguages AnArabicproduct.KoreanCleverTexting. CleverTextingChinese.ThecaseofJapanese. Europeanlanguages.Russian.LanguagesofAfrica. Nepali,Urdu,Sinhala,Tibetan&Bhojpuri.Bahasa, Indonesia.OtherlanguagesofAsia. SectionIII Chapter11 ProjectShiva Anidea.TypographyofIndianlanguages. Orthography.Typographicreform.Aunified typographyforIndia.Towardsanewscript.Shiva. Plagiarism? Chapter12 Good,badandugly Nokia:Episode3.TheassociationwithOracle.TheLG story.Samsung.Microsoft:Episode2.Airtel Bangladesh.Athirdattemptatretail. Chapter13 Broadcasting Awards.UNESCOLiteracyPrize.Exhibition.Media coverage.Advertising.Theartofpublicspeaking. Strategy.Thedownloadfunnel.Scienceand skepticism.Diffusionofinnovation. SectionIV

 Chapter14 Chapter15 Learningtodo ThestoryoftheDecimalsystem.KnowingSteveJobs, 2012.Amateurs. Chapter16 Peopleandproducts TheHRmodel.Interviewingcandidates.Theproduct side.PaniniKeypadasanambassadoratlarge.More researchonCleverTexting.Thefutureofthephone. Ourowndreamphone.PaniniKeypadforthedigital future.Reflectionsonafinitestatemachine. Chapter17 Freethinking Creativity.Delayedgratification.The100thmonkey effect.Thinkingbeforedoing.Bootstrapping.How aboutliteracy?Themythoffreemarkets.AreIndians bigoted?Teachinganation.Whattheecosystem needs?Theneedforincubators.Administrative functions.Fablabs.Changeineducationsystem.Why shouldwepreserveourlanguages?Thinkingabout languages. Chapter18 Thelonghaul Stasis.Ajantacaves.Synthetichappiness.Narcissism. Awarenessofdeath.MementoMori. Dematerialization. GoEast,GoWest China.America.SwamiVivekananda.

 Chapter19 Nottakingitlyingdown Angryandforlorn.Collusion.Legalrecourse.Anti trust.Protectingintellectualproperty.Afewwordsof adviceonIPprotection. Chapter20 Competitionandcommunication Ourcompetitors.Swype.Lookeys,Adaptxtetc. Refiningmarketcommunication.Understandingthe businesscase.Customersupport.Thejoyof feedback.SymphonyinBangladesh.Services, productsandtechnology.Eachoneplayedtheircard. WordAssociation.Roleofgovernment.Onewaywe willalwayswin.Chinastory.Theenvironmentheats up. Chapter21 Epilogue Abouttheauthor Myjourney.Beliefindestiny. Makingsense Galileo.Entrepreneurshipisleadership.

Introduction

About this book This book is an exciting journey of how a tiny company comes about, like a green sapling in a vast, unknown forest, and then one day rises above the forest canopy. It is narrated by the founder. This is a story of an Indian start-up, and the technology it developed. Of a small team of people and their efforts to develop and disseminate a new technology. The book will take you on a vicarious journey over a period of five years keeping the information as real and as close to the ground as possible. The book is a record of everything we found out, covering almost every aspect of our start-ups life for those who could benefit from knowing what it is really like. It is the story of its inception, of creativity and innovation, through feverish team work and an invention. It is about how diffusion of innovation actually happens, and the numerous challenges faced. Importantly, it is also about the politics of technology, which was fought by a powerless and naive start-up. And so it is about all the invaluable lessons learnt along the way, through various failures. It is to be useful for anyone from a developing country, trying to steer a breakthrough which disrupts the status quo in the world of technology. This is the story of the Panini Keypad - a humble technology, of vital utility and importance. A technology that needs to reach the marketplace of mobile phones. But our efforts to get this introduced met with stiff resistance. It was not like anything we might have anticipated. Rather, it was an extremely difficult and arduous experience, which could easily

have resulted in failure. Convinced that we were surely going to succeed, we kept trying. Sometimes, one was struck by the thought that our bizarre trials had a higher purpose. It was as if we were to learn something that would then become useful to others. The book is a guide to aspiring entrepreneurs. To know how hard it is, and also how easy it could seem to be, or even actually be. It is also about how much of effort and preparation is necessary. It is a book that can provide strength, hope and understanding to anyone in any kind of a long, relentless struggle. All human struggles, against prejudice and injustice are essentially the same, as societies and forces of human nature have also remained the same through the ages. The book introduces you to the fascinating cosmos of world languages, and in particular the case of Indian languages. Vital decisions need to be taken on the matter of Indian languages on digital devices, which require the informed participation of the public. Dominant players, most of them from outside India, who have ignored our languages in our devices try to benefit from obfuscation of the real truth, they misrepresent facts to take decisions that try to impose their own agenda over the region that is more aligned to their own strengths and roadmaps. Our languages are ours from time immemorial, the heritage that we have inherited, and it is for us to preserve them. The strengths and weaknesses of the languages in regard to interface with digital technology need to be known. Educated decisions have to be taken in the near future, so that we can ensure their survival in the digital age that we have just stepped into. This book has been written at a particular juncture in the life of our startup enterprise. We are surrounded by powerful adversaries who wish we were not around to upset their apple-cart. It has been five years since we

started, and yet we march on without let-up. The resources that we started with when we stepped on the ice floe are nearly depleted. But we are not frazzled, because the number of users of our technology has been growing, people from every part of the world have been discovering and using it, saying good things about it, and writing to compliment us. And, from all the signals that we discern, this is getting better and better everyday. Hence it a good time to write this book. Because later you forget some of the things, or the same things no longer look like they did then. Or one could be too hesitant or politically correct to admit or say some of the things that he would have liked to say in the midst of a journey. The juncture in the life of our company in which the story is written offers this very special context. The valuable perspectives arising when a company is in a phase of all kinds of uncertainty as everyone is actually destined to be could be far more illuminating than a story about a successful or a failed venture written completely in hindsight. Our technology is successful. It will also see wide scale adoption. The utility of the technology will be so successfully realized by people that the wheels of telecom in India, and possibly elsewhere, will inevitably roll on the axle of Panini Keypad one day. We have already successfully accomplished the most difficult part of the journey, namely developing the technology, providing it to users and receiving their endorsement. This technology is now unstoppable. Enough people have found out about it. The truth can no longer be suppressed. People have also found out about the possibility, their ability, option to write in Indian languages on digital devices and they are taking to it increasingly. This realization and aspiration too is now unstoppable.

The book also aims to unmask. It presents a lot of truths about the worlds of big business and government that some may find hard to believe, because the public perception is carefully engineered to be something different. I stand by everything that I state here. Dozens of people are aware of each of the events in question, namely our colleagues, other entrepreneurs in our incubator, our investors and other well-wishers, including several journalists. Hundreds of stake-holders in the industry who we interacted with would also be aware, and many others would be readier to admit as they grew older. Everything is fully ascertainable. A lot of hints have been provided in the weave about where one could look to confirm the veracity of the stories. It is like the log book of an experimenter, recording a sequence that unravels, open to forensic scrutiny. And I have taken care to ensure that I will be able to produce the evidence to substantiate all the things stated here. I knew we would need it one day. Finally, a small, ordinary story from life, when looked at closely, touches upon many aspects of our larger lives as does this story.

So what is Panini Keypad? Panini Keypad is a software-based technology for mobile phones. It makes it possible to type quickly and easily in all Indian languages on the mobile phone, as well as on any kind of digital device that could demand typing. The Panini Keypad allows one to type at 16 words per minute in any Indian language on a basic phone. Faster than one can type in English on such a phone. It is an invention of a new way to type, which takes care of the peculiar situation of Indian scripts, where one has a relatively large number of

characters in each script. The sequence of characters to be entered while typing to form words is often unfamiliar and complex to the uninitiated. The need to support all of these scripts on the same device, particularly the basic devices used by the vast majority of people, had thrown up an insurmountable challenge. Panini Keypad is an intelligent, dynamic keypad that appears on a screen, with only a limited number of predicted characters being shown at any time, based on the context of previously entered characters. The keypad characters to be displayed at any time are estimated at that moment, based on a statistical analysis of the letter combinations typically associated with a particular language. This analysis is completed before-hand, after mining large text corpora of these languages, and is integrated into the compact software that is ready to run on any type of phone. Panini Keypad offers a new easier means to type, with single finger presses, and most often using only keys located in positions most comfortable to the typing thumb. Very often, by pressing only the same most comfortable key. Hence it is also an extremely ergonomic way of typing. First developed in 2008-2009, the technology was then expanded to include many other languages of the world, and is today used by over a million people in all kinds of phones. Panini Keypad offers numerous advantages to mobile phone users as well as manufacturers. The innovation has won many awards worldwide. It has been described as a breakthrough in digital device input technologies, one which permits the easy input of every language on the same phone, without the need for fixed keypads. The innovation has been patented. It was developed by a team that worked very hard to build it, and then spent another four years

to teach this new way of typing to large numbers of people in the subcontinent and elsewhere, through free software that could run on their phones. Thus, awareness, acceptability and popularity of this new way of typing was achieved with large numbers of people, in all languages. The goal was to create the user mandate, whereby manufacturers were impelled to integrate this available system of input into their phones. The Panini Keypad is a very simple invention, but its ramifications are vast and profound, both for the number of people who will benefit from it, as well as for the industry players whose interests will be affected by it. This book and the stories in it are a testimony of the experience of encountering forces at work which both acknowledge the importance of the technology, and yet, at the same time, work to thwart it.

From the Lab to Real Life Panini Keypad has been demonstrated at conferences and exhibitions, and I have spoken animatedly and with conviction about its usefulness, the splendid concept and software architecture underlying it, and their merits. It was met with overwhelming applause by each audience. At each one of these presentations there were many people who had several questions to ask. A common question was: how we happened to think of doing this, and doing it in the particular way we did. We tried to answer those questions sincerely, but we knew that the brief answers were not the answers they wanted. They wanted the long answer, the real story, the story of how it came about, and what the journey was like. They wanted to know the method of our innovation. That is something which cannot be laid out quickly in a few sentences. Hence this book, a record of our story of

entrepreneurship, innovation, untiring hard work by a small team, and the accolades it has recived thus far in its incomplete journey. It is also about our business efforts, and as every member of our team knows, this is really an account of a battle as we knew it. The reader may wonder why we had to encounter so much of resistance. Why was it so difficult to introduce the technology? Throughout our journey, there was one thing that we tried to keep in place: ethics. We never stooped to bribing, or any kind of dishonesty, or the slightest misrepresentation. And we have maintained unimpeachable integrity with our staff, our customers and those that invoice us. It was a personal quest. All along, many of us had heard that to succeed in business one had to be dishonest. Dishonesty is always about stealing from others in some way or the other. I did not want our story to be blemished by any of that. It had to be established that it was possible to do it in this manner, however hard it may be. For me it was a game whose rules I just could not violate if I were to conduct the experiment satisfactorily, and reach that important answer. On the other hand, if you put in all the hard work to climb any summit, you do not want to stand accused of having taken a dishonourable short cut to it. It takes away from your glory. Hence we can make such a public claim, for anyone to contest. So many of our business leaders today stand accused of theft, bribery, tax evasion, criminal nexus, unfair trade practices and so on. We almost expect such leaders to stand exposed in the fullness of time. Of what use is such success? Of what use such glory? We were doing this primarily for the glory. It would be below my dignity to stoop to what others may be constrained to choose for their ritzy livelihood. True entrepreneurs dont sell their integrity.

People perform for the money, or people perform for the applause.

Inthebeginning Gettingstarted Sometimes, a sense of grave personal injustice is the fount from which the strongest undying motivations arise for the emotional man. Over time, that urge, could be channelized into positive directions, into hard work, fecundity and self-evolution. If you are lucky, fate could play such a cruel trick with your life, and then it would be entirely upon you to meet its designs. There is a Tibetan saying that we are brave because we love. The desire to start something of your own needs to reside in your heart for a long time for you to know that it is real. To ascertain for yourself that you are ready to sacrifice for it. And that you find happiness in the sacrifice, in devoting your time to it. Long before I started, I was already visiting events for budding entrepreneurs like Startup Saturday, Mobile Monday, Bar Camp and so on, that are held in the National Capital Region (NCR), an area contagious to New Delhi, buzzing with industrial activity. Here I could interact with other would-be entrepreneurs airing their ideas and options, learning from each other, sharing notes and voicing their aspirations. In one such event, I came across an offer from an incubator in Noida, which would allow you to start a company from one of its rooms by just paying the affordable rental for it. That seemed like a perfectly risk-free way of starting a business. I had started an office earlier, in Kolkata, in the vacant apartment of a relative, but even the furniture that I had invested in then went to waste, because the business never took off. You have to fail a few times before you get a better chance to succeed. Failure is filled with sacredness in the story of life. How many seeds fail before one germinates? How many germinated seeds perish before one becomes a tree? The tree knows it implicitly, and it gives out copious

amounts of seeds so that at least one germinates. It is part of the design. To try to take birth is our duty. If you have failed in your life in pursuit of creating something new, you are a martyr. That life is more fulfilled than one lived with only a desire, which, however, never tried to germinate, or find a wing. The beginning of a start-up could be in a single room, in which the entrepreneur is all alone, thinking about what he is going to do, where he is going to find his first colleagues, and how he will begin. A vast sea of uncertainty. An incubator makes it considerably easier because he need not feel alone, the infrastructure of office needs is in place, it is located in a respectable, trustworthy space, which makes it relatively easier to attract employees to join his company, and administrative matters are taken care of. The first employees are generally going to be the graduates, straight out of college, because they are the only ones who are ready to work for the pittance that the entrepreneur can pay. In my case, this came from the ATM machine, from the extremely modest personal savings I had. The world economy had also gone into recession in August 2008, and the job market in the IT field was already tough, with almost no new jobs available. Although it was not planned, this turned out to be fortuitous. People who dream of entrepreneurship should take the plunge the moment a recession arrives. This was going to be a very different experience for me, because in all my previous entrepreneurial attempts, I had never hired employees. I may have had ample experience of being in charge of hundreds of troops in the Indian Army, but this was not the same. Everything that I had learnt and observed about leadership in the army, and perhaps not practiced as much, was gradually going to come to my rescue in this new role. I remembered all the fine things that they had tried to teach us, about raw leadership through confronting situations. I recalled the times I had felt overwhelmed to be part of a great organization, and had reflected on what it was in the system that had brought it about. I thought about the times that I was driven to follow a leader merely for what he was like. Indeed, it seems that I had managed to internalize some of the leadership training imparted by the Indian Army to its young officers.

I did not start with the idea of building the Panini Keypad. Actually I began with the idea of building a web portal for mobile phone users. That was the big idea. A domain called mymobilephone.in was taken as soon as the idea had entered the head. It was an elaborate plan, for which I had been making notes for a full year before I started. There were so many useful things to do that came to mind. There was going to be a mobile side of the enterprise, involving utilities for the phone, and there would be the web side, involving useful data. So, one of the ideas was to increase the capacity of SMS by compression, because that could be done by Huffman encoding of course, which no one had done until then. I thought that this would be a neat utility for users because it would result in less cost to the user, be secure, and be a cool thing for young people. That is how the idea of collecting text corpora came to mind. So I began by putting a Rs 250 advertisement in the local newspaper, in Noida, that we were looking for people. I was ready to hire anyone who applied, as long as they seemed alright, and trainable to do something useful. I hired four second-hand computers for the work. My first employee, who was not a programmer, left in less than a week, without any notice. The next one, a fresh graduate with some programming skills, left in a month soon after we had started working on the rough outline of building the portal. He had found a job that paid him 30% more, and it looked like a company with a more dependable future. Thankfully, I already had another fresh graduate by then, also for programming. He was assigned the task of figuring out how to programme for mobile phones. I had never done it, nor had he, we just knew it had to be done in J2ME. We tried to write the customary rudimentary hello world type of program for the mobile phone, but it would not run on the phone. So I had to look for someone who knew how to write a program in J2ME, that would work on a phone. I found a kid who came around for a day and showed us how to write a Java application, or App, that would run on a Java-enabled phone, to send a text message. The next day, we bought a Java phone so that we could test the applications we were building. Our first phone for running prototypes. Since my web developer had suddenly left, and I had only the mobile developer with me, I decided that we should continue with building expertise on the mobile phone side of the business idea. We would see

what we could do as we went along. Then some more youngsters joined, freshers hired from the same engineering college campus we were located in, two boys and one girl. I cannot remember now what exactly they were asked to do, but I do remember that we had a small team of five people in that tiny room of about 100 sq ft, and each one was really busy doing whatever they had been assigned. They were all sincere kids, which is the keystone that enabled our company to move towards a future, or even be called successful one day. I was very stern on matters of discipline and one of the guys had to leave pretty soon. There were fears and strains in my mind, and the team was having to learn to cope with me. Each one of us was desperate, for our own sad reasons. I had met a dedicated editor of a magazine called IT, Vandana Sharma, in one of the start-up meets, and she asked me to write a column for her magazine. The very first article that was published was We will be a software Ashram, which outlined some of the things that I wished our organization to be doing. I used the word Ashram to refer to the human resource principles necessary for research. When I read the article now, I find it eerie that we gradually became what I had only articulated as a wish. A month or so had passed by, and we had developed some competence in building Apps in J2ME that could be run on the phone. We knew we had the basic knowledge in place. We were building small interface widgets, and learning how to manipulate them using our own logic, towards building useful things. Could this be done, can you do that, see if this can work, what happens if you do this, does the phone support this, etc. Around this time, I was also thinking hard on what we could be doing. What useful thing could we build for the phone, that would be of great utility to the end user? Just like I had been selling educational utilities for the PC in the past. Mobile applications were already a much talked about thing, and value-added services (VAS) was being projected as something great, with some thoughtless astronomical revenue projections, which people were ready to espouse, and others ready to print. However, in 2008, when we started, the phones on which an application could run were only the Java phones of NOKIA, which constituted less than 1% of all the phones then in use. The conventional ideas that were around were games, multimedia, entertainment, ringtones, wallpapers,

screen savers. It was called ABCD in the industry. Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket and Devotional. Puerile. When I wrote educational software in the past, it was mainly for free distribution. That was the culture and pride of shareware developers of that time. It was sustainable, because I was already earning a salary from my job. The products were difficult to make, but they were for niche segments of users, and they never got me enough money to recover even my own expenses for development, leave aside yielding any profit. Hence this time around, when I took up entrepreneurship for a living, I had to choose to do something which would yield an income, and hopefully a large one. And so my decision making was essentially a process of elimination. I did not want to develop software for the PC because it was a fairly mature domain, with millions of developers, and almost every utility you could think about, from music synthesis to astronomy, was already available as excellent freeware on the Internet. The mobile phone domain, however, was a new one, where far lesser numbers had entered. The development work for the mobile was also more complex, because there were so many different platforms existing simultaneously, like Java, Symbian, iPhone, Android (which came later), Blackberry, Palm, Windows, Brew, and some more as well. The phones came in so many different screen sizes and form factors that it was extremely frustrating, hard work for anyone to rewrite one application for each type of phone. Shareware developers do not like to be in such boring, inefficient places, because they do it for the fun. And finally, and most importantly, there were far more mobile phone users in the world than there were PC users. So between the PC and the mobile, it would have to be the mobile for us. On the mobile side, we would have to build something for which the potential number of beneficiaries should be very large, as large as possible, so that some sales could occur. There were already hundreds of millions of phone users in India, and the number of users was growing fast. A utility of everyday use for them would have the potential for large sales volume. And of course, it would be wonderful if the application served a critical function, and was something that was often used. It

would be great if it could be of perceived value, which someone in India would be willing to pay for. What could that utility be? I had once visited a company which purported to be doing something about input in Indian languages. I liked the idea, but the company did not yet have a product, and was about to close down. There was another company which was already doing a good job of supporting input in Indian languages via the English or Roman script, written phonetically, a process called transliteration, like you do in Google, which many of you would be familiar with. However, this did not allow you to type directly in the Indian script, using characters of your own language. Only that could provide a long-standing solution applicable to the vast majority of people who need to write in Indian languages, rather than make do with Roman. And this was not a problem that was going away. In this book, I use the words Roman alphabets, Latin script or English alphabets interchangeably. The term Latin script comes from its relation to the Latin language, written in that script, as distinct from Greek, another classical language of antiquity. Incidently, the Principia Mathematica (pronounced Prinkipia) by Isaac Newton, was written in Latin, although he lived in 17th century England. When I tried to think of a utility that could be of benefit to the largest numbers of people, there was no better example that I could think of than a vernacular keypad for the non-English speaking Indians. I did not want to do it using the Roman alphabet, because that had already been done. We wanted to do it indigenously, in the scripts themselves, because India was a country where most people did not know English. It is presumptive to think that those who need to write in regional languages would want to, or be capable of, writing in English first. Or that it could be the culturally acceptable long-term solution to the problem. Writing in that system was a two-step process, and prone to some common kind of errors and bottlenecks. For example, it was extremely difficult or even impossible to write certain words which were not in the dictionary. We wished to use a different approach. I knew something about the Indian alphabets from my childhood, and I was familiar with the obscure world of Unicode. Unicode was the universal standard for storage and transmission of all the scripts of the

world in digital systems like computers, Internet and telecommunication networks.

Language and Technology

Indian languages in digital interface India has many languages, the number varies depending on who you ask. For example, there are 22 official languages in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India, while there were only 14 when the Constitution was adopted in 1950. Inclusion of languages in the 8th schedule is a matter of politically expedient accommodation. It includes languages like Santhali and Bodo, but not Bhojpuri, which has its indigenous film industry, music and TV channels. There is the case of diglossia of the Hindi language, where 42 dialects were included under one name for an intended political assimilation and its imposition as a national language. These languages were ones like Kumaoni, Garhwali and Marwari, that you would scarcely comprehend if you understood only Hindi. The 8th schedule does not include the languages of north-eastern India, like Naga and Mizo, which are distinct languages, with large number of speakers. And again, there are scholars who maintain India has over one thousand languages and dialects. The languages mentioned in census reports are also as numerous. But it is definitely true that India has about three dozen significantly important distinct languages. Let us now talk about scripts, which is something different from languages. The script is about the alphabets used. For example Devanagari, or Nagari, is a script that is used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and several other languages in central and north India. Konkani is a language which is written in both the Devanagari script and the Kannada script. Some languages of the north-east use the Roman script. Despite the large number of languages, there are only 10 scripts that are used by all of Indias languages. So it is finite and manageable. These script systems are Devanagari, Bangla, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi and Arabic (for Urdu and Kashmiri). And you could include Roman to relate to the languages of the north-east India,

where, by their own consensus, people like to use the Roman script. Pick up an Indian currency note, and see how many distinct scripts you can identify there. These are all. Thankfully, all these scripts are supported by Unicode and hence it is perfectly possible, from the point of view of existing standards, to support the storage and transmission of text content in any of Indias languages on computers, mobile phones and Internet. So when someone makes some tall claim about accommodating 22 languages in some device, it is usually only about these 10 script types. Note that I have mentioned storage and transmission, but not input as yet. Now let us talk about input. Let us look briefly at the case of computers first. How do we type on a PC keyboard? English has 26 characters, based on which the PC keyboard is designed, which has by now become a manufacturing standard worldwide, enjoying the economic benefits of mass production. Every other script has had to work around the existing form factor of that keyboard. Devanagari has about 70 characters in popular usage, so a majority of them were supported through two levels, accessed through the Shift Key. Some of the characters were supported with more complex steps, while some were simply ignored. But there were several different layouts existing at the same time. There was a Remington layout, which is used by the typists who sit outside the lower courts with their typewriters. There was the Inscript layout that the CDAC was trying to mandate. There was the Microsoft layout, and there were yet other virtual keypad layouts with various unique merits, offered or suggested by individuals and companies. The presence of so many different layouts meant that a user was unable to take any particular layout seriously, and invest in learning it. Now when we move to the case of other Indian scripts, they are in even greater disarray, because they had variable numbers of characters in them. Malayalam has 70, many outside the Devanagari orthography, and Tamil could do with 46, with other languages somewhere in the middle. Naturally, disagreements arose regarding what was to be ignored or left unsupported. Most users who type on the PC today to write blogs in their own languages, use some or the other virtual keypad of their choice for their language, or use a Roman transliteration system to type. In PCs, the work is getting done. But that is not true of mobile phones.

To understand the subject of Indian language input on mobile phones, you need to first understand that the basic phone has only 12 keys and English is typed through multi-taps, with up to 3 or 4 taps per character. Everyone is familiar with this. Since Devanagari had over 70 characters in popular usage, the number of taps goes up to 7 or 9 in Nokias scheme. In LGs scheme there was a character that needed 16 taps. Apparently, no thinking has been applied to this subject, because the second most frequent character in Hindi, the Halant, was reached only on the 6th tap of a key even in Nokias scheme. Moreover there was no space to accommodate so many characters on the tiny face of the key. So it was indicated as a range, like P-W, so if you had to type U, you would have to count how many taps to U and then do the 6 taps. If you slowed down in your tapping, a multi-tap timeout would result and you would get some other character, which you would have to delete before you recommenced the tapping. All this made the multi-tapping approach a completely unusable way to type, even though each of the major phone manufacturers had introduced phones with such multi-tap Hindi keypads into the market. We have never seen person-to-person (as opposed to machine-generated) Hindi SMS or texting take off in India, even though the Hindi keypad was present on most low-cost phones. Another problem was that India has many other scripts to accommodate. Including only one of them on a printed keypad, in the manner explained above, was therefore necessarily at the cost of non-inclusion of every other language / script. This too was unacceptable, because each of the others were also important scripts, with up to 100 million users. This could become a politically sensitive subject if people became aware of it. There was no way that a unified keypad could be designed, because south Indian languages use a few characters in certain phonetic category ranges that are non-existent in Devanagari. When we were working with Bhojpuri recently, which uses the Devanagari script, we found one character which was not used in Hindi or Marathi. Each language has a few exceptional characters. Hence this has been an intractable problem for a long time for engineers of all mobile phone companies. Herein lay the value of finding a solution to the keypad dilemma, or more generally, the issue of supporting all Indian languages on digital devices.

If a new way could be found to solve the problem, which took care of these realities and constraints, it would be of critical utility and of longstanding significance for the country. And it would be of utility to hundreds of millions of people, not only in India but also in all the countries of the subcontinent. They too face exactly the same problem. So that was our aim. To develop a way to input Indian languages.

The question of fonts If you visit a foreign language webpage on the Internet, and the text does not display on your computer, or shows square boxes, it indicates that you do not have the requisite fonts present on your computer. So you could quickly download the font on your computer, or tinker with your settings and then it would start displaying. Most of the support mail we get is regarding fonts, so it is important that we briefly explain how this works. Fonts are contained in a file that has all the information regarding the characters relevant to the encoding, so that is how the characters are displayed when a message is received. There are thousands of font files available on the Internet, for a variety of artistic and publishing needs. These fonts, including the ones for Indian languages, are produced by individuals or companies or even governments, and are very often open or free, available in the public domain. Thats how anyone downloads them for free to meet most requirements. If the phone manufacturer includes a font of a particular language on its devices, it is ready to display that script. The Indian language fonts require an essential third part, called a rendering engine, which is a software in the system that is external to the fonts file. It takes care of all the rules on how two characters are to be displayed when combined, as in a yuktakshar, (i.e. a compounded letter, technically referred to as consonant conjunct). This is contained in the font file and the rendering engine follows these rules during the display process. When you use a phone that displays square boxes, it is because it does not have the font of that script. If the font is present, but the yuktakshars still do not form, or are spaced incorrectly, or the letters overlap on each

other, it is because either the font was of a poor quality, or there was no rendering engine software on the device. Both of these problems are quite common with the phones, including those from some of those considered blue-chip phone manufacturers of the world. You may ask, why cant a phone user install fonts by himself, just like he could on a PC? The answer is that the phone operating system is relatively new, it has not evolved as much, and has not been left open to the user to tinker with, unlike a PC. There is no way you could install a font by yourself on a phone. In the Android devices, you could install a font by yourself but it would be a hack, called rooting, which renders the warranty invalid. You just have to drop the font file in the font folder and reboot.

So we had to depend on the phone manufacturers to include the fonts on their phones, together with a good rendering engine. You should demand the same for your phone, as a consumer. And the regulator and the government must mandate the same for all phones sold in this country. That it has done no such thing when it is the norm in every country, ought to be a matter of national shame. In the absence of phone companies including the fonts on their devices, some companies started including font support inside their applications, as an ad hoc measure. But this was an architecturally unsound approach, because the user would not be able to view the script in any other part of the phone. He would also not be able to view received messages. It was

like in the old days of DOS when computers could only display plain system fonts, and game developers who wished to display fancy fonts of the recognizable kind (say for a Mickey Mouse or a Star Wars game) had to include specific codes inside their software for the purpose. But this was discontinued as soon as the architecture started supporting fonts at the operating system level, which could be used by all applications, and all parts of the system. All the phone operating systems already supported this new architecture and hence would have been easily capable of supporting the display of all Indian languages by including only 9 font files. Hence the right thing was for them to include the fonts of all our languages before sealing their operating system prior to shipment. This probably answers your question on how you are sometimes able to see Indian languages inside a particular phone browser, but not anywhere else on the phone. The phone browser application had included the font support inside its own programme. Sometimes a company which did this tried to thwart forward movement in the direction of phone companies including the fonts, because their USP would then be lost. Quite like if you are in the business of selling water in jerricans, you would not want the public water supply to come up. But technology has to move in directions which are the right thing to do, the optimal thing to do, the efficient thing to do. Earlyexperiments The first design we built was a simple keypad coming up on the phone screen. We put all the alphabets on the screen together and then used a 3columns x 4-rows grid that could be moved over all the laid out characters, with the grid steered by the navigation buttons of the basic phone. The 3x4 grid was of the form of the 3x4 numeric keypad of the phone beneath the screen. For the character you wanted to type, you moved the mask to overlay the character on the screen and then pressed the indicated key on the keypad. It was an effective method to type and it already required less key-presses than multi-tap. It was simpler and more intuitive for the user when we gave it to them to try out. Most importantly, in this system there were no multi-taps, the pesky thing that was the most difficult part for the users.

I showed the working product to a few close friends who were welladvanced in the mobile application world. They were full of praise for what we had done in just two months. I should thank Lomesh Dutta here for his encouragement. Here was a way to type in any Indian language on the phone, and send messages that would display if the phone had the font. I thought it was worth patenting the design, and started looking for a patent attorney who was affordable but would nevertheless do a good job. We did file a patent eventually for that design of the movable key mask. We will discuss the important subject of patents elsewhere in the book. We will discuss what you need to know, and what we found out by incurring heavy expenses on patents. Our product was already working and usable. But to take the idea further, and to make it convenient to find any character, the full set of characters laid out beneath the 3x4 grid could be arranged either in alphabetical order or in some other order, with the aim of reducing the number of times you would need to move the key mask, and hence the resultant total number of key-presses or interactions. In other words, a layout optimised for efficiency. That would require some specialized investigations into languages. We did some of those experiments on different layouts using English. In those days, we did our first experiments and prototypes with

English first, because it was easier to handle with our available tools, and we believed that some of these key findings would apply to our own languages. I was setting out in certain directions of exploration. It would have to be about which characters followed which other characters most frequently. What happens, and what never happens, and why. And free-flowing explorations on such matters. To find the right answers to all our design questions, we would need to have statistical information about the language. About its character frequencies and combinations. The information had to be obtained from the actual use of the language, which would be available in a text corpus. A corpus is, or corpora are, a very large body of text of a language, which could be mined from Internet using computers. The corpora are then analysed using a computer programme, to understand the nature of the language. Meaning, the character frequencies, phrase frequencies, correlations etc that are inherent in it, i.e., the statistical properties or attributes revealed by the analysis of the language corpora. I started exploring statistical tools for corpora analysis. This was a fairly developed field among linguists, and some tools existed. But being a non-expert in that field, it was hard for me to use these tools, which required specialized servers. Fortunately, I found a simple tool which I could use on my PC to investigate these matters, and so I started with that. The tool I was using was unable to handle Unicode because it was meant for English in ASCII encoding. And all digital text of Hindi or any other Indian languages had to be in Unicode. So in order to be able to use the tool we substituted the Unicode with characters from the ASCII space, to arrive at the statistical results. Subsequently, we developed our own tools, which handled Unicode directly. Our team had already been collecting corpora in Hindi from the Internet for over a month now. I had made several visits to the CDAC in Noida, requesting them for corpora of Indian languages, which they had, but they refused to give it to me. So we collected our corpora on our own. This turned out to be better, because we built it from the contemporary form of the language, obtained from the Internet, which is much more relevant than, say, ancient texts.

Invention&Application

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! but, That's funny... - Isaac Asimov

Statistics and serendipity An invention is scarcely an outcome of a plan. It is serendipity, like a gift of God from the tree above. Our only job is to look under the tree, searching with an open, curious mind, and when we find something, to hold it up in our hands, to realize what it can make possible, and then pursue those implications devotedly. That is all that remains for the inventor to do. A filter for "interesting-ness", and the presence of a lot of background noise within us, helps a lot because the leaps of connections that are not obvious to others are very likely to be inter-disciplinary. When I started processing the text corpora and began looking at the initial data we worked with the English language first I was astounded by the results. The character combinations were really very densely clustered around a particular side. Some things occurred with extremely high frequencies, some others with moderately high frequencies on a sharply dipping slope, a large number occurred in a long tail of probabilities. But the overwhelming majority of possibilities, something like 80% of the character combinations, never occurred at all. It looked like a slice from the continental shelf, and that was a revelation. In the spectrum of all possibilities, the world of real occurrences lay in a very thin, dense band on the side. I was more familiar with the English language, so it was easy to comprehend what was happening under the hood and why. When we looked at the preliminary graphs for Hindi, they had exactly the same shapes. This was very unexpected and ripe for exploitation in terms of compression, as well as the input technology for keypad phones that we wished to develop. I kept looking at the astounding data that was being

thrown up repeatedly from the churning. From this insight came the design. But did I understand everything then in exactly the way that I now describe? No, I did not. Nor did we have any clue of what more we would have to do to convert this exceptional statistical discovery into a way to type. Or what further processing it would take to fit this for our needs, and how we were going to do that. I was somehow led by an intuition to undertake the statistical analyses, and only long after the results were out did I revisit this, and clearly understand why it was working, and comprehend all the implications. I continued to discover new advantages of the dynamic keypad concept as we went along, and we keep finding new ones even now. We did not plan for these advantages, we discovered those advantages. This accomplishment lay on the outer boundaries of my abilities as I knew them. I found so much happiness in this work because I know I exceeded myself in it through sheer good luck. And so I decided that I would take this as far as I humanly could, whatever be the cost. I was not going to let it go. This work had been assigned to me to undertake. I had been given adequate endurance training by destiny to take the strains of the special journey that was now to come. Once the correlations were revealed, I thought about what we could do with the findings. It was then that the idea of the dynamic keypad, like the one we have today, was born. I had a hunch that this could be productive. And it could be productive only because the correlations (and the implied more common letters and letter combinations) was found to be so strong. Without that kind of strong correlation, a scheme such as ours would merely be a wild, random thing most times, unhelpful as a dependable system of input, and not at all a preferred option for anyone. So the new idea was that instead of thinking of all the characters at once, one should put only a few characters on the screen. These would be mapped to the numeric keypad below the screen, so as to indicate the desired input through selection of the corresponding number. All the other characters could be accessed through a Next List button, which would bring up the next set of characters, once again ranked by their likelihood or relevance to the text situation at any time. If we could

ensure that the Next List button had to be used very infrequently, we would have achieved a means to input through single key-presses, and with vastly reduced overall efforts or key-presses on the part of the user. But before those statistical riches could be applied to the phone software in an implementable manner, there remained the huge, laborious step of organising the vast data in a manageable, finite manner. A method had to be found for this. This data had been extracted manually, without any tools, through continuous, diligent, back-breaking work over several days by one of our colleagues. And the work was so error-prone that the entire work had to be thrown away, and started all over again, even if a single error could be spotted. It was done in Excel, manually, and then using macros. But it was still highly laborious. The most difficult part was done. These were later automated, through specialized software tools developed by us. The analysis work can now be done in a matter of hours, with no chance of errors. We quickly put together a working prototype of the dynamic keypad on the phone, for the English language, and were surprised by the results. Most of the time, we got the characters we wanted unfailingly, in the predicted first list. The first innovation was putting the characters that are most likely to begin a word (as shown by our analysis) as the first set of characters on the keypad. The keypad would then respond on variable trajectories of predictions based on the inputs it would thereafter receive from the user. Because the predictions were being assigned to random positions anyway, the next idea now arose, of trying to put them according to their probability ranks in positions on the keypad which were most ergonomic to the texting thumb, while holding the phone. This was a stupendous idea, because reading from the top left corner as we did, these characters were also the first to be read and the easiest to spot. This accessibility of characters coupled with a design that requires the use of the same ergonomic keys for the most frequently used alphabets has played a crucial role in making the Panini Keypad the preferred typing option of all those who got exposed to the technology. No one had ever placed characters on the keypad of a phone with the comfort of the thumb being the foremost consideration. On an ITUT

keypad, the English characters are placed merely in their alphabetical order, without the slightest consideration of statistics or ergonomics. For example, the letter e which occurs with such fierce frequency in English about 15% was on a multi-tap! We cannot really assign any blame, because the ITUT layout was an evolution from the push-button landline phones. In certain countries, this had English characters on them for input, although used only rarely, for dialling vanity toll free numbers, like 1-800-FLOWERS. We quickly filed another patent within the same month, this time with these newer and more significant ideas, of a responsive, dynamic keypad, included. This was important, because for our international patent filings that were yet to come, which would also be extremely expensive, we could not have afforded pursuing two separate broad patents. That was the end of November 2008. I had begun our start-up in September. Fast work indeed, by any standard! Before we could release to the world this English input product that we built first, we had to give a name for the new way of typing, and we called it CleverTexting. I quickly made a website called CleverTexting.com where we put up some information on the new method, together with a simulation of the working, by way of explanation. On the last day of 2008, after office hours were over and just before leaving the office, we released the English product as a functioning prototype of our new paradigm. It was put up on the website for anyone to download and try out. You could type using it, without encountering multi-taps, and the predictions would surprise anyone. Of course, no one would know about the existence of this website overnight. That night, at the party at the Defence Services Officers Institute, just before the New Year arrived, I was looking at the shimmering swimming pool, wondering what lay ahead in our journey hereafter. I was sure this could be useful for many languages, particularly Indian languages. Where I could take this, by doing the required work, before running out of my own money depended entirely on our endurance. We seemed to have found a rich vein. What happened now with the innovation would depend entirely upon what steps towards execution we took.

I hadnt set out to start such an enterprise. But this business was going to be far more overwhelming than anything that I had imagined. It would have a very large domain, which would mean results, but it would also entail far greater challenges. I had no idea how I was going to address this. But I had no choice. This was the fruit that had dropped upon my lap, and I understood its significance. This is what I was given to do, and so I would have to do this. I would have to discover the strategy to do this along the way, learning as much as I possibly could and applying whatever I learnt. Doing this immensely difficult thing was what the purpose of my life had become. As the new year began, we started looking at the statistical data for Hindi. The curves were exactly the same as the ones for English. Since then, we have looked at about three dozen languages, from all the linguistic families of the world, and the curves have always been the same, without any surprises whatsoever. All the languages of the world, whatever has been their independent evolution or orthography, are quite similar in terms of the amount of correlations or noise within them. A curious anthropological unity indeed among all languages. With the initial results for English already in place, we attempted to build the same mechanism for Hindi, with exactly the same rules of usability. And that was built. When I went home on the day the Hindi prototype was completed, I tried to test its efficacy by typing the arbitrary strings of Hindi text that were scrolling at the bottom of the television screen of a popular Hindi news channel. And it was working wonderfully for everything that I tried to type, for every word inside or outside the dictionary. For names of people and places. That was a Eureka moment for me, because I knew we had a cracker here. The possibilities it would open up were truly vast and full of advantages. I kept trying to type something or the other on that phone for most of the night. I tried to use all the knowledge I had gained until then to arrive at a conviction, to help me take the decision, that this should be the vein to follow from now onwards, for the thing that we called our business enterprise. As a reader who had followed technology stories all my life, I knew the worth of it, even though it was only held in my own hands right now. I felt somewhat secure. That was the day we invented the Panini Keypad.

In the last week of January 2009, on the day of Saraswati Puja, the Hindi product was also released, as a Java App that people could download and experience on their phones. It was called CleverTexting Hindi Ver 1.0

The Panini Keypad (Hindi) estimating characters most likely to be typed next and placing them into positions most comfortable to the texting thumb.

What you choose to bet upon in business is a decision that only entrepreneurs can take. Its their call. It is the most important decision that will determine the long-term destiny of an enterprise. How well you take that decision will depend upon what you know until then, and all that you have paid attention to. How much you have read, observed, thought and analyzed of all the happenings in the world around you, because that is the environment. If a sound decision is to be taken, you had better be both informed and convinced, because this decision is going to determine your future, and involve a very long, lonely wait, full of agony and despair. You will have to continue on that path irrespective of who says what. And then, it could click (or fail). No one can know everything about a particular field, but you should definitely start gathering knowledge. Experts are unlikely to be helpful, because there are usually no experts, and no expert can really know how

you alone have seen it. Listen to those who work with their own hands everyday to create the new. Not to those whose minds have reached a stasis, with only handed-down knowledge and beliefs. People also often have an axe to grind, which you dont know about as yet. They could try to mislead you. Earlyresponses So what do you do after you have developed something good? How do you tell the world about it? You put it on a website, and you start writing emails. You start writing emails to all the people you know, take out the visiting cards of all the people you have met at conferences, think of all the people who have been kind towards you, and all the people who you think can help in some way or the other. You write passionate emails, to at least inform them. In the times of the Internet, you do not have to go to a lot of places on foot. You can sit on your desk and send emails, and some of the recipients reply, which means that many more of them had read it. So you have a way to reach out, to tell the world, bring the attention of some people to it, after which if it has real merit, it could travel some distance on its own steam. You could get help, encouragement or useful opinion. I heard back from Prof Jhunjhunwala at IIT, Chennai, as well as one of his colleagues. Since early 2009, we had begun to show our products here and there. Now that it was working, it was a good time to show it around. People loved what we were saying. They found it astounding, and we loved to thrill them. It was common for us to hold out the phone and ask "Say something that youd like to write". And anything they said would immediately get easily written through characters that were invariably predicted, one after the other, to their disbelief, and typed with single keypresses. The messages could be sent to phones operating under the reigning GSM and CDMA systems, and be received perfectly. We wrote to people about CleverTexting, requesting them to download and experience it, and assisting them through the cumbersome process. We did a press release with some of the free PR websites, which were

quickly picked up by search engines. Somehow people started hearing about us, and even writing to us. Some people wrote about it on their blogs. The world of input technologies is a huge one, with fiercely competitive teams at work. Some of their output is novel, and some are bizarre, and most dont ever make it to any devices or real users. People keep a tab of what is happening around the world in this field. Our idea of a dynamic keypad with statistical predictions and ergonomic placement for Asian languages, had several different new ideas in it, and it was being picked up well. Some people who could completely comprehend what it meant did reply to the emails, from our tiny start-up in India, with kind words. One of the replies was from Mike Grenville, Founder of 160characters.org, who wrote about how business should welcome this development and how texting can save languages. The most reputed website on text messages, called Textually.org, which tries to cover every significant development on input technologies worldwide as it happens, published a story on the technology which I am sure was read by the circuit. There was a flutter in January 2009, and the news must have travelled widely, because in early February, we heard from the Ergonomist Society in London. Its called the Institute of Human Factors today, but it is the oldest and most reputed society of practicing ergonomists worldwide, having been established during the Second World War. I worked with a reporter called Suzanne Hutson to provide all the information, and in the March 2009 issue of The Ergonomist, there was a cover story, "Thumbs up to CleverTexting". In the two-page article, they described it as radical, powerful, promising and full of new possibilities. Such encomiums, in print, in the reputed international journal of professional ergonomists, who could have no extraneous reason to reach out on their own to an unknown startup in India and put us on their cover was a big pat on our back. Because they ought to know. It told us that we were definitely doing something very right. We began showing our product to people wherever the opportunity offered itself. We did demos in start-up get-togethers, like the ones I used to attend earlier. Our own Home Brew Computer Clubs. I was glad there were plenty of places to go to which didnt charge you a fee to attend. Because if they had charged, we could not have afforded it. Everyone

was full of praise for it as they tried to type difficult words on their own. We distributed the products through our own website, but also through dozens of shareware download sites, in order to make the product known. The very first users were already downloading it, and their comments were positive. They were being able to use it successfully on their phones. In our first products at this stage, we supported one language (Hindi) through the predictive text, and all the other Indian languages also could be supported through the previous invention, of the moving key-grid, which we did not want to throw away. We called them Mode A, Mode B and so on. The CleverTexting part itself had several options, like Ergonomic, Ergopersistent, Legacy etc, exhausting all the variations of the same model that a user might prefer. Our patent also mentioned these variations. Prediction: dictionary-based versus statistics-based Virtually every assistive technology or predictive texting method that we had seen in the past, whether it was auto-suggestion in a search box, autoword-completion on a phone, auto-correction of a mis-spelt word in a word processor, T9 disambiguation, Swype or any other, have all been dictionary-based technologies. This involved dictionary look-ups from a table, fairly straightforward stuff. Dictionary-based systems have their all-too-familiar pitfalls. On a phone, it becomes difficult or irksome to write words outside the dictionary. Names of people and places are some of the most common words we send as text messages on the phone. Waiting front of SBI ATM Dhaulakuan. Sheetal already here. is the kind of message we often send. It isnt exactly English prose. But statistics involves a completely different approach. The statistical properties of languages are really about their linguistics, phonemic patterns, and these are borne out through all the words of a language, whether inside or outside the dictionary.

If you were looking at a passenger list from an international flight and you saw the following names, what would you think of each of their nationalities? 1. Nagaki Kushomiti 2. Rahedel Dashkafah 3. Nipya Trikurti 4. Keid Barelow Would you be able to say who might be Arab, or Japanese, or American, or Indian? Each of these words were made up by me. No such names exist. We could do this because there are phonemic patterns that seem suggestive. These are the signatures that are maintained across the entire form of those languages. A name of a place in England is more likely to be Wembershire than Srikantapur, and the name in Hungary could be Szigetszentmikls and not uMhlabuyalingana, both are names of real places in Hungary and South Africa. That is why statistical correlation works so well. Its brilliant. My name has the phoneme bh occurring twice. That phoneme is fairly common in Bharat, or India. But there is hardly any English word where this phoneme occurs. This is an example illustrating how distinctly different the languages can be. Statistics is a very good bet. Being statistical instead of dictionary-based has many advantages. The foremost of which is that it is a representation of the infinite extent of the language and not a finite section of it. Dictionaries, however large, and always at the cost of precious memory, will always be finite and hence always incomplete, since new words constantly enter the lexicon. Apps based on statistical analyses, where only the patterns of character frequencies need be stored, would always be for more light-weight than if an entire dictionary had to be stored, while also including the largest extent of the language. Even as small in 10 kb if you want, a whole language. You can have a total data size compatible with the tasks memory constraints, and like in many actual real-life situations, the law

of diminishing returns holds true very strongly. So you can get a lot done with very little if you have to. This is unique to the statistical approach. Statistical implementations can also support dialects, beside the main language, simply because they are so phonemically similar. Therefore, in a world with hundreds of major languages, and thousands of dialects which should also be supported for their users, the statistical approach on a dynamic keypad is the way to go. And this had to be the way of the future, in the vast, multi-lingual, globalised world. As you can see, we delight in rubbing salt into the wounds of the existing dictionary-based technologies. The enormously powerful, but increasingly flagging and yet recalcitrant dictionary-based companies, who were to be our competition for some time. SMSCompression We had made a product for Hindi and were now looking at what our next moves should be. One innovation that I had been keen on trying out was SMS or text compression. We had already noticed that languages were so full of strong correlations. So we developed a Huffman code for the Hindi language. I had to revisit my engineering education, and the first time we built the compression scheme, it involved a great deal of hard, manual work, done on Excel sheets, because the number of leaf-nodes were so many, and hence required large numbers of iterations. It took me a few days to finish it correctly. I later learned how to use MATLAB to do this part quickly. Huffman coding was one of the first brilliant breakthroughs of digital science, where a methodology was found to encode symbols with variable number of bits based on their probabilities of occurrences. The smallest sequences of bits being assigned for the most probable symbols, and vice versa. Thus, given any arbitrary binary sequence of encoded symbols without any additional markers, Huffman Coding makes it possible to discern the symbols without any ambiguity at the decoding stage. Each sequence had to be non-repeating (i.e. prefix free). Morse Codes are also of variable length, but they are not prefix free, and hence

you have to insert a time interval between two codes, which is not possible in a binary stream. This was impossible to do till a 25 year old PhD student in Computer Science at MIT, David A. Huffman, invented a scheme in 1951, while solving a challenge given in jest by his professor to the class, for a weekend home assignment. The students did not know that the problem was actually a very difficult and as yet insoluble one. The reward offered was exemption from class tests the following week. We found that we were doing about 100% compression for English, and for Hindi we were doing about 300%. This was because Hindi was being transmitted in Unicode, which took two bytes per character, while for English, under the existing standards, seven bits per character were required. So instead of sending 70 characters per SMS in a Hindi message, we were sending close to 210 characters per message. A bit about SMS here. An SMS, the standard unit of a text message, consists of 140 bytes, or 140 x 8 bits. Because English (i.e. Latin or Roman), with a smaller symbol space, is encoded in 7 bit per symbol, its 7 x 160 characters in a message exactly equals the 8 x 140 bytes of the SMS. All other Unicode supported languages of the world use 2 bytes per character, hence 70 characters can be accommodated in the standard message (140 bytes). English too is supported by Unicode encoding. Sending compressed messages requires that there must be the same software at the receiving end to be able to decode the message. So one could have our product as an App novelty, rather than a feature of the phone itself. We also introduced a low-level encryption into the message, using the phone number of the recipient as the seed to be used at both ends for coding and decoding. The application at the other end had to intercept the incoming SMS to the phone, and hence the SMS was being sent to a port of the phone where listener software waited. A few phones supported communication to such ports, while others did not. But yes, our SMS compression was something that was being demonstrated to the world, and it was working. If this were Silicon Valley, that itself would have been a sufficiently exciting fundable proposition, but of course, this was India. We did not file a patent for the compression thing simply because the principle of the Huffman code underlying it dated from as long back as

1950. But the use of it on phones in this manner was perhaps a novelty. Since then, we have published the Huffman codes for all Indian languages on our website, for anyone to utilize for any other applications. They would not have to mine any corpus to obtain the statistical numbers. These may well be the first Huffman codes for Indian languages.

The price of SMS Before you have forgotten the SMS math, I bring this story here that sometimes, much later, I used to get calls from concerned friends when there was a report in the newspaper that the price of SMS was going to come down. They worried about whether that would disrupt our business model. I assured them that the fall in SMS price would be the best thing that can happen to us. Because we dont sell SMS, we sell the means to send SMS. It is only when the water in the well is free that it is prudent to invest in a bucket. To avail of inexpensive SMS effectively, users would require, and benefit from, our technology. The cost of SMS in India is ten thousand times higher than it should be, in relative terms. Let me explain. An SMS is exactly 140 bytes of data. A voice call of a minute is about .5 MB of data. Half mega bytes, or 500 thousand bytes, is about four thousand times the data of an SMS, and for this, in India, you may pay 60 paise, or even 30 paise. But for an SMS, which involves the transfer of four thousandth of the data compared to the phone call, you may pay Rs 1. Voice is sent on the voice channels, and the SMS is sent on the signalling channels, only when they are not used, which is often, and besides the SMS is extremely light-weight. So as an operator, while for voice transmission you need to spend on channel, spectrum, equipment etc, you set aside virtually no resources on the network for SMS, and yet charge so much.

20% of sales of Verizon is SMS, but 40% of its profits come from SMS. This is because what you sell costs so little. Wouldnt the operators in India like to sell even more of something that costs them near zero? How could they expand the user base of SMS, to more than the narrow band of those who know English? Which is like 80% of their users. If competition, regulations and market dynamics could bring down the cost of voice calls so much in India, why has it not done the same thing for SMS? It is because it is not used by the largest numbers of people and has never been that competitive a space. SMS is not being used by as many people, simply because they cannot do so. They cannot type in English. Operators have put the price at a level where they think they are milking the existing market to the maximum. That is why SMS is priced a million times higher than what it should be. We have not seen the regulator do anything about it. The poorest people should have the access to the cheapest form of phone communications. HomagetoPanini Panini was an ancient Sanskrit grammarian of this subcontinent, who lived some 2500 years ago. He was perhaps the greatest linguistician who ever lived, but very few people know his name or the true worth of his work. We named our product Panini Keypad because we aspired to be associated with a name as great as his. The potential future role of our technology, for the languages of Paninis subcontinent, was also in my mind. A subcontinent full of languages that evolved mainly from the root language Sanskrit, which has played something like a maternal role in the formation of words in this region, as well as in the world at large. It was apt to honour him, and thus bring his name back to public memory from 2500 years ago, via a utility software meant for mass usage.

Much later, people congratulated me, saying it was a wonderful name, in a marketing sense. Although hard to pronounce, and often mis-spelled in web searches, that unusual word registered. For those who may have ever heard of Panini, and many had, it brought back a subconscious respectful association to language in a classical sense. In the western world, I have had to clarify that it has nothing to do with the Panini sandwiches, which were also well known. Thankfully, no one knew about the sandwiches in India. We put up our product on the website PaniniKeypad.com. Our global products continued to be branded CleverTexting. Later, I heard a lecture on the Internet in which Philip Kotler talks about the need for a spirit share in the consumer. A spirit share was about having an association which was outside and above the consumers personal needs. It was his participation in something bigger. The brand Panini Keypad had the potential to be a big brand. Across the universe It seemed pointless at that stage to build the Panini Keypad for other Indian languages, because there was hardly any smart phone which had the fonts for Indian languages. If the phone did not have a font, the application would show square boxes or blanks, and would be useless to the users. At least some of the phones had the Devanagari fonts, so we had a Hindi product. So instead of looking at Indian languages, we started exploring other languages of the world like Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Hebrew etc. The fonts for these languages were present even on phones sold in India. I was also extremely curious to know whether the statistical correlations and the resultant usability could be applied to other languages. Many of these languages faced the same problems, albeit less severely. Russians had to type through multi-taps on the phone, and so did the Arabs. I was exploring how this paradigm worked for languages from other linguistic families. Did the same correlation hold? So we chose eclectic languages, like Swahili in Africa and Finnish in Scandinavia, and built their products. By now our team was like a well-

oiled machine, with everyone's work cut out, and corpus collection, corpus mining, data preparation, and incorporation into code, all taking place in parallel. We were working on languages that we did not understand at all, but we knew that the results would nevertheless be correct, because the computer said so, and statistics can never lie. If something had occurred thousands of times, it cannot be wrong, and if it was, then it was part of the language. We did, however, learn something about each of the languages, reading about their orthography in public websites like Wikipedia and Omniglot. If we had access to someone who knew the language, we consulted him or her. And after a language product was made, we tested the product and had its reliability verified by a real user. We developed the Huffman Code for all the languages, and incorporated these into the products so as to include compression. This ensured that we could compress messages in all languages. We also included a small flag bit, so that a single message could include English text, symbols etc as well as any Indian language. So we shifted between Fixed bit and variable bit within that same SMS. Its true that coding theory had always been a strong interest for me. My friend, Steve, and I had spent years in the pursuit of compression of random data, rather like the search for the mythic perpetual motion machine. That dream evidently has lived on in a pigeon hole of our hearts. The months of February, March, April and May of 2009 were spent in developing this technology quickly for several major global languages, one after another. Nothing excited our staff more than when they knew that whatever they had been doing all along, had turned into consequential work at last, a useful real thing that they themselves loved and were convinced about. Something that could possibly have universal applicability. They kept coming up with suggestions for improvements. They were a completely self-driven and motivated team by now. But there was also another more important reason why we put out these global language products, which was strategic. Make the story as big as you can, as quickly as you can. Move into the available spaces quickly, so as to make it credible to relevant people that the possibility is both

very real and very large. Claim territories, go there. Put at least some minimal viable products out there, alpha products. Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian. Especially because it was now so easy for us to put a rough-cut product out there, with very little new effort. Move there before other people get the response time to use these ideas. Put a product out there, even though you know that the lack of domain knowledge of these languages could make them less than perfectly usable. Put the paradigm out there, for people to consider it. Increase the number of pivots. Expand the scope of it to as much as you can think. Think of all the devices, in the present and the future. And devices in special situations. All the things that are better done than left undone. Someone asked me why we developed products for so many languages. My answer was: Because we could. PaniniKeypadandthebrain

My friend Ramaswamy, back from a trip to Hannover, in Germany, announced that he had seen a product for children with learning disabilities, called Brain Boy, which was like a game device, that directed the user to do things in order to e.g. develop better eye-ear and eye-hand, coordination. And he felt that CleverTexting too involved something like this. It was a revelation. Ever since, I wanted to speak to a brain scientist about this. I met a neurosurgeon from AIIMS, who directed me to the Brain Research Centre, also in the NCR. From their website and listed research papers, I discovered one scientist who actually did research on matters related to language and brain development. I fixed an appointment with Dr Nandini Chatterjee Singh, and visited the National Brain Research Centre, in Manesar, to make a presentation to her and her PhD students. They understood, and agreed in principle with what I said, and were keen to carry out the investigation. It may well be possible that, for the general population, this constant game like, eye-hand coordination, to type, several times a day, can prevent the onset of degenerative brain diseases, while at the same time it could be a simple tool to help children with learning disabilities. Who knows!

Excellence When we are dealing with languages, we dont understand a single word of, if we are not very careful at every stage, errors will creep in, and they will never be detected by us. In such a scenario, an ethos of excellence is our only protection. I dont know how much we have succeeded, but that was definitely the aim. You can build an organization that will be successful in its mission if you believe in excellence. This is a much-abused word, but excellence is about everyone doing their level best everyday. Excellence will be built in a company if you never accept anything less than the highest grade that could be produced. You were ready to slow down, even throw away previous work, just to get to the highest grade possible. Whether it is a shift of one pixel in an icon, or a practical suggestion that had not been incorporated in a product. When the leader is absolutely committed to excellence, the lesson is driven home to everyone that this organization will accept nothing less than excellence. So the people down the line start producing it, without ever being in two minds. People will take the time and make the effort to do this, knowing fully well that this was the clear goal, and that their efforts will be appreciated, and the resulting delay never be penalized. If you exceed what was expected, that is even more appreciated. Others then get the same signal, and that is how excellence is reinforced. Thus, at some point of time it becomes the reigning culture of the organization. Newcomers who join see that excellence is the only standard which is acceptable. Your very best and nothing less.

With our team, Amit, Atheel, Christiaan, Ruby, Sadhna, Abhijit, Ravi, Shyam, Aftab in 2011.

Preparingtoventureout Discoveringthebusinessmodel Even while the technology was being developed, as its utility became better understood, and the curiosity value of the products increased by the day, I began to wonder how we could be make a business out of all this. What would be the way to monetize this utility? I started finding out what this segment of industry that we belonged to was called. I tried to learn about the fate of such innovations and the associated companies in the western world. I already had some familiarity with these companies, as we had researched them during our patent research. As I researched, I found some good news waiting. The American company (Tegic) that had invented T9, had been acquired for $265 million in 2007. Another Canadian company, Zi Corporation, was acquired for $35 million. Swype, another texting technology for touchscreens, was acquired for $100 million in 2011. All these companies were bought by one Nuance Communication, a NASDAQ listed company, which planned to rake in much more by licensing these technologies to phone manufacturers, and did too. For anything between a dollar to a few tens of cents per phone, these technologies were licensed to over 5 billion phones in the world, which were replaced every few years.

I gained some sense of the worth of what we had developed by assessing the complexity of the other input solutions, all dictionary-based, their applicability in terms of number and types of devices, languages supported, and the criticality of the needs addressed by them compared to our own. The magic was the sheer number of phones that were going out into the world in the years since 2000, growing by leaps and bounds. From now, most of these phones would be for Asia, where our technology was most applicable. This could be a very valuable company. And if a valuable company was to seek investments, we would need to be incorporated. So that is when we got ourselves incorporated in April 2009, as Luna Ergonomics Pvt Ltd. The man who had gone to register the name called to say that the name I had provided wasnt available and so could I suggest another name within half an hour. Luna is the name of my sister, the one I fought with the most while we were growing up. The name sounded to me like it could become a brand name, and I knew that my entire family would be left totally bewildered by this new pincer attack. I do like to think that there will be a building one day with that name written on the outside, in a crisp font. I could also imagine what that dark grey building would look like, and the values it would stand for. Perhaps it will not be a building, but a cluster of huts in a mountain. But strictly speaking, I was guilty of creating brand confusion, which was inadvertent, but happened nevertheless. For example, between Panini Keypad, Luna Ergonomics, CleverTexting and the founders name. Each of these names, like Panini Keypad, will yield over half a million references on the web, but the right thing to do would have been to ensure that all of them acted together as one instead. We are working on doing that.

Creatingproducts As I saw it, the commercial potential of the technology would come from licensing to handset manufacturers, and hence I was trying to talk to them. However, till such licensing commenced, I foresaw the possibility of selling this technology directly to end users, as an App. A piece of

software, just like I had sold my shareware in earlier years. In this case, the number of potential users of this would run into hundreds of millions of people, and if we could get just a small amount from each one of them, we would be a very profitable company indeed. Moreover, this small amount, of, say, Rs 150 or so that we were considering, affordable to any smart phone owner, would be much higher than the amount we could get per phone from a manufacturer we licensed to. So it would be best if we went directly to the market by ourselves. Hence that was the hot idea at that point of time. Keeping such a business model in mind, we started creating products with our technology. A process we named Productising.

Software protection & scratch card A vital and preliminary task that needed to be completed before we could retail our software, was to protect it from software piracy. So I had to think of a way to protect this. In my shareware days, I had devised a foolproof software copy protection scheme that was used most effectively to protect the software I sold, between 1998 and 2008. It involved a Challenge String and a Reply String. Readers who may have used any of those sharewares would be familiar with the concept. I have come across no other software, then or even later, that uses such a scheme. It involved finding or generating a unique recreatable seed on the phone, based on which a pseudo-random number would be generated. That number would require a matching Reply String to unlock the software. The right to generate that Reply String, from a public server, and over SMS, was given to a user through a Challenge String. All these together would form a formidable combination, and a dependable protection scheme. The Challenge String could therefore be retailed as a scratch card. Although it sounds complicated, for the user it only involved entering the Challenge Number from a scratch card in the slot displayed by the phone App, and pressing a button, and everything would happen automatically. The authentication mechanism would happen automatically over a webserver that would have the database, as well as a script running on it,

to generate and authenticate the request from the phone via SMS. For this, we had to engage an SMS gateway and sign up with a virtual number provider. And so the scratch cards were printed with our logo. A 16-page, smallsize, green booklet was also printed, intended for the user, with all the information needed for installation, use, registration etc. We were ready to sell. I was so ambitious about the business potential of the scratch card business that I was guilty of getting a rather large number of these cards printed, with associated precious cost. Another mistake. My own money had almost run out by then, but I was unworried because I was certain the retailing was about to happen and take off. We would offer a 30% commission to retailers who sold this, and everyone who sold phones, offered phone repair services, or sold mobile recharge coupons, was a potential reseller of this product. And such shops were now practically every fifth shop in any market, in any part of the country. So we could have plenty of resellers. I was upbeat. Evangelisation We needed a smart website now. A professional web design company redid the website of PaniniKeypad.com, the first time an external agency was making a website for us. Pinaki, the web designer, came up with the catchy caption of Zarurat se zyaada Easy, (or Easier than Necessary). He felt that the products sophistication was way beyond the expectation and imagination of a user. Hence, a real comprehension gap was manifest, which the caption gave a positive spin to. And we put up a flash animation to illustrate how one could now type on a phone, and how easy it was. The website has gone through several versions since then, as the product inventory and requisite communication needs grew. The content has increased a lot, and the navigability of the user through all of it had to be reconsidered again and again. Websites too need to evolve.

I went about demonstrating the product at telecom conferences and startup get-togethers in the capital, and word went around. I made passionate pitches to anyone I bumped into. Some were kind enough to listen, others were not. It was around this time that I started sending the first feelers to telecom companies, showed it to people I met at conferences and wrote emails to them. We had our first opportunity to be on television in May 2009. Jaimon Joseph, of CNN IBN, put us on television with a small story, our very first time. I thought that coming on television once was enough to light a spark of viral awareness. But this is never the case, and you should know that. In September, we were also shown on Zee Business, in a program called Mobiles and More. An important task for us was to seek a formal presentation at the Telecom Regulation Authority of India (TRAI), because we felt they ought to be officially made aware of this development. We were granted a meeting on 13 May 2009, and we made a presentation where we demonstrated the product, talked about the possibilities that it would bring about, and why they should encourage its adoption. In our App of that time, we were typing Hindi with predictive text, and all the other Indian languages using the moving Keymask. We also had a feature to convert phonetically across all Indian scripts. So we demonstrated to them an effective and convenient way of sending and receiving text messages in all Indian languages, across the GSM and CDMA networks. We also made them aware of the dismal situation in regard to availability of Indian language fonts on phones, which the eco-system needed for Indian language text messages to flourish. This could require a regulatory intervention in the industry. Finally we also told them about our SMS compression, which increased the capacity of an SMS by 300%, emphasising the fact that the Latin script was supported in 7 bit, and Indian languages in Unicode, which enabled the extra compressibility. As it turned out, this was a big mistake, that we were to bear the cost of down the line. The meeting was attended by TRAIs entire Mobility Division, and chaired by Advisor, Mobile Network, Mr Sanjeev Banzal. The meeting

carried on well past the working day. We gave them our official letter, outlining our products and our recommendations. Also in May 2009, we applied for the Economic Times Power of Ideas, an India-wide business idea contest. It went through several rounds over the next months, and we eventually made it to the top of the competition. The Panini Keypad story got a lot of coverage in the ET. This paper has been very kind to us all along. I do not know who to thank, but there must be people responsible for this. The contest also got me into writing business plans, and pitching to investors on the subject of our enterprise. BusinessPlan The biggest Business Plan is only inside your head, and rather than being a plan it consists only of contingency planning. When the questions are asked, the answers can be provided. There is a reason for doing this enterprise. You see a way, you see wide opportunities, and you know the risks. If you had to communicate what is inside your head to another, you should choose a format appropriate to the occasion. Every case is special. We generally think of a Business Plan to be for investors, but it could be for anyone. It could be for an important employee candidate, it could be for your suppliers, it could be for your resellers. It could be for a contest. It would be impossible to articulate everything that you have thought about in a limited presentation. It could also depend upon who is the investor. If he is someone familiar with the space and revenue models, you dont have to explain a lot and take it to more complex matters. For someone else, it could require just explaining the concept alone. It is only when the questions are asked or known that they could be answered readily. The Business Plan also changes constantly, in all respects, in step with with the business and the environment. As new strengths appear, previous claims become irrelevant. Making Business Plans again and again is a bother but it helps in assimilating your ideas into a written form and organising them, interrogating them. It is also useful in seeking the opinion of others.

Our technology advantage The many virtues of the technology of Panini Keypad began to be broadcast. It was full of advantages, for the user, as well as for the phone manufacturers. It was such a sweet spot. It solved everything and asked for nothing. It was clear that nothing could get better than this, not even theoretically, because we had exhausted the optimizations. There were many advantages that we were aware of when we started, and many more that became evident only along the way. Lets first talk about the advantages to the users. 1. The number of key-presses required to type: Previously, due to the large number of characters in the Indian languages, the number of key-presses to type even a simple thing was very large. The Panini Keypad reduces the number of key-presses to a third. The average was very close to one key-press per character, the best one could possibly have. 2. Ergonomics: The characters that you typed were mostly placed on a key which was the top left corner of the keypad, or around it. That key was the most comfortable to the thumb, and one typed mostly on or around it. Very often, for most long words or common words, you could type practically by pressing the same key, since the next characters would keep coming to that same key. 3. On a touchscreen phone, our App had larger, easy to point characters, and again, the helpful predictions. One did not have to choose characters from a congested keypad with two levels, which was error prone. We also supported dictionary predictions, and the user was allowed to add his own words to it. 4. The technology, being statistical, worked for words both inside and outside the dictionary. Earlier, dictionary-based systems had made it very difficult for people to enter words outside the dictionary, like names of people and places. 5. The ability to add English words in the middle of an Indian language sentence was permitted, and in Touchscreen phones,

Panini Keypad was also supported with a Qwerty keypad for English, along with its own conventional dictionary predictions. 6. Indian words were complex in the character sequence to be entered. Unfamiliar at first to users, this is greatly aided much by helpful prediction of characters to assist in the typing, with correct spellings. 7. It offered the right balance of assistance and control. T9 was pesky, and people hated it because it sometimes produced nonsense, words that you did not intend to write. For the manufacturers, this meant that they would not have to produce phones with printed keypads. Hence the same phone, produced in the same manufacturing run, can be sold in many parts of Asia. When they produce a phone with a printed keypad, a fresh run in the assembly line is needed for each model, because a physical keypad with printed keys has to be attached. These phones, for each model, for each region, have to be produced, inventories have to be maintained, shipped to regions etc. If a particular phone model failed in a particular market, it would be useless in another market, without changing the keypad at the factory again. A technology like Panini Keypad would reduce production costs, and more importantly, risks. The same system of typing, across both the types of phones which will continue to coexist, i.e. keypads and touchscreens, simplifies the required marketing communication and support to users. Teaching users a way to type can involve a huge cost. But with Panini Keypad, the rules of typing are simple and the same across all the languages. There are just two rules, look for the character you want to type, and if you cannot find the character, use the Next List button. The software for this was lightweight, and it was ready to run on the lowest cost phones, with very little memory and processor requirements. Panini Keypad enables the same speed of typing for every language. Languages with many more characters are not placed at any disadvantage. A story by ITU News about our product said that this technology puts every language of the world on an equal platform; no one has any discriminative advantages.

Greentechnology Do you know what Coltan is? Coltan is a mineral from which Tantalum, a rare metal, is extracted. Tantalum is used for making capacitors, which are used in all electronics. But the overwhelming part of electronics today is in the form of cell phones, that billions of people use. Tantalum is in extremely short supply in the world, and is very expensive. The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the countries where it is relatively abundant. Congo is an extremely poor and corrupt country, and the most violent place in the world today, with over 4 million deaths in conflicts since 1996. Highly armed gangs roam the land, and control the trade of its minerals. Sexual violence is used to control the areas, with 400,000 rapes per year. It is considered the greatest resource curse, and so Coltan is a conflict mineral. And there is much activism in the world to stop using minerals from DRC, which fuels the violence and the destruction of the environment in this country. The cell phone is made up of many metals like Tantalum, which are in short supply, are expensive and are running out. Lithium and Cobalt, both rare, are used for batteries. It is said Indium, used in the LCD display, will run out in just 15 years. Pin head capacitors for cell phones are made from Tantalum, Yttrium, Hafnium, all rare. Many of the metals used in cell phones cannot be recycled. There were 1 billion phone users in 2002, and there were 4.1 billion in 2009. In 2013, the figure is said to be 6 billion, all of them to be replaced by new ones in about 18 months.

With 50 million tons of e-waste generated each year, the impact this has on the environment is considerable, and the need for sustainable solutions is dire. The contamination which is being caused by cell phones is not to be underestimated. Assuming that there are around 500 million cell phones in landfills, around 300,000 pounds of lead will be released to the soil. Furthermore, Cadmium, one of the major components of batteries, is a human carcinogen and can cause liver and lung damage. Other battery components such as Lithium and toxic lead are potentially explosive. Even though they are among the smallest pieces of electronic equipment used by people, they are owned by a large numbers of people, and have an average lifetime of only about 18 months. Fast-changing trends, and other psychological/social factors encourage the quick replacement of these handsets. With less than ten percent of cell phones being recycled, the great majority of these end up in landfills, causing irreparable damage to the ground and the people around who depend on it. A close look into the cell phone lifecycle gives important clues as to the phases and processes which lead to the greatest ecological burden. A great deal of energy is consumed in their production, with resultant release of green house gases. Extending the life cycle of cell phones can have a significant positive impact on the environment. Extending the lifetime of the product implies less phones being manufactured, and either the user will be utilizing his handset for a longer period of time, or the handset will be transferred to another person who will not have to buy a new phone. Efforts for extending the life time of cell phones are in existence, but are still limited. Organizations such as Recellular buy and sell used cell phones in large quantities. Reallocating these cell phones to other

countries is a very complicated issue, as many of them use different keypads which correspond to their specific languages script, therefore rendering these cell phones almost futile in other countries. Organizations which would be willing to sell their phones to other countries for profit will have a hard time allocating these used cell phones, because of this problem. CleverTexting is a cell phone application which has been developed to allow the user to type in any language he or she pleases, without having to rely on the printed characters on the keypad. By providing this utility in software alone, the process of reallocating reusable cell phones will become more seamless, especially for cell phones which are being exported to countries with dissimilar languages and scripts. By doing so, CleverTexting will be contributing to the increment of the lifespan of cell phones. It is a vitally important for the enablement of recycling and the reduction in cell phone production.

From a report submitted by one of our interns, Christiaan Wiebols, for the ITU Green ICT Application Challenge, 2011.

Tomarket StartupCity,Bangalore We had our first opportunity to showcase our technology in an exhibition stall of our own at the Start-up City, in Bangalore, in May 2009. I felt it was important to stamp our arrival at the software capital of India, where many of the handset companies, operators, chipsets and other players had their research bases. Our team of four travelled for two days by second class train, in a fun trip to the south of the country. My friend Ramaswamy, in Kolkata, visited us in early May to see for himself the

merits of what we were doing, and guage its potential. He gave me ample encouragement. On his return, he had his small company pay the fee of Rs 20,000 that was required to exhibit, and so we went. The Start-up City exhibition was held over a weekend, at the NIMHANS convention centre, and was only meant for start-ups, to showcase their products. It was very well attended, with executives of many relevant companies. We could demonstrate Panini Keypad running on the phone to the public over a plasma screen, and many people with compatible phones paid for the scratch cards and installed the software. We also had an opportunity to speak from the podium. We experienced first-hand the value of such exhibitions for showcasing a new technology. We were visited by members of Nokia Forum, Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Kyocera etc. They left their visiting cards, and we corresponded with each one of them, providing all the additional information.

Our stall at Startup City, Bangalore.

Businessdevelopment The first deal we established with a handset manufacturer was in June 2009. This was with Spice Mobile, who were also located in Noida. They had got in touch with us to consider the feasibility of embedding the technology on their phones. As I saw it, it would be highly feasible if

they pre-embedded this as a Java App on their Java phones right away, which would need no additional work. After the commercials were agreed upon by both sides, we signed an agreement. We learnt subsequently they were unable to embed Panini Keypad on their phones, because their ODMs in China could not yet include the Hindi font. I had also begun visiting other Indian phone manufacturers in this regard. Even a tea shop owner could tell us that we should be showing it to Nokia. My friend Karan Bamba worked his networks to get me the mobile number of Mr Shivkumar, the head of NOKIA in India. One morning in May 2009, I got a chance to give him the pitch on Panini Keypad, highlighting all the innovations in it, including SMS compression. He heard me out and delegated it to Mr Raju Sastry, to whom we were to make a presentation at their Gurgaon HQ on a designated day. We did that. He was very impressed and said he would get back to us after feedback from his colleagues. And thus began our long story of formal interactions with Nokia, at various levels. Several emails were exchanged with Mr Shivkumar. One can try to speculate, just like us and everyone else who was watching this, including the tea shop owner, about what went on inside their organization, in parallel, as we continue with our story. Here was something that would be a critical value addition on their phones, particularly for the rural markets, but they were not grabbing it. Why? Once again, it was Karan Bamba who connected me to an engineer in Samsung, who worked in the usability field itself. I got to present to them, and show the merits. They didnt tell us anything immediately, but I was told that our presentation had been translated into Korean and sent to their HQ. A fellow-entrepreneur in the incubator where we were based, Shishir Jain, brought to our attention NOKIAs global contest for innovative Apps for 2009, named Calling all Innovators. We must thank him, because we applied and eventually won the Judges Choice award, in the section on Mobile Necessities for Emerging Markets. But what was

even more important was that we could get the story of this innovation into the heart of NOKIAs design jury, at their headquarters in Europe. They also commissioned a leading European usability company to audit and assess our technology. The report turned out to be favourable, they found it a usable technology. They encouraged us to put our Apps in the NOKIA OVI store, which we did, but their Quality Assurance division kept blocking us. We had to raise the matter several times till we were accepted. Free downloads from the NOKIA OVI store commenced, reaching larger numbers of people. We had already put our Apps in dozens of download sites of the world. We did this so that visibility and awareness of this technology could spread, among anyone who looked for such things on the Internet. Gettingknown How were we going to get people to know about Panini Keypad? Get them to look for such a thing? Who would find out about it? Some people found it through search engines, or from detective work of their own, following references in blogs or other stories. We could not afford any advertising, or even an email campaign. We could only send emails to friends and associates I had met in conferences. But at least a start had been made. However, there were several crippling eco-system problems. The first was the lack of awareness that Indian language SMS was possible, that a message could be sent in Telugu and could be read in Telugu at the other end. The second was the apathy towards our own languages, at least in some parts of India. Why would someone want to write in Indian languages on the phone? This was a question that I have been asked many times. The next problem was regarding absence of fonts of Indian languages on phones. One could see the Indian language messages on a phone only if the phone had the font present on it. In 2009, the vast majority of the phones did not have these fonts on them. Hence messages sent to them would show as square boxes, or be blank. Our software would be useless to them. Even if some of them had the Hindi font on them, they would

have very poor font rendering, so the script was broken and not readable. The matter of the font and the rendering was the responsibility of the phone manufacturer, simple stuff really, but it was to or about us that the users would complain. The only phones at that time which did have several Indian language fonts, and with perfect rendering, were the midsegment Nokia phones. Their low-cost phones too had almost all the language fonts, but they did not have Java, so our software could not run on them. The high-end NOKIA phones had none of the fonts. But thankfully, there were at least some phones on which our technology worked. Theusabilitychallenge The use of Panini Keypad was based on a new paradigm. Hence it seemed unfamiliar and non-intuitive, at first, to users. If you handed the phone to people, it was often not clear to them how to type. They saw the few characters on the keypad and wondered what they were expected to do. Some tried to use the navigator buttons, assuming they were expected to move a cursor through the characters. Others tried to touch the keys thinking this was a touchscreen phone, when it wasnt. Very few people could grasp that they were expected to indicate the numeric key below in order to type the corresponding character. Only children always got it right the first time, without help. The next problem was that even if the users did that, the keypad now responded with new characters dynamically, startling them. There was absolutely no expectation of an intelligent keypad, of great sophistication, for input in Indian languages. They would not know what was expected of them. The problem was compounded by the fact that almost nobody was aware of the orthographical rules of typing in Indian languages. For example, that a yuktakshar is created by inserting a halant in the middle, that a matra is always written after the consonants. Or even awareness of what a yuktakshar is. Many words were not even recognized as involving a yuktakshar.

The Halant is a character in all Indian scripts. It is called Ref, Hasant, Chandrakala, etc in various languages. Seen here is how it is used between consonants to form the compound characters in various languages. And hence determines the sequence of characters to be entered as per Unicode rules.

But we just kept giving out the products, putting instructions and many examples of all kinds of words on our websites and within the product, hoping that of the large number of people who would download it, some would definitely figure it out. And in turn, they would teach others. Nobody in the country knew how to use Yahoo Messenger, but they learnt. Since the products were being given out in all the languages simultaneously, there would surely also be a network effect, whereby a Bengali who has found out the trick of typing will be able to teach a Telugu how to type, using the same orthographical rules. Our public download sites are full of remarks by people stuck at various points along this circuit, as well as remarks from others trying to help those who were encountering difficulties. There are large numbers of comments from those who have figured it out, as well as unhappy remarks from those who could not. That was our experience in regard to teaching a new usability. Teaching the orthographical rules of typing, i.e. the sequence in which characters need to be entered, was absolutely essential because no matter what the system of typing, whether ours or any other, one would need to know this.

A small, related barrier was that even when we talked about it, or sent out any communications, there were always users who assumed they knew what it would be, so they would not read the instructions. They assumed it would be Roman because it was hard to get them to think of what else it could be. This was the most common way that this problem was usually attacked in the past, and there is a prominent example of it on the web. It was like introducing a bicycle, to type. In your very first attempt, it would be hard to believe that you could do this. You would not get it for several tries, and would fall off a few times, and you could give up. But if you lived in a world where other people had learned how to ride the bicycle, you would gradually find the motivation to try it once again, and thus learn it. Today we live in a world where almost everyone knows how to ride a bicycle, whereas there was surely a time when not one person knew how to do it. After you have learnt to ride a bicycle, you no longer want to go back to walking. Our policy was akin to giving away as many free bicycles as possible to the world, so that we can get as many people as we can to try to ride it. Surely some among them will learn how to ride it well, creating the proof of the new means for others. A lady from a public relations company, who had visited our office once, had remarked that no one would ever forget Panini Keypad once they saw it. Aperceptionchallenge It would be much simpler if Panini Keypad was simply rolled out in much larger numbers, countrywide, so that the awareness about its usage could spread much faster. We were talking to handset manufacturers and operators, but strangely, the people we were talking to did not seem at all excited about the importance of languages, and the need to support them. This is something that I have never understood. Over 800 million people use the phone in India, 90% of them do not know English, but a majority of them know their own languages enough to be able to write in them. These people are unable to store a contact on

the phones address book, or send a text message. They were using the phone only like a landline phone, dialling out from it, or receiving calls. If people could store addresses they would also make more calls. If people could send text messages, it would mean more revenue for the operators. So the operator would be the biggest beneficiary if typing in Indian languages became commonplace. Even for the handset manufacturers, of all the utilities we can think of on the phone, whether it is the ability to play music, take pictures, have Facebook or Twitter on it, play games or download wall papers, of all these things, what could be of more critical value to the user than his ability to store addresses or send a text message? I found it so hard to get this across to all the business management graduates and experienced industry players, sometimes VPs and CEOs. We wondered why. You too could wonder why. It is because they had never seen anything like this. It was beyond their syllabus of ringtones and horoscopes. "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Not for rural markets alone As I went around trying to sell the Panini Keypad technology for typing in Indian languages, very often, what I heard from people in the companies was that this would only be a value proposition for users in rural India. In many parts of India, the role of the mother tongue had fallen to such depths in the perception of the well-heeled, that it was banished to be something of relevance only for rural or poor people. Their disdain for it was so great that it appeared they were just too happy that they could get away from the scourge of those scripts. No more Hindi tests to sit for, and no more was one required to write even a line in Hindi. People admitted, with apparent pride, to their inability to write

anything any longer, or their being clueless how a particular word would be written on a piece of paper. No wonder then, that the impression has gained currency that anyone who could write in English would no longer want to write anything again in Hindi. The regional languages were only for those who had not moved up to English. Those societies had stopped producing any literature of any significant value, volume or variety, because their well-off would not patronize its production. Their newspapers were supposedly low-grade, with barely the staple that could meet the intellectual needs of the lowest of their society. But the languages are not held in such disdain in all parts of India. There are many parts of India where a man would be most delighted to write in his own language, even if he was professor of English. These regions continued to produce copious amounts of literature, films, music, quality journalism and newspapers, and there is great pride there. A mans pleasure in sending a message, say a poem, to his loved one in the vernacular would be something that could never be substituted by English. It was apparent that India was not a canvas painted with one colour. There was great diversity in the value of languages in different societies. In the markets where it was respected, it was not meant only for those who did not know English, such as rural people. Are regional newspapers only for the rural markets?

Firstretailexperiments Ever since the exhibition in Bangalore, where we sold some scratch cards from our stall, we were convinced about the retail potential. But how were we going to set up the distribution system? We started walking into phone shops and demonstrating the product, and explained how it could be sold through the Rs 150 scratch cards. We told them how it could be installed, registered, used etc. We highlighted the 30% commission offered, considering that they got only 2% commission

from selling telecom scratch cards. They appeared interested and were happy to put up our posters in their shops. But when we went back to the shops a week later, we found that they had sold none. They said some people asked about it, but they were in no position to install it for them, or answer the questions asked. About which phones were compatible, how to install the software, how to type, and so on. This happened over and over again in different experiments that we conducted, all during the second half of 2009. I was convinced that none of these shop owners were ready to take the pains to sell this on their own, although they would be very happy to give the scratch cards for money. It was all about the effort of selling it. It also demanded specialized knowledge and training on an apparently obscure subject. The shops expected the brands to sell by themselves. So this didnt take off in the manner we expected, at least in the NCR. In June 2009, I ran out of money, and my Dad made a kind call to ask if I needed support, which he provided until we found some investors the following year. The next approach in our retail strategy was trying to tie up with major mobile retail stores. There were quite a few around by now, like Hotspot, The Mobile Store, EZones, Cellucom, Mobile NXT, Univercell, Planet M, Reliance Digital, M Club, One Mobile, Future Group, Store Guru, TMS, Sangeetha, Big C, Jumbo Electronics, Retails Direct, METRO, Vijay Sales and Axiom Telecom. Over a period, I tried to contact each one of them, making pitches to their management to consider a partnership, whereby they could sell this through their stores, countrywide, on a revenue share arrangement. They could up-sell Panini Keypad with compatible phones they had already sold, or to customers who came for other things. There was a potential that it could go viral among the users, making new customers come to their stores for it. We would provide all the training to the staff, the requisite support and also marketing materials like posters, danglers etc. I found it quite strange that while people were willing to hear us out, they were hesitant to act. This is one of the things that I have just not been able to understand. Why do people not act on things that could be of mutual profit? Is it apprehension towards a new product? Is it genuine incredulity

about whether such a thing would have any demand at all? Is it the expectation of a personal incentive on the part of people within organisations? Is it distrust about a much smaller party, and getting into a business association with them? Is it a form of negotiation? Is it the reluctance to take on the burden of additional work? Or the fear of a risk of being associated with something that is not yet proven and may fail? What is it? I have sometimes had opportunities to talk to persons close to the business owner, or sometimes the business owner himself. And our meetings were always very good. So I just do not know why. Creatingdemandforanonexistentproduct For the second time in my life I was in the situation of selling a product whose demand did not yet exist. It is quite easy to sell products that are already well sold. If you wish to sell washing powder, which consumers already bought every month, you would have to fight on quality, price, marketing and distribution. You would not have to sell the concept of what a washing powder does, how to use it, or why one should buy it. Throughout our marketing efforts, we were often asked why anyone would want to write on a phone in Hindi. Or even been told that since they do not write in Hindi there could not be any demand for it. I tell them the example of refrigerators in India. The first people who went around trying to sell refrigerators in India must have been confronted with people who said that they do not eat food from the previous day. It was difficult for them to grasp that they did not eat food from the previous day because it was not possible for them to do so. All the utensils were washed clean everyday, and on the next day, cooking would start afresh. That had to be the routine. But gradually it changed. Today, no one has to pitch the value of the refrigerator any more. Rather, you could well mar your chances of getting married if you did not own a refrigerator in urban India now! Similarly, there were people who said that they did not write in Hindi on the phone. Thats because it was simply not possible to do so easily. What if it was possible? What is the cause and what is the effect? Most

people do not comprehend whether they are looking at the problem from the right end or the wrong end. When you create something from scratch, for a need that does not exist as yet, it is called a Blue Ocean opportunity. A Red Ocean is one where the water has turned red with blood from fighting with competitors in an old product segment. Blue Ocean has its own challenges and opportunities, and it also has to do with your personality type, whether you think blue or think red. DevelopmentforallIndianlanguages The latter part of 2009 was also spent in developing the technology for all Indian languages, one by one. These language fonts were present only on a tiny number of phones, but we could at least demonstrate the products. The languages were Bangla, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi. Oriya was not done because there was not even one phone with the font then, and Assamese was not done because we were unable to find sufficient quantities of corpora to mine and build a good product. (These, and some more languages, were done subsequently.) But the nine languages which cover almost all the major languages of India, were built by September 2009, as separate products, each with their own predictive text. There were hardly any phones with all the fonts, but at least we were able to demonstrate to anyone that one could type with predictive texting in all languages of India using the Panini Keypad. We had also now put them up as free Apps on our website, and people were downloading and using them. Only a few dozens of people everyday. Many could use it in the phones that had the fonts, so it was already a reality. Messages were going out in every language. But, almost every mail we received from users was about the lack of fonts on their phones. We had no answer, except to advise them to buy phones in which the fonts were present, because the phone architecture was a closed one unlike the PC, and it was impossible for a user to install a font on the phone. To those keenly watching the space, we had built a successful technology to type in all Indian languages on the phone.

Nasscom A Nasscom event was being held in Bangalore in end of October 2009. Guy Kawasaki, a big name in the IT field, was among the speakers. There was going to be a mobile-related event also, for which our friend Keshava Reddy, of MOMO Bangalore, had kindly arranged a pass for me. But I could scarcely afford the airfare. But Ranjan Singh, of MSME Foundation, Delhi, proved a godsend. He arranged the airfares for some of us from Delhi to attend the event. When you are new to the field, when you dont know very much yet, it is easy to be enamoured of things that you could be missing, which you think you simply must attend. And you must do that which you think is important. A lot of big shots had come down, and I did spend my time running from person to person with my pitch, trying not to miss anyone I could show it to. I even stopped Guy on the lift. There was a naive belief that I was about to meet the one man or woman who would open the gates for me, who would get it. But life isnt that way. Or maybe it is. I showed Panini Keypad to Kiran Karnik, and lots of other people, dozens of them. There was a VC lady from Israel to whom I showed the Hebrew product. Some of my own friends laughed at the efforts I was making, like a mad dog as it were, because it isnt a pretty sight any longer, when you are a 40 year old. But thats alright, it did not matter who laughed at you. I have done this over and over in every conference, every opportunity, before and after, in India or abroad. I dont know if it has done us some high brow harm or low brow good. But I would like to think that it must be the latter, because we did thus communicate to a very large nation. People can see it when you are ready to be a clown for the sake of your passion, and the real guys will respect you. After a while it wasnt inglorious, and we will come to that part too. I showed our product to a journalist, Sujit John, who wrote about it in his Times of India column soon after. It was a well-researched article. I mention all this because you may need it too. Face the world, which has only disdain for the upstart.

On that trip, I had also scheduled meetings with two VC firms in Bangalore, but I will talk about investment matters a bit later.

TechCrunch In November 2009, Pankaj Jain, a friend, had organized a meeting of some NCR entrepreneurs with the visiting columnist of TechCrunch, Ms Sarah Lacy. It took place in a Connaught Place restaurant. The meeting was pleasant, Sarah was travelling across the world, collecting ideas for her new book. She told me that she would try to get us into the prestigious TechCruch Disrupt event, although they had a policy of only admitting innovations that were being shown for the first time. But she said she would try. That would have been terrific. I am happy I showed CleverTexting to someone from TechCrunch in 2009.

SIM embedding Also in Nov 2009, at Bangalore, I met a representative from Gemalto, who gave me practical information on how this technology could be embedded in the SIM card if it could be made sufficiently small, because the SIM chip also had a processor. And the memory of the SIM card was also constantly growing. That could be a real way in which our technology could be provided by the operators, as part of their connection. That was also possible now. It is conceivable that the architecture be made such that the lightweight common algorithms reside on the phone and language data as applicable to a locale could be given away in SIM cards. Panini will easily support such software architecture because every language used the same display interface, the same rules of usability and the same internal software algorithms.

Proto.in One of the sweetest things that happened in the life of our start-up was Proto.in, held in IIT-Mumbai in the winter of 2009. Proto.in is an event

where selected start-ups are allowed to make a crisp, 16 minute presentation before a packed audience of industry watchers, technologists and investors. It was conducted very well by its expert team, and was covered well on TV. The event had acquired a fine reputation in India, both for the interesting selection of its companies and the format of the event. We were one of the companies selected for Proto.in that year. I have never seen the video, but it was probably the best presentation we ever gave. I had paid the Rs 10,000 fee for it, and had travelled all the way to Mumbai, and so I really needed to do this well. There must have been a prayer on my lips. I started well, with the description of the pain point of the people at the bottom of the pyramid. Their inability to store a contact in an address book. I then demonstrated fast typing on the phone, which was projected on the large screen, as we typed words that people shouted at us from the audience. I got a thunderous applause and I think we also got a standing ovation that day. Then I took questions. With the event being held in Mumbai, it had in attendance members from many VC firms, start-ups of the region, technologists, larger companies, and many others. One could say it was the day when Panini Keypad really saw the light of day, because it was shown to all the significant people who mattered in Indias financial capital. They would never forget it. Nor would we.

Lockheed Martin Indian Innovation Growth Program One day, there was a visitor in our small office who was brought in by the CEO of our Incubator. He was from the Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Program. The India Innovation Growth Programme is a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and IC2 Institute at the University of Texas. The aim of this programme is to accelerate the entry of innovative Indian technologies into global markets. When we showed our innovation to our visitor, Mr Len Denton, the Program Manager, he hurriedly fumbled for his visiting card in his pocket as he responded, and asked us to apply for the programme.

This went through several rounds of presentations and selection over the course of the year, and eventually we were selected for the programme and were the winners for the year 2010. We got a gold medal from the Minister of Science and Technology, Government of India. The members of this programme scout all kinds of accessible research bodies of India, including the governments CSIR laboratories, university laboratories, as well as incubators and private research bodies. I think the best part of this programme, which is conducted by competent people external to India, is that it can offer an opportunity for the occasional recognition of the importance of the research work of an individual scientist in a government laboratory, when the same could be suppressed by the politics within his own institution. But if we had integrity, it could have been an Indian body also.

As winner of DST Lockheed Martin India Innovation Award

Anothershotatretail We never forgot about the retail option, and in July of 2010, we were lucky. Mr Mahajan, the CEO of Hotspot, was impressed with our product and passion, and after a few visits to his office which was quite close to ours, he agreed to allow us to do a pilot in his flagship retail store in Laxmi Nagar, East Delhi. That was an important opportunity for us, and so for the next month, one of our colleagues and I were at the store, pitching our product to visitors to the phone shop, demonstrating to them, installing it on their phones, and also selling to customers. The sales day started from about 10 am in the morning and continued till about 8.30 pm in the evening. The store had a larger footfall than most other mobile stores. It sold about 40 phones per day, of which, at that

time, 10 would be Java/Symbian phones of which 5 would have the Hindi font and be compatible with our software. We regularly sold 3 or 4 cards a day. We showed that we could sell our products, but the cost of selling was very high. It required our well-trained and highly motivated team member, who sold less than what his salary and costs were. It could be done by the shops own staff, but they would have to be equally trained and motivated, for a sale whose margin was relatively low, compared to selling phones. In those days, Motorola was exiting India, and they offered a Rs 1000 margin on the sale of a phone. So we could not get them to be too enthusiastic, so as to replicate it across their stores, countrywide, after the pilot effort.

Thepoliticsoftechnology CEWIT On the morning of 5 October 2009, on my way to our office, I got two calls, both from dear friends in the capital. They asked me whether I had seen the headlines in the Times of India. I hadnt, so I stopped to buy a copy on the roadside, and read to my great surprise that an organization called CEWIT had come up with a way to send SMS in Indian languages, using a 7 bit encoding system developed by them. I was left stunned and angry. The report was written cleverly, so as not to include any actual lies, but with the express intention to mislead people, by giving a wrong and deliberately incomplete impression. There was also a clear attempt to gain legitimacy by throwing in names like TRAI, Department of IT and IIT-Chennai. The plain fact was that all Indian languages were already very well represented through Unicode encoding, in all types of phones in existence, and there was no need for introduction of any new encoding system. That would only disrupt the system. The report gave the impression that Indian language SMS was impossible without it. It made no mention of the fact that SMS in all Indian languages was already a reality on many phones, and could be available in any phone if only the manufacturers put the fonts, and there was a means to input, like ours. I have mentioned the date of the report so that as the country becomes

digitally aware, even a school child will be able to evaluate the merit of what was written there, on some future date. At that point I could do nothing. This looked like an initiative backed by the government, so I just went to my office. It seemed some people were creating phoney projects, for the money and the junkets available to do this. But it would be highly damaging if anything of that sort was actually implemented. After being in a disturbed frame of mind all day, I did write to Prof Jhunjhunwala (of IIT-Chennai, the same campus within which CEWIT was located). I got a reply from the Head of CEWIT. Eventually, we were successful in completely blocking this nonsense, almost single-handedly, but that happened a little later. If we did only this in the interest of the survival of Indian languages on phones, we would have done enough. But I was incensed by the politics and chicanery that was being played out already in this space. As you can see today, Indian languages require no 7 bit encoding. All phones send messages in Unicode now, just like they did then. Every other country on this planet does the same thing. Special Interest Group After my angry email, the CEWIT folks had got back to us saying that I could join their Special Interest Group for Indian languages on phones. I could sense that this was a design to favour dubious mandates, through the semblance of a committee appointed by the government. But they put a rider for me. I had to pay Rs 75,000 as a membership fee to join, something that they knew a tiny start-up couldnt afford. I have the email I sent them, saying that I understood every one of their tricks. You should read that mail. After that they had to relent. A meeting was fixed for 11 November 2009, at Bangalore, for crucial decision-making on this matter. I felt I had to attend it in order to ensure that they did not push through some nonsense. I could ill afford that trip to Bangalore, the second in a fortnight. But nevertheless I went. A technology battle is not fought only in the laboratory or research centre, merely as a scientist. It has to be fought just like a warrior in the

field, and area domination is an important part of it. Be ready for it, take the steps, anticipate. The meeting took place in the Samsung Software Development Centre, and I saw that a few companies had turned up. Amongst operators there was only Tata Teleservices. The phones manufacturers present included Samsung, Nokia, Mediatek, Sony Ericsson and LG. There was Nuance and a couple of system integrator companies, SIM companies and two Indian language companies. A motley crew. The meeting was organized in 3 different tracks. Encoding which was their main agenda and Fonts and Input, which were the remit of other cronies of the CEWIT. Namely, a professor of IIT-Chennai, who had done his PhD thesis on the subject of a static keypad of his scheme, and another sponsor company of theirs, who wanted to look prominent in the fonts field. They were trying to push their agenda through in a hurry. I could see that the participants from most companies were either completely clueless on the subjects, or were least bothered, or had clearly been briefed in advance to say Yes to anything that was being proposed by the organizers. I raised the issue of how exactly a changeover between these two encoding systems was expected to occur, which would entail an interregnum of several years of intervening chaos. In response, ludicrous ideas like the networks transcribing between 7 bit and Unicode formats were proposed. For which the operators said they would need to develop special software, which should permit them to raise prices or seek government subsidy. It was hilarious that people even entertained this idea with a straight face. However, the system integrators were happy. It looked like a staged thing. There was also a member from CDAC Pune, the people who had worked on the Unicode for Indian languages, and I could see he was most unhappy. But he did not have a voice, in government protocols, to protest against his seniors. It looked more like a place where hoodlums were ready to rig an election. I was not given an adequate opportunity to speak, but during the lunch break, I did get my chance to speak at length on the subject to all those who were ready to understand anything. I found the most sensible people to be those from Tata Teleservices, and started communicating with them, over long email debates. Later, I was

able to convince them about the nonsense. And none of the CEWIT ploys could advance in this attempt. Not because we could control what they could or could not do, but because we had convinced people on the subject. Particularly Rajesh Gandhi and Shital Rawal of Tata Teleservices. There could be other political dynamics, but I am not aware of everything. Where had this agenda come from suddenly? CEWIT had gone ahead and introduced a standard of 7 bit encoding at 3GPP for all Indian languages, without consulting the industry or the nation. We will get into the merits of that standard in a minute. They were trying to carry out the consultation after the fact. And that standard, if adopted, would have been disastrous for Indian languages. It is a good thing that the standard was passed beforehand, so it will be impossible for them to deny their handiwork for posterity. Just Google 3GPP 7 bit Indian. From the discussion below, you can learn about what our incompetent government is capable of doing in the name of useful work, with tax payer money. How they are unwary participants in active harm done in their name by charlatans, traitors. I have later had the chance to expose them at the Department of IT. Only much later did it become evident that this initiative could have been part of a collusion conspiracy. Here are the arguments I was making then, that was formally conveyed to Tata Teleservices and also to every member of that forum. If you examine them, you will realize how weird the suggestion of 7 bit encoding was. (a) An impression was being given that phones did not have Unicode encoding. The big bogey. This first untruth was being used to prepare the case for the need for such a thing. They specifically stated that very few phones support Unicode, holding up phones that could not show a message sent in Hindi, resulting in blanks or square boxes. It was absolute dishonesty by people who should know, because the square boxes indicated that the decoding of the received Unicode message had occurred correctly but were not being displayed only due to the lack of fonts. It was easy to verify this by forwarding that same message to another phone that had the fonts. I was the only one saying all phones already support Unicode. But not everyone was ready to agree with

me, although the representatives present were the language support teams from all the phone companies, which supported Unicode on each of their phones. (b) All the phones in the country, some 400 million then, already supported Unicode. If you were to introduce a new standard of message encoding on a phone, it would mean these phones would not be able to inter-operate, messages could not be sent to each other. It would be as bizarre as introducing cars that drive on the left lane and those on the right lane on the same roads. If you wanted the network to come in between to transcode, how would they do it? It would involve a complex task, unnecessary cost, and was most unlikely to work at all. What about messages sent to phones in India from outside India? And messages sent from phones in India to phones outside India? That would be impossible. What about messages in other languages that used Unicode, like Urdu? The Internet content of Indian languages was already in Unicode, so it was clarified that this was only for SMS. Hence the same phone would require two different encoding systems, and the user would not be able to copy paste or exchange information between the two systems. Unicode encoding is part of the phone chipsets, which are mass produced and enjoy economies of worldwide volumes. If the chipsets or the phone were to be modified only for phones in India, these would have to be developed and custom produced, which would increase the price of the phones very significantly. Who was going to legislate about all the low-cost phones that are imported officially and unofficially from China, or bought outside India as people actually do? Why should any other manufacturer bother about your mandate?

(c)

(d)

(e)

The other bogey was efficiency. Lets examine this. If we assume that all the 500 million phone users sent one SMS a day, the saving in the transfer cost with 7 bit instead of 2 bytes would be 65 Gigabytes per day, which costed less than Rs 1000 across networks then, and is even cheaper now. So a 7 bit encoding would lead to a saving of Rs 1000 per day for all the operators put together. But it would require infrastructure for inter-operation and running, whose cost would run into tens of millions of rupees, and still not work at all, with all the resultant chaos. There were many smart and innovative countries that also used the Unicode, including Russia, Israel, China, Japan and Korea, and all the Arab countries. It is not difficult to think about such a measure if it was genuinely warranted. But none of these countries have done any such thing. Why? The 7 bit encoding is no technology, but just a way that unscrupulous people make money by introducing a fraudulent project to sanction government money and resources. If you give any computer science classroom in India a weekend homework assignment to build such symbol tables for all languages, you would have 30 different schemes, each of them as correct as the other. You could try it out. If efficiency was indeed the objective, then it should be Huffman encoding which reduces the average bits per character to 5 bits and can be made even lower. But we do not recommend either Huffman or 7 bit. It should remain Unicode, for seamless inter-operation across international standards. People of that forum hoped that we would have proprietary issues about not releasing our Huffman tables, but we promptly put them up on our website and made it known to the group. So that ploy was also defeated.

(f)

(g)

(h)

The point was finally driven home. I wonder about the kind of people in 3GPP who had passed such a thing, and under what persuasion. No other

non-Latin script country in the world had committed this folly. Thankfully, it was never taken seriously by anyone. Because if it was, it would have killed the Indian language SMS story prematurely, and probably also killed the story of Indian languages on digital devices thereafter. So we fought and defeated this. The full form of CEWIT is Centre of Excellence for Wireless and Information Technology, represented by 4 people. Words are indeed very cheap. The institution still exists today, supported by government funds. You may wonder what other damage they have been up to. The Head of the CEWIT then is today the Director of IIT Chennai. Our technology faces no problem whether it is Unicode or 7 bit. Ours is only an input technology, and we can transcribe / encode either way. If we can compress SMS on variable bit, we can also encode on a fixed bit scheme, in fact that would be far easier. Our objection was that this will push the eco-system so badly into dysfunctionality that Indian language SMS itself will disappear, and that would harm us. It will probably not be able to make a reappearance before our country becomes a Roman script country, like Phillipines or Indonesia. And that would happen at this crucial juncture of digitization, namely now. It will harm the people and culture of this country far more than it can harm a small company like ours. Besides CEWIT earning brownie points and helping some of their crony businesses, why were the operators ready to buy into this? I can understand the handset manufacturers, who were engaged in a turf war with us, but who else was interested in damaging the Indian language SMS space so badly that it disappears? Who does it help? The functionaries of COAI were with them. How could it benefit the operators? It would be a big loss. Were they being ill advised? Being shown a fear of some ghost? Were some people compromised? What was it? I was naive then, but subsequently it became amply clear how this formation had come about, who the people behind it were, and how they managed to come together. It is clear to me now that this was being done at the behest of a conglomerate of large companies which sell in India who had a particular

road map for India and South Asia in terms of their available strengths and technologies. Their plan for languages of India was based on the Roman script which their existing platforms, input systems supported. No one was ready to do the additional work, involve dependencies to the large number of languages in South Asia. There was another very large company who had the most to lose whose strengths were in Roman script input alone. For this development would necessarily not use their Roman script-based technologies. Therefore they had to mangle the space, so that at the end of the resulting chaos, India would have no alternative but to move over entirely to the Roman script. So the Special Interest Group was genuinely about this special interest.

Another conflict of interest In June 2010, there was a nice article about our technology in the Indian Express. The next day, we got a call from the office of Technology Development for Indian Languages, at the Department of IT, Government of India. We were asked to join a meeting that was going to be held, on the subject of Indian languages. During that meeting and also in subsequent ones, we demonstrated our technology to them, they tried it out on their own phones, and were convinced. Thereafter, for quite some time, we were always included in their own meetings with other industry stake holders on these matters. But after a while, as the popularity of Panini Keypad among ordinary users kept growing, the TDIL office realised they had a conflict of interest with us. Because all the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) units across the country, as well as recipients of many other research grants, across several IITs, pertaining to Indian languages, worked under the Department of IT. The CDAC had its GIST developed Inscript Keypad for the PC. Although this was not for the phone, and there was no direct conflict, nevertheless, an intelligent keypad for all languages of India, developed so quickly, by a tiny start-up comprising of just a handful of people, and with near-zero resources made them look pathetic in front of their bosses.

We have been patronized much less since then, but there are people inside the organization who continue to respect us and our work.

The puff of M-Governance One often hears about the government having allocating X amount of funds for M-Governance, M-this and M-that, hundreds of crores if not thousands of crores. What was all this about? Enabling notifications, information exchange, querying information sources, and so on. The most hackneyed example of which is the Mandi price story. If the government planned to do anything towards digital inclusion, it would have to be around the phone, which is in every hand today. And it would have to be in Indian languages, and it would have to be around SMS, because that is the lowest common denominator of all phones. But the phones do not have the requisite fonts, and they are least bothered. There is no way to input, and they couldnt care. They do not even have a plan, but they are already talking about M-Governance, and allocate large amounts in that name. In the absence of a solution to include Indian languages or its input, big IT companies and system integrators have bagged lucrative contracts that involve Interactive Voice Response Systems. The same old aap kataar mein hain kind of thing. Now IVRS was necessarily expensive for both the caller and the system. For the caller it meant a long phone call, uncertainty about when his turn will come, and then going through a long menu of options to select a sub-menu, and so on. It was cumbersome, error-prone and highly dissatisfying. On the system side, it would involve dedicated circuits for each channel. How much simpler it would be if people could query free-form information from a server, using SMS, delivered from standard HTTP servers. It would cost one thousand times less. To make it simpler, instead of going through the list of all the trains and choosing one to know the delay, you could write the name of the train in Gujarati and send an SMS, and even if your input name was inaccurate, it could still

find a fuzzy match and give you what you want. That would be extremely simple to implement. For these system integrators also, an input system in Indian languages that was working well on the phone was a spoke in their wheels. The secretaries and officials of the government department were all made aware of our technologies. And at least one of them used it on his phone, and was also very satisfied with it. He shared it with his colleagues and I was informed. Until 2010, eminent speakers who spoke in conferences on subjects like telecom in India, digital divide, rural inclusion and so on, it was customary to mention the importance of supporting languages on the phone. But as it became evident that there was now a complete solution, and what that solution was going to be, what it meant, what it would entail on the part of the various players, quite mysteriously, the mention of languages began to disappear from the lexicon of the eminent speakers. "I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone." Charles Darwin

Valuation and Investment

The world of VC firms We were hearing from investors ever since the Economic Times Power of Ideas, people who had been referred to us by others. I made a presentation to Upal Basu of Nokia Ventures in October 2009, who in turn referred me to other smaller investors for a start-up in our stage of operations. The Proto.in event had been an even bigger opening, being held in Mumbai. Sequoia Capital was present that day, and I had apparently endeared myself to a person from the company with my

presentation. Well, we never finally got funded by Sequoia or any of the many others that we have met since, but let me discuss the subject of investments without taking any further names. Investors in India do not invest at the early stage. Even if they talk about the early stage, they really mean a stage where revenue has started, and the treacle looks like an oncoming flood. They dont invest in the stage when a company has developed a technology, and it looks like it could be a winner. My thinking had been that the boys in the VC firms were nice guys, scouting for other nice guys called entrepreneurs. I thought I had done my job, of building the technology, so I relished telling them how good it was, and how bright its future was going to be. But what they were really keen to hear about was how much money we had begun to make, or what contracts we had closed. I had thought that we would just be discovered by someone, who would say Well done boy, you have done your part, now it is for us to take on the hard work of getting you the business, weve got the connections. I thought there were VCs like that because I really think there ought to be. But there still arent. Another point was that VCs seemed to think that our valuation estimate was too high. How was I to explain without writing a book what kind of forces we were fighting against? About the size of the space we were operating within, and why? People were unfamiliar with this space or this business model, although they agreed readily about the utility, importance and elegance of our work, and its critical relevance in the most happening sector. They didnt know if phone companies were going to pay royalty to us, just like they had paid when it came to the western companies that I could point to. How could they be sure? And if we asked them what our valuation should instead be, or how that should be calculated, we got no response. The other thing to note is that investment is a competitive space. Just while I was waiting, there could have been another proposition from a cold storage man, or a shopping mall man, or a television channel man. The VC has no love for the technology per se. His money searches for assured returns, with no love lost for technology or innovation. So even if he likes your thing, it may not make it in the competition. A VC is talking to hundreds of other people, whose ideas he may like. But VCs do like huge projections on the slides. Make them, no one is going to hold it

against you. They want to see such things. They want to believe such things. Most of the VCs in India are US funds, they are given broad mandates by their bosses in USA. If the mandate is airlines, they will chase the 8th portal for selling airline tickets. If it is E-Commerce season, they will chase the 4th E-Commerce portal to sell toys online. It just happens to be the season. The season could be SAS (software as a service), it could be Cloud, it could be Mobility. But not our kind of mobility. For some time, it had been social networking, which is off today due to the current preponderance of Facebook. In the earliest days it had been portals. VC money flows and ebbs with recessions and booms in US economy. I think these days they are busy answering for their past investments. If all you want is VC money, you could lock in according to the flavour of the season, and some people have done very well in this way. However taking VC money and then trying to run your company may not be the sweetest thing that can happen during your entrepreneurial journey. VCs are right to fear that an Indian company cannot sell technology. There has been no precedent. India sells services, we have scarcely sold products, but technology, barely ever. Definitely not for todays phones. They doubt whether an Indian company will be able to get global majors to pay them royalty. And indeed its going to be hard, but we have to begin somewhere. VCs like to benefit from asymmetrical information, a euphemism for exploiting your ignorance. Basically something that they know which you dont know. For example, if they knew that a global sneakers major was going to be on the lookout to buy a shoe portal in India soon, they would buy your shoe portal quickly, and for a value that may surprise others. Or if they knew that Apple was keen on buying touchscreen glass developed by a Japanese company, they would quickly buy 30% of it. So if you are a 40 year old start-up founder who talks a lot, seems to know a lot, researches a lot, talks about a business space and a business model which is unfamiliar, it makes them nervous. It doesnt look like a place where asymmetric information is going to work. They also have other theories, like whether a CEO is coachable or uncoachable, which could apply to me. There is a bit about the IIT network, IIM network, Stanford network, whose cousin is who, but that part is not official. I also believed they

would have ways to find out for themselves if the overseas handset manufacturers were in a mood to license a technology developed by an Indian company, or would rather violate IP if really required. So they could indeed have had some asymmetric information. But no such fears on their part could stop us from doing what we were doing. VCs are hesitant to be by your side if you are doing something that had very large companies as its competition. Even if your technology is very good, they think it is likely to get defeated. Even if they appreciated you, empathized with you, it would be very risky as a business proposition for them, because they knew it would involve a head-on collision with a major player. VCs may have funded other small companies who need to gain favours from some of these same global majors, and hence the VCs would like to have them on their side rather than sour the relationship. Finally VCs also want to help you when you are in deep trouble. That is the time you are going to sell everything, your company as well as your voice. If you are smiling when you go to meet them, theres unlikely to be any happiness for them at the end of the deal. So we have never got any money from any VCs, although we have talked to plenty of them. I dont think I ever pitched badly, or that I made them angry, or that they felt the technology was bunkum. But the last time we talked to any one was a long time back. We have since stopped hearing from them. Of course, I never knew about these things but I discovered them along the way. If you started making money, all your problems would be solved. But its when the company is not yet making money that it needs investment support the most. That is the paradox. I think if people were ready to invest at that stage, many more of our start-ups would survive. Much work and wealth would be saved from destruction, but most importantly, the world will not lose its most precious capital, of hope and justice. I hope it will be like that one day. Investors should also study a lot more on what they are looking at. We need people capable of independently assessing under the microscope the merits of what is being offered. To do this, they will have to study the space, look at the engineering challenges and the quality of the solution, the competition. Investing when a revenue stream is visible is the easiest

thing. And that still cannot be the best way to take a right decision, because it could be highly transitory. It could be easy to fudge, to show some sales. The VCs perform a very complicated function. But most of that effort is directed towards the assessment of risk minutae, and dynamics of board positions, made all the worse if dealt with using complex risk mathematics to build into a superstructure called term sheets, with their numerous arrangements relating to situations and eventualities, all the while trying to take care of everything that was ever encountered. While VCs are very good at all that, I am of the view that they often miss out on the function of spotting opportunities early, and backing new ideas and innovations. Counting has assumed overwhelming prominence over finding, valuing and working with the entrepreneur. It is this desire of the lender for detachment from the numerous hardships and risks of the producer, that had made usury prohibited by religion in some of the earliest societies who witnessed what it eventually did to their society, and to the human spirit of some of their best people. Otherwise it is difficult to understand such prohibition in important trading societies of the time. Those laws did not intend to stop economic enterprise. They only wanted the lenders to participate more with the entrepreneur in sharing risks and hardships. Urging people into being part of the production economy, rather than merely increasing the number of people in the speculators economy, who did not produce anything. But there is a minimum that you have to do on your own. When you dont have anything credible, you cannot expect anyone to put any money behind you, unless you are a serial entrepreneur who is trusted by some people. So you can only think of attracting investments when you have something going. You have done a lot of work, built some competency, there is clear utility of the work you are doing, you have demonstrated leadership ability, to sustain a team and take care of the administration issues of running an organisation. That is the time you could be investment worthy. The gut feeling I had when I was building the organization was that if you wish to attract investments, you have to go on working towards removal of the risks. Risks that you are aware of. There are hundreds of

different risks, so you work on eliminating them, and making the organization robust. For a company like ours, that deals primarily with IP, it would be patents, it would be putting products out, proving that people wish to type like this, and thus validating the value of the technology that you have developed, gathering more dependable evidence as it were. What use is it to have developed a technology that no one would want? So you have to prove that people want this. Its a very tough thing to do if you have to do it as a small company, because big companies spend tens of millions in promoting a new thing and they still fail lots of times. Without promotion, a thing will have to be really good for people to be ready to learn a new way of doing something. We were confident that our technology was so good that gradually it would be discovered by the users, its merits become known, and preference towards it begin to be expressed. Actually that was the most important strategic aim of our company. The other thing is to go to the market under ones own brand, so that it becomes well known that the technology came from this company. That makes it counter-productive for any company to make something similar and call it their own innovation. If your brand is well known, licensing companies will like to include it as Panini Keypad instead of wishing to offer it white-labelled. So you have to work towards removal of the risks.

Valuation Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. Warren Buffett

What are the ways in which we can value something? What are the ways you can value a company, a business, or a technology? Valuation of real estate, valuation of art, valuation of a patent, valuation of a business. This subject has been of great curiosity to me. There is really too much inside it, once one studies about the upside and downside possibilities in the history of any investment.

First, there are three different things involved, there is a price, there is a value and there is a utility, which are all distinctly different things. In all things in the world, there are these three real economic aspects, generally in the ascending order. They vary with perception, and with time. So, in valuation, we are talking about the middle thing, value. Let us say we are talking about a gold necklace that weighs 100 grams. The price could be anything; depending, for instance, upon whether the man selling it needs to get into his camel to flee. But its value is what you think you could get someone else to pay for it. When we find something with a price lower than what we consider its value to be, it looks like a good investment. We will come to utility later. The most common way for valuation of companies is the discounted cash flow method. You look at what the current income is, current profit, you decide upon some period for which the sales will continue steadily, or will grow in some measure, make an estimate of the future earnings and hence arrive at the valuation. I think it is the ideal way to arrive at the valuation of a movie hall in town that you may own. The movie hall reminds me that another valuation method can be the assets. Like the land on which it stands, the building, the furniture, the airconditioners, everything in terms of its salvage value. And that is also a way of valuation. That is the kind of valuation that a bank may do, bearing in mind the possibility of liquidating your loan. They might even have to auction the items, and hence assign an even lower value. A third way, a bit more sophisticated, would be to compare the price at which something similar has been sold recently, and arrive at a valuation estimate. For example, if a news portal with 10 million users has sold recently for a certain price, you would have some estimate of what could be the value of another similar website with similar traffic, and with a similar revenue model. But none of the above has given you any insight into why Hotmail, with 8.5 million users then, was sold for $400 million in 1997, Youtube for $1.65 billion, how Facebook could raise investment at the stock exchange at a $100 Billion valuation, why Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion at $30 per user, or Yahoo offered $1.1 billion in cash for Tumblr and paid $30 million for Summly. Yahoo itself was valued at $100 billion

in 2007, twice the size of Pakistans economy, because the portal got 300 million page views everyday. Dont you sometimes think these are phoney? Well they often are and scarcely pay for themselves, but that will need a lot of investigation into what was really happening inside. What if the money was just a statement, really meant to scare the many competitors into giving up, and actually given only with the intention of making the money go around in planned, desired ways. Instead of jumping with awe on hearing such unrealistic reports, one should put on ones thinking cap and start asking the relevant questions. Valuation of technology companies has nothing to do with the above techniques. Valuation of technology companies depends only on who needs it, how badly, and how much they are ready to pay for it. It is about who thinks who can make how much money with that asset. It may be something that fulfils a strategic need of the company. It could be for the users, it could be for the technology itself, it could be the brand value, it could be the team, it could be the expertise, the complexity and labour of what has been accomplished, a barrier to entry. It could be for the patents. And it is finally about how much the entrepreneur is ready to sell it for. Big negotiations happen, as in the well known case of Sabeer Bhatia, from $200 million to $300, then $350 and then $400 million. He was looking for a billion. There had been times when Microsoft walked out of the negotiations. That must have been one of the hardest ones ever. Our Indian boy did it. If no one wants it, the efforts in a technology company will come to zilch and there is usually not even a salvage value left behind. If you could be driven to the ground by having to wait it out, perhaps you would be ready to sell for much less. You are familiar with what Youtube or Facebook offers as their service. Tumblr is a microblogging platform for social networks. It had 108 million blogs. Instagram is also about photo and video sharing, and it had 30 million users when acquired. Each of these have the strength of users, but there is no defence against these being succeeded by other players tomorrow, as they will definitely be, players who surpass them in terms of features, innovations and hence popularity. Compare this to a

breakthrough invention which will make it possible for a couple of billion people to type on their phones, comfortably and fast, using their own scripts. A problem for which the industry has no solution, and no alternative, smarter way is visible either. There is undeniable, great underlying value latent in it, waiting to be leveraged. Here I would also like to tell you about what is called the Greater Fool Theory in the investment world. This is about previous investors who are often large VCs themselves who could have made a questionable investment, then finding other large VCs who would buy it. Investment could also have much to do outside of the merits of the technology. For example, there could be another company, not invested in by VCs, which has a similar or even superior technology, which they would like to see the end of. The VCs make the arrangements, they give and take within a closed community. Another way to arrive at a valuation is to ascertain the cost of development that went into it. All salaries, etc etc. But who can estimate the opportunity costs correctly? Who can estimate how many years go into preparing for such a thing? And what of the risks, which are really 1:100? There would be no buyers if the technology hadnt been produced, or was not successful, or its premium not established with users. So that is no way to value a technology. I have even heard valuation aspersions from investors, like, in India, a start-up should cost around this much. Thats a fine way to buy cattle. I disregard people who think that companies in India are plastic toys in a village fair that you get off a plane and buy. We think we are made of titanium. We put in the effort to develop the worlds best technology, and we managed to do it. If you dont value yourself no one else will. People are waiting to devalue you.

Arriving at a price Technology like ours is always bought by users of that technology, mainly manufacturers of equipment, and they pay a royalty, generally on the number of devices, which is a fair system to both the parties.

Of course, it would be ideal if the companies could develop their own technology, in which case they would have no dependence on any other, but if their own technology is not so good, or there is something else which is far superior, they would have to license that technology to stay competitive. Our revenue model would be to license the technology to phone manufacturers for royalty. 20 million phones were sold every month in India alone, as of 2012, and this was going to get better and better even if no new phone connections were sold, which were slowing down now. So how are we to arrive at what would be the right royalty per phone? So lets talk about price. The phone is made up of hundreds of parts that came from different manufacturers, lots of technologies that went into it for which royalties were paid by the company directly, or was being paid by those who sold them those components. Each of these components were paid for, which added to the cost of the phone, say Rs 5000. Each of these tiny components added to small increases in the marginal utility of the phone. In a talk called The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz jokes that he once walked into a phone shop asking Is there a phone that offers less? A 2009 study by Rassweiler for the iPhone revealed, for example, that of a total bill of materials worth $179 per iPhone, only $6.50 went for its manufacturing in China, by a Taiwanese company. The rest was paid in much larger proportions to companies in Japan, Korea, Germany and USA, for their parts and royalties. These went for Processor, Flash memory, touchscreen, camera, many other ICs and also the audio codec. This was the case of a company that owned a very large number of patents and tried to develop everything inside the organization, as far as possible. So we were trying to add the name of India into this in some tiny way. That would set a trend. So what is the highest that can be paid to the company that provided the camera on the phone? That amount could be equal to how much more a user is willing to pay for a phone that includes the camera. But it could also be higher if it fulfils a hygiene value.

Hygiene value, as my friend Rishi explained to me, is something that the phone needs to have. Just like for a 5 star hotel, a coffee shop may not be a profitable unit, but it has to have one. Similarly for its toilets and all other amenities, which would have to be present even if they didnt make any money. When something is of hygiene value, it could cost more than what it could make for the company. Similarly, if a phone had Panini Keypad on it and another did not, how much more would a user be ready to pay for that one? Its just a perception question. One phone with the ability to write on it, and another without it. For the 600 million people in India, who are buyers of such phones, the question is really about not being able to write at all. Not even an address book or a text message, ever. What do you think is the extra anyone would be ready to pay for it? The answer has a big deal to do with perceived value. If he is completely oblivious of his ability to type on the phone, it would be of no value. But if he is aware of it, then it could be of critical value. He would not buy a phone without it, just like you would not. But our users here, as of now, are not even aware of it. Not even aware of their possibility to do this. So the direct premium of the technology will depend upon the demand the feature enjoys. It is in our interest to create that demand, and it is not in the interest of the overseas handset manufacturer to create that demand. Because it would require him to pay for the function to an external supplier, worse it would create a dependence, a vulnerability, particularly if it were to be licensed from a start-up in India which was a monopoly supplier, with both patents and renown. But it should be of interest to the operators, because much more calls will result if people could store their numbers in an address book, and there would also be revenues from text messages and other value-added services. And the flourish of a million things in the vernacular, with content and development strengths with Indian entrepreneurs. The royalty could also depend upon whether there were other ways to do it, and if there was competition. If there was competition, it may be possible to get the two or more companies to fight each other in price, and thus bring down the price. So what should be the right price or royalty for this technology?

To wrap up that question, fortunately there are precedents on how much phone companies were paying for this kind of technology to other suppliers. In this case, to a supplier who had a monopoly because it had bought out all the companies that offered significant texting technologies for the roman script. We would be ready to work according to those norms, of what was being paid to them. That would be the price.

Utility The utility of the lock on your door is not the price you paid for it. The utility of a book is not the price you paid for it. What is going to be the utility of our efforts to the people of our country? We understood this and therefore had to continue with it, whatever the hardships or costs. What is the utility to a user of a phone that he could now send and receive several messages a day? What is the utility to him that he can now store an address book of his friends and relatives? That he can enter a text string he wants to search on into a vernacular search engine? That he can enter the name of the train in an application on his phone that then tries to find a reservation for him? These are all utilities that add to the gross, they are not paid for, but are nevertheless very real. If we gave the utility of the means to type on his phone a number, say Rs 1 per day, it would be that much everyday from all the people in the country. And if that is the gross usefulness of what we were working for, then paying any price for it was worth it, in human costs and in real costs. It does not matter if the resulting utility paid into our pockets. We developed the Panini Keypad because we knew how vitally important this was for people at large. If you live in the city and work in an office, you may have noticed that you scarcely write on paper any longer. You write on your computer, you write on your phone. Its sometimes hard to locate a pen nowadays. Gradually, everyones life will be like that. If a language cannot be written on digital devices, it will not survive the first half of this century in any form. What if all our languages, with their literature, disappear in the next 10 or 20 years because they were left unsupported in digital devices?

My father quotes wisely from Sanskrit slokas that he learnt in the original. He also quotes from Bengali, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudhan Dutt. I interrupt him immediately, to say that they are indeed profound. I will not be able to repeat them after he departs. That is how a heritage is depleted and then lost. And someone elses heritage is then imposed upon you. It is the ultimate form of political subjugation. We resisted this successfully even when the British ruled over us and determined our education systems. Many other colonised country of the world had capitulated. What if we were to lose our languages now? What if we lost the ancient efficient orthography of our scripts, and we became a Romanized country, like it is in Philippines. What is the cost of losing our own languages? What would you say to your grandchildren who would ask how it came about that this ancient, most populous, large peninsula, came to speak a language of such poor orthography that came from a tiny island in northern Europe that was a bright spark in history for only 200 years? In England itself, the language of courts and text book upto the 15th century was not English but Norman French. And then it was Latin. Is this the diffidence with which we are going to begin the century, which was supposed to offer us a chance to reassert ourselves against all such unequal, hegemonic cultural spaces of the previous century? That is why it is worth continuing whatever the hardships. These are wheels worth coming under.

A nominal price We not only developed our texting technology for Indian languages, we also developed it for many other languages. If we were not serious, why would we do so? Why would we spend on expensive patents all over the world? We were sure this would become the reigning paradigm one day, and definitely in Asia, which in turn would define everything for the rest of the world.

If Swype could sell for $100 million in 2011, and Tegic for $265 million in 2007, one only for touchscreen phones, another only for keypad phones, and both only for Latin script languages primarily, then at a stage when we have developed the technology for all the languages of India, and have proven the technology with the users, we should command a valuation of at least $5 million. I was clear in my mind, that for selling the first 10% of our company, if I ever spoke to someone who was going to be fair, I would mention $5 million as a nominal valuation for the company, and with the aim that this would become incrementally higher for subsequent rounds of investment. And I did not think I was asking for an unfair price. The discussion on valuation was merely by way of justification. Finding our angel Rajesh Yadav, my friend from the Army, who was also an entrepreneur in Gurgaon, called me one day to ask me to join him for the Signals Regiment get-together in the evening. So I went along. At the end of the party, when most people were eating dinner, I was still at the bar with some of the raucous youngsters from my time, when we were approached by an elderly gentleman whom we recognized as a familiar face, a former General, and we all wished him together. He asked where he could get his cognac, so I offered to get it for him from the other bar, the VIP bar. And then he was with us for some more time, during which he asked each of us what we were doing. I showed him our product on the phone. He was very pleased, and gave me his email id and asked me to get in touch when he would be back in Mumbai, where he lived. This was Lt Gen Prakash Gokarn, PVSM, AVSM, one of the ex-Signals Officer-in-Chiefs of our Corps of Signals, now about 70 years old. He had a great career reputation, for both his heart and his probity. I sent him an email a few days later, with details about the product and what we were doing. We also spoke on the telephone, and thus began our friendship. I had told him in one of our conversations that it was my dream to visit the Western Ghats, and drive along the coastline. So he invited me to join him for a trip there in December 2009.

I went to Mumbai and we set off in his car from Mumbai, first through the mountains to Goa, where we stayed at the Signals Training Centre. We ate a lot of masala crab, prepared specially for the General, gave a presentation to the troops and officers in the auditorium, and then we continued further south. The landscape was spectacular, and we stopped whenever we wanted to soak in the view, sometimes from a hilltop, sometimes at a lagoon. I couldnt help dreaming that one day we would have our office in such a place, and how marvellous that would be. Gen Gokarn had an endless stream of stories from his life, and he had even permitted me to smoke in his car, instead of fidgeting, a privilege which I think I abused, thanks to his kind indulgence. Stories from his service life, from the operations, his views on various matters, and the most striking thing was he remembered people in great detail, whose cousin was who, who lived where before shifting where, who had his first kid in which year. He never spoke ill of anyone. He was a peoples man, and that is why so many people loved him. You dont care to remember details of other people unless it mattered to you. And it matters only when you love them. Thats him. I am not that. We reached Gokarna, a small idyllic place with fishing and salt pans, which was the ancestral village of Gen Gokarn. He had a cottage there, on top of a small hill overlooking the Arabian Sea. There were many old books and papers in that house, pictures of his father with Pandit Nehru and President Kennedy. He had been one of the first communication officers of independent India who worked in the United Nations. We stayed there very comfortably, and the General knew all the great places to have the best sea food. Everyone was his friend, as it is in your own village, and the General is so humble that he even talked to the carpenter as if he was his friend, and they really were. We went down to the famed Om beach and then enjoyed a lobster dinner at one of the plush resorts, which he hosted, the largest lobster I will ever have. I had said I had never enjoyed a Kerala massage, and so he took me for one. We chatted a lot about how I looked at the enterprise, what I saw as the opportunities and the challenges, and so on. The way I discussed valuation with him was by drawing pie charts on a napkin in a beach shack, looking out at the sea, and that was for twenty minutes over beer, I guess.

He also took me further south to Shirali, and then to Manki and Murudeshwar. At Murudeshwar is the huge statue of Shiva on the sea, around which a holy town had grown up, with hotels for all classes of people, and with breathtaking views. At Shirali, I had an audience with the Guruji of the Math. I showed our technology to him too, and he blessed us. The General was affectionately called General Maam in that part, and most people knew him. One day, he took me on a trek to a remote stream and waterfall, deep in the forest, where we bathed in a chilly pool. On our way back from our holiday, we came via Pune and once again, we had a chance to see some great landscapes of the Western Ghats as we crossed over from the Khanapur side. There were just too many places where I wanted to settle down. For instance, beside a lake on top of a mountain, or in a reserve forest for bisons, along which went the road through the Dandeli Kali Reserve Forest. Back in Mumbai, the General had organized a meeting for me with Mr Asim Ghosh, the former CEO of Hutch. Mr Ghosh had built Hutch in India over 10 years, from a one city operation to the country-wide operator of the great brand that it had become. Mr Ghosh had presided over the sale of Hutch to Vodafone for $19 billion in 2007, which was the largest cash transaction in the history of corporate Asia. You may know very little about him because he is very media shy, but if there is a true icon of telecom in India, it is him. In the year 2009, well before he left India, he had paid Rs 75 crores as income tax for the sale of his stake in Hutch, making him the second largest tax payer of the country, so do not mix up what you read about the Vodafone matter in papers. The General and Mr Ghosh were together as part of the first Spectrum Management Committee set up by the government. It was actually Gen Gokarn, as the then chief of Signals who had cleared the release of the spectrum that the Army held, by formulating the National Frequency Allocation Plan. This made mobile telephony possible in India. The first meeting with Mr Ghosh is also something that would be one of the most memorable events of my life. Mr Ghosh had asked us to meet him at the Taj Chambers and, of course, I was all charged up to do my best and be my best self. After I showed him the product running on the phone, I asked him to say some arbitrary words for me to write and when I quickly typed and showed him, he was mighty pleased. His first

exclamation was: Have you shown it to Steve Jobs? Soon after, right in front of us, he called up several of his close friends, all over the world, on his tiny phone. He was trying to find the words to describe it as succinctly as possible, but it seemed hard. To Ravi Venkatraman, the MD of Microsoft in India, he said, I think it is absolutely worth your while to look at this. To someone else in London, he said, I have never seen anything like this. To someone in Nokia at Singapore, he called to tell him about us and to connect us. I asked him Sir, do you think I will be able to do the selling myself or do I need another more experienced person? He looked at me and said You can do it. He wished me well and I could see that I had earned a permanent well wisher on that day, unless I screwed up. After Hutch in India, Mr Ghosh went on to become the CEO and President of Husky Energy, one of the largest petroleum companies of the world, based in Canada. It was the first time that a non-petroleum person had become the head of a large petroleum business, and when he joined, replacing the CEO who had been around for 20 years, the stock actually fell a little. Very soon, Mr Ghosh had turned the company around to historic profitability, and had become an acclaimed man in Canada. From FMCG, to Telecom, to Petroleum, all in one life. Have we seen it before? Husky Energy is a 39 Billion oil company, which makes him one of the top-ranking CEOs in the world of Indian origin, but you wouldnt have heard of him. Over the next 3 years, Mr Ghosh always replied to each of my emails within a day. He has always been affectionate and supportive, with great empathy for our struggles. On the last day in Mumbai, before I was to go back to Delhi, the General gave me a very large cheque. A cheque that could take care of all our financial problems. If God is with you, fund raising could be that simple. In the following weeks, he encouraged some of his friends and relatives to give us some more money, and one of them did. Vivek Nagarkatti, who was head of Hewlett Packards E-Business globally, made an equivalent investment. This had never before been the fate of a startup in India, and it was probably at the highest valuation. I had heard somewhere that Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have said that if you want to know a person, go on a journey with him. A very

unusual practical message, that is so true if you think about it. It is true that in the journey through the Western Ghats over ten days, the General got to know me, and I too got to know him very well. He had seen all my bad habits, and also any good that there might be. This made possible the equation, and the bond that I respect and would die for. On the day when I can finally say that we have become successful, I would like to call him to the stage to say that this Indian innovation would have suffered a premature death in 2010 had it not been for him. He is the hero of our enterprise, like a father to us. He lives in Churchgate, and frequents the Golf Course in Mahalaxmi. Anyone who knows him will say good things about him. You should meet him and his wife. He is one of the most senior Army officers settled in Mumbai. In the course of the next few months we had raised about Rs 2.5 crores, for about 10% of the company. One of the investors was my dear friend Hemant, in whose home I had most of my dinners, after work every evening. Mr Asim Ghosh too made a token investment, he too never asked what was the valuation. Our incubator, where we are located, also took the step of making an investment. Later, I raised another investment from Rishi Khanna, an industrialist from Delhi, who had become a friend. He had an interest in Indian languages. All angel investments. All that we did thereafter, for the next three years, was done with this Rs 2.5 crores, of which we still have some left. In hindsight, I realized we had raised an angel round in India for exactly the stake, and at exactly the valuation, that Facebook had raised for its angel investment in the Silicon Valley, from much wealthier people. We hear of angel investments operating as syndicates today. I think operating in syndicates is contrary to the spirit of angel investments. An idea at a seed stage is never likely to get funded on the basis of decisions made by committees. Angel investments have to be made by individuals, who develop an instant faith in the capabilities and motivations of the entrepreneur. Nothing more is required. You are not going to get your first $100,000 cheque from someone who cogitates about risk, because you are completely engulfed by risks. And yet, the true angel investor is able to cut through everything, and see something real and powerful at the core. It is also an emotional decision.

Steve got it from Mike Marakkula, Andy Bechtolsheim gave it to Larry and Sergei, Peter Thiel gave it to Zuckerberg and the Queen of Spain, Isabella gave it to Columbus. The angel investor grants the restless, tormented dreamer his wish, with the power of someone who grants a boon. These were the beginnings of some of the biggest companies of our times. It wasnt given to them by committees. You could try to look at the story of companies that were invested in by committees and syndicates. 'Consensus decisions almost always sway the process away from strength and towards lack of weakness.' Steve Jobs got another angel investment, long after he had been the founder of Apple, which had by then become a public company. He had been on the cover of Time, and was worth hundreds of millions. This was for his second venture, NEXT. He needed the money desperately, for he had finished much of his own in building Pixar. He valued his company at $30 million, a number that he had created in his own mind, for which $7 million had already been spent. But there were no takers. But when Ross Perot entered the scene affectionately, he sold a 16% stake to him at a valuation of $126 million. How did this happen? Of his investment, Ross Perot later said, I pick the jockeys, and the jockeys pick the horses and ride them. So we can see that the angel investor backs the entrepreneur, and the true entrepreneur will die for his angel investors. It has to be both ways.

Pressing on

Qualcomm In December 2009 I could get Tata Teleservices interested in what we were doing, and they wanted us to do something about their CDMA phones. The CDMA phones used a Qualcomm chipset, the development

for which was in BREW, in which we had no competence as yet, and the development environment was not as open or free of cost. So they put us in touch with Qualcomm on this, who in turn put us in touch with Global Logic, to develop this for them in partnership with us. In the following month, Shashi Chaudhry, one of the founders of Global Logic, visited our office to discuss its development. The development plan was clear-cut, but Global Logic proposed a development cost of a couple of million rupees, which we forwarded to Tata Teleservices because they would have to bear the cost. But nothing came of it afterwards. I have met people from Qualcomm later, in conferences, and they said that they always remembered us whenever they thought about Indian languages on their phones.

At Microsoft HQ Mr Ghosh had introduced us to Microsoft in India at the highest level, and we followed up over email. A meeting was arranged for 13 January 2010, not in Bangalore, but in Hyderabad, where their India Development Center was located. Srini Koppolu, the head of the India Development Center, was to attend. So Gen Gokarn and I traveled to Hyderabad to attend the meeting at the large, impressive campus of Microsoft, at Gachibowli, in the Hi Tech City, said to be the largest one outside the United States. The news had already reached, about a visiting General, and so in keeping with protocol, there was a bit of a flutter there when we arrived. The man who volunteered to be his security escort turned out to be someone who had served under Gen Gokarn in the army, and so he was very happy. We had the meeting with their Indian language team, with Srini presiding over it. Thiru, the team leader and two others were also present. We made an impressive presentation, together with demo on the phone. We explained how this worked, the advantages, and so on. They showed us what they were building, and I pointed out how that could never work. They were proposing to alternately toggle between consonants and vowels on a static keypad on the PC, which was not necessarily the case for character sequences in Indian languages. Also, they were thinking of

supporting an input sequence of characters based on typography, for example, if the chhoti ee matra appeared on the left of the consonant, it was proposed to be entered before the consonant. This was flawed, because this is not the orthography. A dependent vowel (matra) had to come after the consonant. This approach would be untenable because there were matras, for example in Bengali, that came on both sides of the consonant, or even went all around the consonant. So how was one to discern what would be the typing sequence, when it would vary ambiguously from case to case. The typing sequence has to be according to the orthography, irrespective of the typography, and that is also the standard according to Unicode. This kind of ignorance on basic matters, in the most impressive campus, of the worlds largest software company, was both shocking and revealing. Why were they too trying to change the good system of Unicode? How can this disruption help anyone? But we had gone there to do business after a few people helped us to reach there, so we were keen not to offend them, or screw it up in any way. The meeting ended on a very positive note. Srini admired our work, and they said they would discuss the matter internally and get back to us. In a few weeks we did hear from Microsoft. They proposed that we could work together with them to build a better keypad for them, with our research and findings. About the commercial aspect, we asked for a tiny royalty per device, per PC for example, and thats where the discussion crumbled. They were interested in paying a fixed amount, for all Microsoft PCs, for all time. I asked them what that amount could be, and they said it would be the cost it would take them to build it themselves. When I said, it was a patented technology, they said they had patent repositories to take care of that. When I then asked them what might be the cost of development envisaged by them, they said it would be half a million dollars. I had consulted a lot of people about this, prior to this discussion, and I was not ready to take their offer of half a million dollars, for licensing our technology for all Microsoft PCs, for all time. In hindsight, I dont know whether it was a good decision or a bad decision. Perhaps Mr Asim Ghosh was disappointed that we could not convert the opening he had created for us, but he never said so. And we have not heard from

Microsoft afterwards, although I tried to reopen the dialogue. They too have never released a new keypad for Indian languages. We have had other occasions to interact with Microsoft, later. Srini left Microsoft soon after. Chatterjee, who succeeded him, and who I know through Linkedin, did not respond on this subject either. Probably they had closed the chapter on Indian language keypads. Who can say what a company may be thinking internally. The subject is however an important one.

Nokia:Episode2(Copenhagen) The gentleman in Nokia who Mr Ghosh had introduced me to was Jawahar Kanjilal, a reputed, hands-on veteran from the time when Nokia was first establishing in India, who was now at the Asia Pacific HQ at Singapore. Nokia is full of people with designations that you can never understand or place in a hierarchy, so lets forget about that. Jawahar was trying to help me. We spoke on the phone, and he worked internally for a few weeks first to find out who would be the right people inside Nokia to connect me to. Finally he fixed a conference call with Jens Benner and his interface and language support team, who were based in Copenhagen, and not in Espoo, their headquarters in Finland. On the day of the conference call, when I logged in, I came upon a rather noisy room of people, who were asked to come and join a call in which they were going to hear from an Indian company. I presume that they were not taking it very seriously. But as I went on speaking, the room at the other end became increasingly silent. I talked about things that they had probably never heard of, like statistics instead of dictionary, its advantages, comfort of the thumb, all languages on the same keypad, lightweight. At one stage, the room had fallen so silent that I had to ask, Are you still online? I heard a voice say, Yes, we are listening By the time we had finished the call, we knew we had won the show. There was one voice which said This is the best way to support Asian languages. Then they asked me about how we intended to handle the commercial aspect, and I said royalty, as has been the case with other input

technologies. They asked about our patents, and we told them they were all in place. In the following weeks, there was a lot of interaction with their engineers, as they asked us for more and more information about the model and its metrics. What happens when the data is smaller, how is the quality of prediction affected, how does it vary across languages, and so on. We made a software tool specifically for them, where one could actually choose the data size to engage and see the quality of the predictions. So, we were pretty sure that things were moving in the right direction, judging by their interest level. And then we suddenly stopped hearing from them. I kept asking Jens, and he assured me that he was carrying our cross inside that large organization. But nothing came of it finally. Nokia did not take the decision to use this technology. Their basic phones have never supported anything better than multi-taps, and that too for only one language. When we show this technology to people, any one could see how it would be invaluable to phone companies like NOKIA, and tell us that we should show it to Nokia. But why was there a resistance, both in India and at their headquarters, that was holding them back? We may only know after a long time what actually happened internally then, but we could speculate about some of the reasons. Reasons that became far more apparent in later stages. Thepoliticsoftechnology First they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win. M K Gandhi So what had I thought? That it would be so easy? I was trying to drive a disruption that converted previous work, designs, and most importantly, valuably held patents into the mud; it threatened the settled careers, reputations and jobs of lots of engineers working in this field in those companies. So would it be so simple? They already had billions of phones deployed out there, which used printed keypads to support some of the languages across Asia. The phones were in production, on assembly lines. Taken together, mobile

phones were the largest business in the world. Here was the question of Asian languages, where the future of the largest sales volumes lay. Very large companies, like Nuance, had built their multibillion dollar fortunes by licensing their technologies to these phone manufacturers exactly for this. They wished to continue to do so for a long time to come. They had pointsmen inside these companies to bat for them, and to scuttle every other thing that threatened their interests in internal decisions. And so could it have been like a walkover, as in boxing? So you have to be aware. And you have to be prepared. Its only simple when you have a Godfather who is going to make it happen for you, silencing every voice of dissent. Rather it is open war. One must fight from the front foot, with a disarming transparency and courteousness, while being aware that the very same people you are talking to hate your guts and conspire against you. There is a possibility that they could be respectable ethical companies, hence the front foot. In presentations on Panini Keypad in conferences, as I spoke with devastating clarity about the obviousness of its choice, I would see the terror in the eyes and faces of some of the agents of those companies, placed there to take notes. I was aware of their presence as I drove my point home, and ridiculed the status quo. You have to terrify your opponent before the match, just like in boxing. There is a chance that if they saw the inevitability of defeat, they would not bother fighting. Terror can make your blood turn into water. Make you lose the will to fight. You could not be so naive as to think that there would not have been a great deal of discussions inside every organization, about how to scuttle this somehow. About how to build a strategy to stop this, or work around this. And they chose to wait it out, till the country had grown aware of the possibility, government or regulator was ready to act. Or we had simply died of exhaustion when our invention could be violated. It would be easy to think that I must be delusional, to tell you a story about major companies being terrified of a small start-up, or conspiring against it. And that I was suffering from paranoia. But worrying is the job of the founder, just like a mothers job it is. And as you read the story, you would know that it wasnt delusion. If you stepped off your matrix

mind and used your common sense, you too could understand exactly why. Many people did, even at that stage. It is actually quite easy to see why. And this story is actually a description of such a battle. The Right View is the one which is based on your own experience. Some reports reached me subsequently, via people who were loyal to me. Or were slipped in during conversations. Or occurred to me as I watched the tribulations of those who had supported me, within their organizations. I also noted the measured expressions, the terrified exchange of looks, at who said what, and who looked at whose eyes, exactly when, in the course of our discussions within the companies. Even when the recognition had dawned on their masters, there was an attempt to shirk it and keep moving on as usual for as long as it would be possible. They were hoping that touchscreens might come to their rescue. Carry on in denial until then. We havent seen this, this does not exist. Wait for us to dissipate in the natural course of things. One of the strategies left at their disposal for them was to use the case of the touchscreen phones to support and bolster second-rung companies, which could then appear to be our viable competition, in the eyes of the participant media, or the public, or even themselves. Solutions that they would never have to buy, but which could nevertheless be used to create sufficient confusion and obfuscation of the space, in the eyes of the Englishman public, were being propped up. They tried to support the fixed keypad ideas, so as to give them a shot at viability on touchsceen phones. Trivial non technologies that they would not have to buy, or buy for very little because it was known to all, these were something that would be easy for anyone to develop over a weekend. To put buttons on a screen, a static keypad. No media asked them what were their plans regarding the basic phones where the Indian language support was really required. You should note that when you confront your opponent with a monopoly situation, their strategy could be to create a bogey of competition. They would invest and strengthen your competition at their own cost, in order to somehow weaken you. The resistance was also because the technology came from India, a developing country. I do not think it would have been as difficult if the

innovation had come from the western world, backed by western investors. It would have been feted, and launched as a breakthrough of theirs. But it was just the opposite in this case. Our technology was entirely developed here, and we had destroyed exactly those technologies that western investors had invested on. That is why it was so difficult. And hence the relevance of the quotation from Gandhi. BusinessdevelopmentHandsets Selling Panini Keypad was not something that could be done by the freshers in their early 20s who worked with me. We were still just the initial four, Ravi, Shyam, Sadhna and I. Yes, four people, all the languages, no money, and a global turf war. I did go out whenever I could, but then technology development suffered, especially if I had to be away for several days. I needed to hire someone with experience in Business Development, but they were so expensive that I could not afford them. From the spring of 2010, once our investors contributions were in hand, I hired several people. Surjendu and Mujtaba came in June, for business development. Saurabh joined to look after all the administrative matters, of which there were plenty. Surjendu was briefed about all that had happened so far, and we started going together for calls, so that I could show him what the customers, e.g. a handset manufacturer, asked, and what our answers ought to be. What the dynamics of this business were. Our strengths, weaknesses, the undeniable logic and the compulsive propositions. The various options of pricing, and how getting embedded on the phone was more important than anything else. Surjendu was an IT engineer who had returned from the US after gaining some experience there. He had picked up an MBA degree in IIMC, had worked in Rediff for sometime, and then come to join us. I think he picked up the new mantle really well, and was standing in for the company very well. Over the months, he renewed many conversations that we had begun with some of the handset manufacturers and operators, and also started many fresh conversations. The problems were the same, namely lack of fonts, need for integration in China etc. He worked quite hard, and after a year he left to start his own enterprise.

Later, Pawan Yadav, a friend of mine from the Army, joined in the same role, to help me in business development. Pawan came first in our Engineering class in Signals, he was marked to go very high in the Army, but left midway. He worked in Hughes, where he had won the best salesman award. He also worked in another technology company, before he joined to help me. He too tried very hard. He had done the work of bringing the Sony Ericsson account to near closure. That was one which we lost from a stage where we were about to collect the advance payment cheque. We suddenly heard that they did not want to introduce any particular language until they had all languages on the phone. Some excuse really, but what really happened? Over the months and years, the number of phone companies that we have talked to included the following, in rough chronological order: Videocon, Spice, Wynn Telecom, Micromax, Intex, Zen, Olive, Akai, Maxx, Lava, Lemon, Beetel, Karbon, Murphy, Fly, G Five and Celkon. In August 2010, thanks to the support of Mr N K Goyals organization CMAI, we were part of a delegation to Shenzhen, called the India China Sourcing Fair, where I did get a chance to interact with many handset manufacturers of India, their business owners and also employees, while travelling together. Similarly, I had a chance to see the Shenzhen phone suppliers industry over two days. Observing was a great experience towards knowing. It was very educative for me, but this education never served to be enough. Each case was specific in terms of details, but the general trend was that Indian phone manufacturers did see the value proposition, and were willing, but they faced problems with integration, or putting fonts with sound rendering, or lack of memory space, or their production schedules. In a highly competitive space, of fancier handset models popular with users, new handset models were selected from the ODM markets in China and shipped to the market in India within three months, with very little opportunity to integrate anything with a longer design and development cycle. The priority was fire-fighting in the distribution and sales of what they had already imported. Also, they felt that the demand for Indian language texting would be associated with the lowest cost handsets, which were non Java.

The rest was about the specialist skills of getting things done within organizations, in which the author of this book failed. On one occasion, I was told by a business owner, We know what you would become if we did this, whatever that meant. The big phone manufacturers of the time were companies like Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG. The larger handset manufacturers should face none of the problems of the small manufacturers, because they have dedicated engineering teams, who could take care of these things provided a basic decision is taken to move ahead. But they would not take such a decision. During the course of this story, you will find enough evidence that there was no dearth of communication, perhaps to the highest levels in each case, and with all the details. Right thinking people in any organization could have moved things, but they didnt or else they failed. We shall later speculate on the reasons behind this. Business development Operators Many retired officers from the Indian Armys Signals corps held senior positions in the various telecom companies of India. Gen Gokarn put me on to the CTO of Idea. I had an opportunity to present to their entire top management, to their VP Marketing, and so on. I was referred to a midlevel manager who took care of Value Added Services. But soon after, things stopped moving. I wrote many emails, made many phone calls, paid two visits to Mumbai, but no contract was signed. Gen Gokarn had also connected me to someone in Vodafone, and there too it was very difficult to get them to understand what we had to offer. In Reliance, I already knew several people who connected me to the right persons, but they did not seem interested either. In Airtel, we had gone up to the stage of Imtiaz, who gave a green signal, but things did not move thereafter. Tata Teleservices already knew about Panini Keypad, and we had given a presentation to Ranjan Banerjee. And in Tata Docomo we had shown it around too and were corresponding. The same with Virgin. Aircel and MTS were sent a sufficient number of feelers, aimed at the right quarters. Most of these companies were also present in the

audiences where I gave presentations. Their bosses were often members of the same panel of speakers in conferences. No one told me the product was unready, or what else we needed to do to make it suitable. If it was gratification which was sought, as is speculated by my friends who work in the field of VAS, we were not going to do this. It has happened so often that an industry never understood its ally. The music content business didnt understand that their ally was iTunes, when Steve Jobs first went to them. I also made presentations to VAS conglomerate companies like OnMobile and One97. In OnMobile, in Bangalore, where we had gone to show it to someone, we were asked to wait for an hour while an emergency call was made to the whole team, from different offices all over the town, to come to meet us. We gave a great presentation, with lots of questions and answers. A proposal was floated that we would start with something to do with making it easier for their users to seek ring tones of south Indian films directly in the languages, instead of writing in English, which fetched inexact matches. But nothing happened after that. We wrote many emails to them. The founder of One97 was personally known to me, he was also friendly, and so we should have had it easier there, but here too we never heard them ask for our products to be included in their ensemble. Not even when the subject of our meeting was about seeking investments from them. Whose was the unseen hand? Then there were Appstore companies, like CellMania and Flypp. We did work with them, but nothing came of that. Mike Eldridge of Sun Microsystems had once told me a joke about serving dog food and cat food at home. When you served food to the big dog, it was already there barking for it, you gave it and he finished it even while you were serving it. But for cat food, you would give it and the cat would be watching from somewhere afar. It would come to the food only when you were gone. He said marketing and selling could also be like serving dog food and cat food. A technology company could be serving

cat food. Not pursuing the customer too aggressively, simply making the merits known, and then leaving, for the consumers to evaluate it and take their decisions. It turned out that we were trying to sell like serving cat food. Perhaps we would have to learn how to sell technology like we were serving dog food. Later, we made a comprehensive visual presentation for telecom operators to see the advantages to them in embracing the technology. And we tried to circulate it amongst the operators and their business advisors. You will find it in SlideShare, under 20 slides for Indian operators. We have expounded on every aspect of the business case. Exclusivity A technology developer may face the question of offering the technology exclusively to a particular company. Exclusivity is always dicey, because there is no assurance about how good their implementation will be, whether it will be perceived correctly by the management, and marketed correctly. Also, phone companies are constantly going up and down in the market space. You could merely be stuck with someone who didnt do a good job, or fate just didnt work out. Although we were ready for exclusivity for limited periods, we never proposed full exclusivity to anyone. We also strongly felt that this technology must enter every phone. Exclusivity could also be a ploy. Here is a story told to me by a much-respected friend. When a large aeroplane lands, this is something over a hundred tons, which suddenly drops from the sky and lands at about 200 kmph, on just a set of two tiny tyres. Imagine the force of impact, so the friction is very high, and these high quality tyres need to be replaced regularly, after every so many landings. An inventor came up with the idea to start rotating the wheels electrically, at an optimum speed, prior to landing, so that friction would be significantly reduced, and thus extend the life of the tires significantly. He filed a patent for it. A major tyre company

bought the patent and then never implemented it, because this would have reduced its sale of aircraft tyres. So planes do no such things till today. The good thing about a technology start-up sleeping with everyone, and thus being a whore, as it were, is that no one then proposes or demands marriage. Which is a very good thing, in my opinion, as far as technology dissemination is concerned. Although as a developer, this is a call you would have to take, based on the specifics of the situation. Our technology needed to go to everyone.

Business development UIDAI Gen Gokarn knew Mr Nandan Nilekani, of UIDAI, and so he arranged for us to give a demonstration at the UIDAI office, at Connaught Place, New Delhi, before Mr Nilekani. But prior to that, we had already made a presentation to the Chief Architect of the UIDAI, who sits at their office in Bangalore. Mr Nilekani liked our technology, and put in a good word for us to his team. The Chief Architect, Mr Pramode Varma, also liked our technology. The day we showed it to him, his spontaneous remark was that he could write his Malayalam faster using this, than he could write on a piece of paper. However, the UIDAI team had members who had been placed inside by certain private companies, as so-called technical volunteers, whose sole purpose was to steer decisions which favoured the interests of these companies. And in this case, it was about the Roman script transliteration method. I did make subsequent trips and further enquiries, but our ideas were shelved, and we stopped hearing from them after some time. There is a large global company whose India roadmap was defined by Romanization. They had a member inside UIDAI. And so the UIDAI went in that direction. Mr Promode Varma, who was on my side, had once remarked that they will finally have to use this.

BusinessdevelopmentAkash The Akash project has been in the news for quite some time. Akash is an Android device, so our technology would work on it. Our well-wishers put us through to many contacts, at various levels, like the business advisors of Akash, their senior executives, institutions which were coordinating this, and so on. We made presentations to all of them, running Panini Keypad on their device. Subsequently, my colleague Pawan had a chance to discuss it with Mr Tuli too. But the tablet manufacturer did not put Panini Keypad on the device. TheWorldTelecomDevelopmentConference Gen Gokarn had introduced me to Mr R N Agarwal of the ITU-APT Foundation in Delhi. After I showed him our technology over a car ride together, he offered me an opportunity to present our technology at their Annual General Meeting in Delhi, which would be attended by most of their members, many of whom were senior leaders in the Indian telecom industry. We gave an excellent presentation that day, took all the questions and thrilled the audience. There were also companies from outside India at that meeting, and I made a good friend in Tim Wells, of SPX Corporation. We were invited to be a member of the ITU-APT, and soon after, they decided that we would be invited to be part of the delegation of the ITU-APT representing India at the World Telecom Development Conference. This was to be held in Hyderabad in mid-2010, at the majestic Hyderabad International Convention Centre. I was thrilled. The World Telecom Development Conference was a huge affair, held over a span of 11 days, with delegates from over a hundred countries. This was a global conference of the United Nations, and a prestige event for India. There were hundreds of delegates, men and women of all languages and colours, and I felt like a kid in a toy shop.

Most of the participants were ministers of communication in their respective countries, senior members of their communication departments like secretaries, regulator bosses, prominent industry players within their countries, and so on. Some large companies like Microsoft and several others were also there in their own right. I played it cool, taking time to understand the place, the nature of the organization, and making a few friends. On each of those eleven days, the lunch and the dinner was hosted by one or the other country. And they would be the grandest of meals, with lots of food and drink, because each country was being its gracious best. But with so many countries present, some meals were being thrown by more than one country at the same time. So you could have your evening snacks in the dinner by, say, Egypt, and then you could hop into a nice bus waiting there, which would take you to one of the leading five star hotels of Hyderabad, for the rest of your meal, provided by another country, say France. A great atmosphere to make friends, for sure. As faces became familiar, smiles were exchanged, hellos and handshakes followed, and thus one made friends. My aim was very clear. To offer my spiel to as many people as possible, coming to the point in a few minutes, directly or indirectly. We had our products running on the phone, to show for many languages, and others could be made if required. Since I was from the host country, there was one more reason for people to be nice, I suppose. Cards and smiles were exchanged, and my job was done. It could be anyone, a regulator, a company, a beautiful lady. I had shown it to one more person, and told them what it could do. Had thrown a grain of pollen into the wind. I was also part of the Indian delegations meeting with the Secretary General, and the official photograph. Among the many things that were discussed involving radio and spectrum, the senior member did bring up the case of the junior-most member of the delegation. That made it easier for me to seek a personal appointment with him subsequently.

Anyway, a lot was happening in the conference, in its various tracks. The main hall had delegation after delegation who were delivering their official speeches, simultaneously translated in the six languages of the UN and heard on headphones by all participants. Each country, from the United States of America to Maldives, and this carried on for several days. Country delegations, of seven or eight members, scurried in and out of the hall carrying nice leather briefcases and bags, sometimes having accomplished something, or angry about something that someone had said. There were also comments from the audience. When someone spoke from the mike placed on every desk, the camera would zoom in on the person and he would be on the large screen. Thankfully I never thought of saying something aloud, about my tiny island of a nation. In other tracks, there were discussions on specific topics, like radio, or standards, where a certain Sec 34.1 was being discussed, objections were considered and some ruling was passed, before moving to the next item, Sec 34.2. I sat through some of these sessions, but without exception, I could never understand what was being discussed. Good for me, because I was happier to be outside, floating around with the other floating population. I smoked outside the hall, and made friends. Two members of the DPRK delegation gave me their packets of charcoal filter cigarettes as a gift, and I showed them our Korean product, not yet on phone because there was no font on my phone but accessible on a simulator on the computer. They liked what we showed, and gave us the phone numbers of people we could contact in their embassy in India. Things like that. Always on the job, or should I say on the prowl? And there were the media persons to catch. The western media was less interested, but the Telugu media was very happy. Considering all the dry matters of regulation and administration that the conference involved, they could not find a story once the inauguration was over, but they found one in our demo of how to type in Telugu on the phone. So we were on several newspapers and also television. There were people who had found out about us, who came to the event to find us and report on us. I also had to go down to another hotel to give a more detailed story to a newspaper. The grandiosity of the venue and event offered a backdrop of eminent credibility to our story, and we could demonstrate on a phone which they could try themselves. India Today had sent a photographer to the venue

to cover us for some other story, and thats how I got some great professional photographs from the event by Mr Prabhakar. We were to be on the cover, but that story was never published. When I met the PR man of the WTDC later, he smilingly admitted that we had managed more coverage than the event itself. One evening, when I went back to my guest house, the owner said he had seen my picture in the newspaper. He took me more seriously thereafter. I had carried a good wardrobe, some original perfume, not the duplicates you see, took an auto-rickshaw every morning, dismounted a few hundred yards away from the venue, and then marched in to take on the rest of the day. Very soon, I found out that it was rather easy to get a meeting with the senior officials of the ITU, who had offices upstairs. One could even book a slot for a meeting with the Secretary General, and check later if it was granted. And so I was granted a meeting one afternoon, and I made my coup. The Secretary General, Dr Hamadoun Toure, was from Mali, but he had studied in Russia. When I mentioned that Russian was among the languages we had developed our texting technology for, he wanted to try it out, and he did. He tried writing on the phone, and he was most impressed with the idea, the new paradigm, with no multi-taps and with the predictions working. I went on telling him, with practised ease, about all the merits. And he agreed. He felt very confident about the future of our innovation, and extended all personal support. He referred me to several of his senior colleagues, like the Director BDT, Director (Standardisation), and others, to all of whom I demonstrated. After that I became something of celebrity, because the Secretary General was seen by others waving at me when he went down the escalator, and smiling and shaking hands at the dinners, and so on. He invited our company to become a sector member of the ITU, and I was most surprised that we could even be admitted. That would put us in a notionally similar status as any of the other micro-nations. We would have a sovereign desk at the back of the hall, with our name on it and a mike before it, like Boeing. I would of course have to find out about the annual fees.

People were kind. I met many people, all senior functionaries, who gave me practical advice on the difficult journey that lay ahead of us. About the technology turf war, and how the big companies thought about grabbing innovations that others had developed.

I had also made many friends within the ITU organization, most notably the beautiful and always hard-working, Malaysia-born Ramita Sharma. She was kind enough to introduce me to some of her own friends from many countries. The delegation from Tajikistan had a young woman who had done a course in New Delhi. And so it became more pleasant in the parties in the evening. And then suddenly, the dream-like WTDC was over. We subsequently found out about the ITU membership fee, which for a small company could be a quarter of what others paid, but would still be over Rs one lakh annually. We were ready to pay, but the ministry of telecom in India dilly-dallied with our application for some time, in disbelief I suppose, before it was sent on and we became a member. There were only eleven members from India, including BSNL, MTNL

and Bharti. We must be the only start-up in the world who was a sector member of the ITU. What we wished to leverage from this was the association, and who knows what else. The Secretary General had said he would get an article written on us in ITU News, which goes out to the entire telecom fraternity of the world, for which I should present at their HQ in Geneva whenever possible. I thought that our company would become much bigger very quickly, and should benefit from the networking opportunities that such global events could provide, which we were now eligible to attend. An article on us was published in ITU News, which goes out in the six UN Languages. The Secretary General did even more for us, by visiting our stall officially during the Mobile World Congress in 2011. After two years, our ITU membership was cancelled because we had not paid the fees for the following year, as we could not afford it. But I think Dr Toure, who is still in office, will continue to be supportive to us, and I have apprised him of the challenges we were facing.

The Secy Gen at our stall during the Mobile World Congress, 2011.

Allplatforms

The year 2010 also saw us extending our products to all platforms. The Android platform was emerging, and so we built for that. We also started building for the iPhone, for which we bought a Mac computer. We added a couple of new developers. The developers were also taking much longer to learn to program in the environment for iPhones. It was an important strategic step, because both Android and iPhones are touchscreen devices. These were platforms for which there could be other virtual keypad alternatives, and there were. The basic keypad phones were going to stay in the developing world for some more time, but the world market could gradually move, in a few years, to one where the majority used touchscreen devices. We had to remain a strong contender in this space. Our touchscreen applications had to be so good that people preferred to use it, even on touchscreen phones, for some of its unique advantages. Development for ARM processor Mediatek was the largest supplier in the world, by volume, of chipsets for mobile phones. Mediatek was headquartered in Taiwan, and their chips were used in practically all the phones that were imported from China. We had meetings with the MD of Mediatek in India, about building a reference design on their chipset, which would have Panini Keypad embedded on it. So in mid-2012, we engaged with a private company licensed to Mediatek, to develop such a reference design, at our own cost. The reference design was created in weeks, because our technology was so simple and ready for integration, with clean, API based access. This was a very important milestone for the technology. Because we could now demonstrate that this was not just an App, but something that could actually be embedded into even the lowest cost phones, into the hardware, as a usable technology to write in Indian languages in every part of the phone. It was an important proof of the concept. We had also kept our architecture for this implementation extremely neat, with the algorithm and the language data isolated. Hence any number of languages could be plugged into the algorithm, and thus be supported on the phone. The architecture could also be such that new languages could be hot pluggable, in the sense that the user could download a new language, or an update, from the Internet into the phone, place it in a

designated memory slot, and that language would then be supported on the phone. These were ideas which were way ahead of existing technologies. The algorithm as well as the language data were both lightweight pieces of software. To a phone manufacturer, we offered easy API access, where his interface elements could cleanly access our libraries, and obtain the predictions on demand, whenever required, and for the language he required, in discrete atomic transactions. Our implementation in C language could likewise be implemented into the reference design of any other processor. The availability of this real implementation was publicised in a Wall Street Journal article. The right time Considering how difficult it was to commercialise this innovation, one could speculate as to whether we were trying to do something before its time. I think it was the right time. It could not have been made before, because the ingredients required to build it would not have been available in the public domain. For example, large amounts of text corpora of the major languages, available on the Internet. This had to wait for a period when sufficient numbers of people had put up content out there. Secondly, this is not a technology that could ever have been developed manually, not in a million years. It is something that can only be done using the fruits of the computer, which can do an ocean of calculations and give us the results in minutes. These calculations being done on affordable PCs. The mobile phone industry had exploded, and it is only in the years 20052009 that it moved from something that only the well-off could own to something that just about anybody could afford. In 2009, it was already touching the 600 million users mark (for India alone), a level that had been reached very quickly. With the mobile phone having reached those segments of the society where writing in Indian languages mattered, our innovation became extremely relevant. The requisite fonts were also available on some of the phones, so that we could at least prove the concept.

But the fact remains, that fonts have been the greatest impediment for all the companies operating in the domain of Indian language content on phones, including vernacular websites and online editions of the vernacular press. This problem needs to be fixed very quickly. Being there, at the beginning of the mobile telephony process, mattered very much, if you wished to benefit from the first movers advantage. It was going to take some time for our technologies to mature, for people to find out about it, learn how to use it etc. We did not waste any time. We were extremely busy. I couldnt say that our timing was wrong. And ultimately, we dont control the timing of anything; destiny does, with its own purposes.

The world of languages

An Arabic product We built an Arabic product. It was our first exploration in a right to left language, but that didnt pose any additional challenges because the standards had taken care of everything on most phones. Arabic is the principal language in the 22 countries who are members of the Arab League, from Morocco to Oman. And it is also spoken in several other countries outside the Arab League. The language spoken in the countries spanning this vast region varies, but there is a Standard Arabic which is the official language in all these countries. This is also another diglossia. We had built our preliminary Arabic product based on text we had found on the Internet. Later, Sara joined us from Morocco, and improved the corpora that we were mining. Thereafter, Atheel joined us from Jordan, and played a crucial role in improving the product, and particularly for popularizing it over the wide region. Our downloads of the Arabic product are higher than for any of our Indian language products, taken singly. The remarks from the users are also very positive. It has been developed for all

platforms, and is being used quite widely. CleverTexting Arabic is the name. It could do much better with promotion and publicity. Arabic also offers the opportunity to build several different products for the dialects which are actually used by people, rather than the Standard Arabic language. This could be very popular in the region, because this is the language actually used in text messages. We hope to tie up with empowered local partners in the Arab region, who could help us launch this on a phone, or reach users via the operators. We would also like to develop superior products, with domain knowledge and local representation. The barriers are less in the case of Arabic, because almost all phones support the Arabic font, this being a UN language. And the character sequence to be entered by the user poses no additional challenges of learning. And, no one asks why anyone would want to write in Arabic on the phone.

Korean CleverTexting While we were studying other languages of the world, I had already started speculating about whether this technology could be applied to the CJK languages, namely Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which were said to have many more characters, running into thousands. After studying preliminary information about them, I came to the conclusion that Korean could be the first to try out. The Korean script, called Hangul, was invented by the emperor of Korea, Sejong the Great, in the 15th century. In ancient Korea, the Chinese characters were used, but now Hangul, the Korean script, is used in both the Koreas. Hangul characters are essentially made up of three or sometimes two elemental parts that combine to form characters which look complex, rather like the Chinese characters. So now when you see the Korean script, you will know what it is. The elemental parts are called Jamo characters, which are simple elements like circles and right angles, and they comprise a finite number, of only around 51. The Jamo characters come in three parts, called Initial, Medial and Final, to form a

final Hangul character, which themselves could occupy a large amount of symbol space of Unicode characters. So there was a lot of implicit structure within the script system, which could be taken advantage of by an innovative new input technology. We studied the subject and came up with a scheme that could benefit from the statistical prediction algorithms developed by us for other languages. The Korean language could also be resolved as a stream of Jamo characters, in the simplest form, just like most other languages. In our CleverTexting implementation, the Jamo characters came predictably to our fingertips, which in turn could be combined to form the required Hangul character. We filed a patent for this technology, first in India, and then within a year in Korea, in keeping with the rules. The prototype developed for the phone was ready in the early part of 2010. It was subsequently released as a Java App, Android App and Iphone App, and hundreds of people have downloaded it in Korea and elsewhere to try it out.

We are not sure whether it is ready to become one of the preferred ways just yet, but we had succeeded in introducing a paradigm. It could be more efficient, for instance. But at least we developed such a thing, and introduced it to some users. It was usable, to write anything. If not for the phone, such a thing could perhaps be used in other devices, like a gaming console, or an instrument panel. Or any system where a multi-lingual

input was required and printed keypads cannot be provided like the kiosk at the Olympics.

CleverTextingChinese After the Korean prototype was completed, I wanted to understand the case of the Chinese script. This was a language with over 3000 characters in Simplified Chinese and 10,000 in the Traditional version. They have complex problems of input, and who knew if a statistics-based dynamic keypad approach would solve or mitigate the problems. So I read up about the Chinese script, the various types of input mechanisms that had been developed since ancient times, their strengths and weaknesses, preference of users, and what was popular today. In July 2010, we were visited by our intern from China, Li Chen from Dalian. I had many discussions with Li Chen, trying to understand the language and its nature. I was not trying to learn Chinese, I was trying to learn about Chinese. The completely new aspect that Li Chen told me about was the tone system of Chinese. All characters had one of five tones, numbered 1 to 5, that were prevalent in the Chinese language, and every word was uttered with a particular tone, like a rising tone, falling tone and flat tone, which gave the Chinese language its singsong quality. With him on our team, we started going over the lists of Chinese characters we had collected. We cross-checked with other accessible authoritative sources on Chinese academic websites, and made a complete list. Then we collected the tone information accurately for all of them, and got them verified, one by one, by Li Chen, who did an extremely thorough job. Hence we know that the Chinese alphabet information in our products is complete and accurate, with over 10,000 traditional characters, including the very rarely used ones. In fact we had spotted occasional mistakes even in some academic sources. We collected Chinese text corpora with his help, and were mining to see what we could do. Our tools then were not capable of producing accurate results for the symbol space as vast as Chinese. But we started thinking and experimenting with what could be the various approaches.

We developed a prototype for the phone keypad while Li Chen was with us. It could only run on his phone, because we did not have a phone with the Chinese font. We kept his phone with his permission. After he had left we continued to think about it, until we arrived at a scheme. Subsequently a patent was filed. When we built our keypads for touchscreen phones, we completed a far more usable Chinese product. This is our design paradigm for the Chinese case. It is a design that can also be used in limited fixed button devices. I was struck by various interesting facts pertaining to the Chinese language. The Chinese language is made up of thousands of characters. Each of these characters have a fixed sound, the way it is pronounced. These pronunciations have a strange feature. They are highly finite. Just about 800 sounds. Each of the thousands of characters is pronounced as one of these 800 sounds. That is why, in Chinese you can write Leng, Ming, Shen, Shang but you cannot write sounds like Tree, Cut, Pick or Hat or even Oung. Thats because these are not in the list of 800. For example, my name, Abhijit, could be at best written as A Bi Ji Tu. The Chinese have no problem with this because any additional sounds dont occur in their conversation. Its just that its almost impossible to write foreign words, because the script system is not a phonetic orthography. Something as complex as the word Lewinsky would be impossible, so the Chinese way would be to replace it with something simpler, which can be accommodated, like Lishu, and people soon get familiar with the replaced name. This is what is done in newspapers to cover foreign matters. For example, India is called Indu (two characters). The d sound here is close to a t sound. In Singapore, foreign names might be written alongside in English. This is another reason why the Chinese find it difficult to follow what you are saying, the sounds are unfamiliar, and Chinese ears are also highly tuned to pick up from tones, but you are not communicating anything in the tones. At the Shanghai airport, I asked an airport official where I could find a police station. I was saying police station over and over again, but to no avail. I kept repeating it as slowly as I could, till one of them said, Ah! A

police station!, and I thought to myself, what was I saying all this while? This happens. They expected me to say the word police in a particular tone sequence, I guess, the tones in which a Chinese would say it. The finiteness of the 800 sounds looked like an advantage to us, to find a wedge for input optimization. Each of these 800 sounds are spelt in pinyin which is a Romanisation scheme for representing the sounds. Pinyin is taught in primary schools in China, and with 99% literacy, everyone is familiar with it. So, even though most people in China may not understand English, everyone can read the Roman script, although they may not know what it means. Thats one thing we learnt which was very interesting. The next thing is that each of the characters which had a unique pinyin to it (the pronounciation), would also have a tone associated with it. One of the five tones. The tones are high, rising, falling rising, falling and finally the far lesser used fifth tone, which is a neutral tone. If you said a pinyin sound with a particular tone, it could mean a particular character and hence a meaning. But if you said that in another tone, it could have an entirely different meaning. And this is a very common problem faced by foreigners, who think just saying it would be enough and they could reach their hotel. So a pinyin could have any of the five tones to represent particular characters. But a pinyin with a particular tone will not necessarily map to one character, rather it could map to several characters, sometimes half a dozen characters or more, and this is often the case. And again, there could be a pinyin with a particular tone with no corresponding real characters represented by it. So it is completely arbitrary. Which means that the Chinese are constantly resolving what is being said from among possible ambiguities, because there are many characters (meanings) which have the same pinyin and the same tone. That is why Chinese is called a contextual language. Meaning is understood based on the context. This helps them a lot in their diplomatic communications! The pinyin is made from the characters of the Roman alphabet, but never uses the character V. The character E or I or U could never be the first character, and many other small things like that. The letters Q or X or

even others would be pronounced very differently from how you would in English. In all parts of China, the language or dialect does vary and there are said to be at least 9 distinct languages, but the characters and their meanings are always the same. So it occasionally happens that the same character is pronounced in more than one pinyin or tone. Hence we must offer a means to reach the same character through different pinyin paths, if applicable. In Taiwan, where traditional characters are written, they have a different system of pinyin-like resolution of character pronunciations, but this is not made up of Roman characters, but another elemental alphabet called Zhuyin, whose alphabets are Bo Po Mo Fo and so on. We are not going to discuss Zhuyin here, but the same technology can be developed for it, along exactly similar lines. Amongst 19th century Europeans, another system of Romanization like pinyin was popular, called the Wade-Giles system. That is why Beijing used to be written as Peking in the past. Reads very different, right? But it described the same sound that the locals have always used. Since 1958, it is only Pinyin and Simplified Chinese which are the official mandate from the government in mainland China. All of these facts together provided a framework for us for this language. In our system of typing, we offer the user CleverTexting at two levels, at the level of pinyin, and at the level of characters. The user will first indicate the Chinese character he desires by entering a character of pinyin, and the system will respond with likely Chinese characters as well as the subsequent likely characters of pinyin to keep refining the search. If the Chinese character is spotted and entered, the system will now try to predict subsequent Chinese characters, so that a flow of predictions could start, like in other languages. If the prediction is unsuitable, the user could fall back to the pinyin level, to resume the initiation. This works quite well and one can type at least at one character per second or two. Our assumption is that for a symbol space as large as in Chinese, a far tighter set of correlations should be spotted, but we are yet to find that much correlation. This is because the characters here are not phonetic any

longer but are instead ideograms, they stand for words. Since the Chinese do not follow a subject-verb-object order in sentence formation, the ideograms occur more randomly. The Chinese also do not use spaces between word or sentences, which also may have played a role in our mining for statistical correlations. Perhaps we need to implement it correctly, and then it could possibly offer a truly revolutionary system for Chinese. That is the theoretical expectation. One of the important innovations we introduced was that we allowed the user to shortlist the candidate predicted characters at any stage, by choosing a tone filter from one of the 5 tone buttons placed below. We have not seen the Chinese exploit the tone part of the story in the input systems that we have studied. The tone part could really be very effective for those who want to use that tool.

Our product actually offers a variety of approaches open to the user at any point of time. Each will work but with variable efficiency, depending on the case. The user could choose a strategy that would best suit the case, using his own judgement, once he understood the tools at his disposal. I was once sitting in a Chinese airport, watching someone eat with his chopsticks, and in this I actually found a metaphor for our

design, from what Chinese people do anyway, all the time. Eating with chopsticks is about constantly strategizing. Each morsel would require a different strategy. With a spoon we could be eating while we watch TV but with chopsticks you cant be watching TV. Our product is like that. The user is expected to use his judgement, based on what character he wants to enter next, to choose a strategy that will work best, based on his increasing experience with the system. In our system, it is possible to type Chinese characters with an average of two or three keypresses per character. We expect we will be able to average to one. This is likely to get better as we implement correctly, but the positive aspect is that the average with other input systems that are popular in China is generally higher. We continue to work in the Chinese language, which we have named Cong Ming Da Zi, which means Smart Texting or CleverTexting. We dont know any Chinese, so everything is done by computers and implemented by guesstimates. But we need domain knowledge, with the assistance of interns working with us, to explain what is happening, and help in decision-making. You can find a video of our intern typing using the Cong Ming Da Zi on Youtube. It is in the Taiwanese accent only because its our next intern Hank Yu, from Taiwan and he is actually unfamiliar with pinyin but is still typing. The Chinese product is offered for Java and Android phones, and for the iPhone. Thousands of people have downloaded it to try it out. Till date, the reviews from users have been positive. There is someone who has written this is excellent. If an obscure thing as this was found to be excellent by even one person, excellent it must be. ThecaseofJapanese We felt that our technology could be used for the Japanese script, and hence we filed a patent in Japan. Subsequently, we had an intern visit us from Japan, to aid us towards a better understanding of the language and its script. And about its currently popular text input systems.

The case of the Japanese script is a very complex one, because the Japanese use Hiragana, and they also use Katakana. They then use Kanji characters, which are unreduced versions of the Chinese characters and hence quite numerous. Apart from that, they use Roman characters in the middle, called Romaji, and finally, they use lots and lots of pictograms, glyphs like smileys, called Emojee. The Emojees are so popular in Japan that rival telecom operators have their own expanded sets of exotic Emojees to lure customers. The Japanese case was the most complex one, and perhaps this would be the place where the statistical technology could be put to its greatest use. But we decided to address it only after we had developed and obtained some usage in the other two CJK languages for which we had completed prototypes. This was in order to ensure that we have advanced our knowledge adequately to be able to take up the challenge of the Japanese application. The Japanese obsession with glyphs also reminds me of the view of a lady friend, that the entire world could one day migrate to a universal script consisting only of descriptive pictograms, and that would be such a nice world, according to her. I have thought about it seriously. Its all about arriving at the right ontology. If that world comes about one day, it would be the victory of the original Chinese idea. From phonetic scripts to pictograms. Ancient ideas from China have come to dominate the world in various consecutive centuries, like paper, compass, gunpowder, printing, fiat currency. Who knows if another Chinese idea is waiting to dominate the world in the century ahead? A future in which, for instance, many more of us could be born dyslexic, yet not suffer the learning difficulties that current alphabet scripts impose on dyslexic children today. Europeanlanguages The common impression is that all the countries of Europe use the Roman script. In reality, however, all the languages of continental Europe, that is all the nations of Europe with the exception of the British Isles, use alphabets that employ accented characters, or diacritical marks. Characters like , or , which are not supported on the Qwerty keypad.

French uses , , , , , , , , , , , , , . German uses , , , , and the others languages use many more. Hungarian has 44 characters. Many more of the languages of Europe, like Faroese, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Irish, Welsh, Gaelic, Asturian, Galician, Spanish, Leonese, Romanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Hungarian, Livonian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Turkmen, Albanian, Kurdish and Maltese all these languages, taken together, use a variety of diacritics which can vary as widely as the following: t

All these languages face marginalization today. Their young people have stopped writing these characters because they cannot find them on the keyboards of the devices that they use, and so the languages are changing. Olavi and Mari, from Estonia, came to live with me, and I asked them about this problem. Mari came up with an interesting response. She said if she were to send an SMS to her friends saying Lets meet today in the evening at 7 pm or Kohtume tna htul kell 7, apart from these characters being difficult to write, she would be highly reluctant to write any word like htul in her message, because it would immediately bring down the size of the SMS she could send, as everyone in Estonia knew that was equal to many characters, and hence something to be strictly avoided. The truth is that inclusion of would immediately shift the message encoding from 7 bit to Unicode. 7 bit can carry 160 characters, and Unicode can carry 70 characters. The reason tna would go through in 7 bit is because GSM 03.38 standard for 7 bit had accommodated some of the diacritic characters of Europe, of which was one. These issues affect the lives of people in real ways, unvoiced, uncomprehended, and these were changing the usage and the language. The question is, is this acceptable to these European nations. A dynamic keypad can accommodate as many characters as you wish, so as to

include everything, with no omission or discrimination. And Unicode can accommodate everything. There are also other interesting things we discovered, specific to the European situation. The Dutch language, for example, uses double vowels. Words like maan, gooien, leeuwen, tomaat. The double vowel itself is to be understood as a character. So should the Dutch need to type twice for it, or could it be entered in one keystroke. We developed a variation of the CleverTexting for Dutch, which offered that variation. The case of the Finnish language is the most interesting. In the Finnish language, vowels are used more frequently than consonants, and the vowels are often used in long sequences. But the bigger surprise is that words are combined to form new words all the time. This is allowed. So, for example, the longest acceptable Finnish word is said to be lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas, which means technical warrant officer trainee specialized in aircraft jet engines And this is happening all the time. Which is why Finnish words appear so long, often with some 15 or 20 characters. Hence, almost by definition, a Finnish dictionary is impossible, because it is infinite. The base dictionary of Finnish has one million words, which is the biggest in the world. So how can dictionary-based predictions work for it? It has to be a statistics-based approach. We have built a Finnish product that works very well statistically, for all kinds of Finnish words. We had it evaluated by a Finnish delegation who had visited our incubator on a mission to scout for innovations. Mr Mkel Riku, Counsellor of Innovation at the Finland Embassy in India, was present during our demonstration. He bought it to the attention of the CTO of Nokia, who are also based in Finland. Greece and Cyprus are also in Europe. The Greek language, of course, uses Greek characters, not Latin characters, and there is not even a phone with the Greek characters on them. We have been spending valuable money to retain our European patent. We do see a future there at some point of time. So far, we have not been able to devote the attention or the money to promote the European language products which we have already developed. But they are good products, which can also become much better.

 LanguagesofAfrica The languages of Africa also use the Roman script today. But the African languages, over 2000 of them in 6 major language families, have many sounds which are not represented in the English alphabet. That is why you have words like Nzuri, Sbusiso, Ngobese, Nciza, Mzekezeke, and Nwanyi, that you would not know how to pronounce. There are also clicking sounds of the tongue which are part of the languages of southern Africa. There has been an aspiration for an African alphabet which would be an expanded alphabet of Roman characters, accommodating all the additional sounds and phonemes of African orthographies. An African alphabet was developed as early as 1928, and in 1978 a formal Africa Reference Alphabet was proposed in a UNESCO conference. This was formalized in 1982. The alphabet has 60 characters. African languages do need a keypad to support their own expanded alphabet. From our side, to illustrate that the technology worked for African languages in general, we chose the largest language of Africa, namely Swahili, which is spoken by 20 million people in the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and also Burundi, Congo and Rwanda. We have a product for Swahili that works quite well. But it is for the expanded character set that our technology will offer an advantage that none other can. So we see a special future there. The African continent is thrice as large as Europe, with people of diverse languages spread over every part of it. They have sometimes been influenced by French, sometimes by English, and sometimes Portuguese and Dutch, and even German. And yet, when any African speaks in English, there is a distinct African accent, which is their own. What is in that accent that represents a unity in African languages?

Russian The Russian language is written using the Cyrillic script. This script is not only used by Russia, but by all the states of the former Soviet Union, and yet others like Mongolia, parts of former Yugoslavia, and Turkey.

There are about 50 languages that use the Cyrillic script, including large countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. After Bulgaria became part of the European Union, Cyrillic became the third script in EU, after Latin and Greek. We have developed a product for Russian, and in the same manner it can be developed for every language that uses the Cyrillic script. Nepali, Urdu, Sinhala, Tibetan & Bhojpuri In 2013, we began developing Panini Keypad for more languages of the subcontinent, like Nepali, Urdu, Sinhala and Tibetan, all neighbour languages, so to speak. We also made two upgrades to all our products for touchscreen phones, i.e. for Android and iPhones. We added dictionary support to each of them, as well as a Qwerty keypad to allow the user to write in English in between, as is often the case in the subcontinent. The English keypad also came with its own dictionary predictions, just as good as the default keypad of the phone in terms of efficacy. These products were put up on all the download sites and Appstores. This was also the time Google launched its own Hindi keypad in the Android store. A competition for us. It expected the user to type through transliteration, directly on a fixed keypad. We expect it would be popular only with the English-speaking population in India. The Nepali product took off like a rocket within weeks. The Urdu product too. In our Urdu product, we had included support of Baloch and Pashtun characters that had also occurred in the corpora. The Sinhala product was slow at first, because there were no devices that had the Sinhala font on them, but in the Java segment of keypad phones, the Sinhala product was doing quite well. The Tibetan product also faced a problem of fonts, because there were no phones in the world that had the Tibetan font on them, except for iPhones. There was a Tibetan person from Dharamshala, an IT worker for the government-in-exile, who came to suggest many things to us, specific to the Tibetan language, and we are in the process of understanding them. The people in Bhutan also use the same script, but the language is different, called Dzongkha. We can easily develop Panini Keypad for Dzongkha.

We were happy that the products were now available to users in new territories. The new paradigm was getting well known, in new places. The Bhojpuri product was a strategic coup. Bhojpuri is a language spoken in northern India, in western Bihar and parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Nepal and Jharkhand. The people have a great deal of linguistic pride, in the sense that they had Bhojpuri music, Bhojpuri films, Bhojpuri Television, and yet the language was not officially recognized. By building the Bhojpuri product, we were creating a new market within what is considered the Hindi-speaking belt. Offering something to users which a static keypad could never provide. This was the first Bhojpuri keypad product ever, for any platform. The Bhojpuri-speaking population numbers over 45 millions, mostly in India, but is also present in countries like Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad, Surinam. It was released in Java and Android, and picked up immediately. In this manner, we intend to introduce products for more languages of north India, like Garhwali, Kumaoni, Haryanvi, Marwari and others. Bahasa,Indonesia We got a call from Huawei in April. They had a VAS business, where they offered sourcing and technical integration of content to telecom operators. They were interested in offering a Bahasa product for the Indonesia market, for an operator named XL Axiata. So we developed an Indonesian product in four weeks, for Java and Android, and also the iPhone. It would be an interesting battle, because the Bahasa language is written in Latin script. If we could win here, it would prove that our technology could be viable even for languages which are written in the Latin script. That would mean invasion of a huge territory. The territory of the Roman script. Indonesia had a population of 200 million, its the fourth most populous country of the world, just after the United States. The Bahasa language is also spoken and written in the Latin script in Malaysia.

OtherlanguagesofAsia Asia is full of languages, and we have already discussed some of them. But there are others like Hebrew, for which we have already developed a texting application. There are a dozen languages in our scanner, and hundreds of minor languages are not in our scanner as yet, but we know they are there. Only some of these languages use the Roman script, but many more have their own scripts, and most of them are supported by Unicode. So keypads can be built, and can be supported on phones. Thai is on our radar. But to build a Thai product we need an intern from Thailand to assist us. ProjectShiva

An idea We applied for the Economic Times Power of Ideas in 2010 as well, and we made it to the select list. This year, the selected companies were called to IIM-Ahmedabad, for a special two-week training course, specific to the subject of start-ups. This time, the idea we submitted was not the Panini Keypad, not any product at all, but a concept, for this contest was called The Power of Ideas. So here is our idea.

Typography of Indian languages I was observing 3-year old Pari being taught to write ABCD by her mother. She had just joined a play school. The exercise book had exercises of standing lines, sleeping lines, slanting lines, circles, half circles etc, on which she exercised first before moving on to writing the characters. After a few weeks I asked her mother how she was doing, and she reported that Pari could write most of the characters, except for the character G which she found confusing and complicated.

If G was complicated, I thought, how complicated are the characters in our Indian alphabets, and what kind of challenge do they pose to learning? Could this be acting as a barrier to literacy? The challenges of the 3-year old were not unique to her. It would be as true for me to learn a complicated shape of, say, Chinese or Malayalam, just as it would be for anyone trying to get literate for the first time as an adult. When something is difficult, it takes longer to learn, and is also given up more easily. From the background knowledge that I already had about all the Indian languages, knowing them quite intimately, an idea came up. An idea that should be self evident to anyone, if only one just put together the unfamiliar facts of the matter. There is no doubt that the Indian scripts, 9 of them in all, are each complex in their typography. There is a very convincing theory about what determined the character forms for Indian languages. In the ancient times, the north Indian wrote in Bhuj patra, the bark of the Betula utilis tree, which grows in the higher Himalayas. I have seen the tree. Its numerous thin layers of peeling bark quite like white paper itself. And the south Indians wrote on palm leaves. If you wrote with straight lines and sharp angles on a palm leaf, with a pointed stylus, it was likely to get torn or damaged at the corners, which would then attract rot, which meant a shorter life. So the characters in the south are roundish, and not rectilinear. If you move from the north to south, you will see a dramatic pattern in how the scripts change gradually in their form. From Devanagari to Bangla and Oriya, and then Telugu, Kannada and finally Tamil and Malayalam. If you go to Sinhala, you will find the most complex rounded forms. This is very, very interesting.

Orthography Orthography is the spelling system of a language, of how letters combine to represent sounds and form words. All the Indian languages are united in their orthography. If you wanted to write Mera Bharat Mahan or even Dhritarashtra in any of these languages, you would have written exactly the same sequence of characters, matras, yuktakshars, everything. Just that their jalebis(!) would have been different. How the characters look is only the

typography. It is entirely different from the point of view of orthography. Just like in an algebraic equation it wouldnt matter what symbols you used, whether you used xyz, abc or phi, gamma, theta. The orthography is the real thing. The typography is the symbols you used which could just be any other. The orthography of the Indian languages is the most scientific of all the alphabet systems of the entire planet. In fact, it is so good that there is no orthography that could even be remotely compared. And it is very ancient too, thousands of years old. It is so scientifically derived that the orthography of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), developed only in the 20th century, which are the alphabets used in the dictionary to denote exactly how a word is actually pronounced in any language of the world, is entirely inspired by the Indian orthography. We do not have a haphazard, arbitrary sequence of characters, with consonants mixed up with vowels. We have them laid out in strictly phonemic sequences, like the Kanthya (Guttural), Talavya (Palatal), Murdhanya (Retroflex), Dantya (Dental) and Osthya (Labial). The other thing is about orthographic efficiency. Do you remember the joke of our childhood, why is p-u-t put and b-u-t but? George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that fish could well have been spelt ghoti gh as in rough, o as in women, and ti as in action. He was making fun of the orthography. The English orthography is one of the worst, although not the very worst. The Americans seem to rebel occasionally, and hence they have their own ways of pronouncing words like often and hostile, and spelling words like color, center, gray , dialog and behavior. Orthographic efficiency is about having one grapheme (a character) being mapped to only one phoneme (sound), so that a t would be a t and nothing else, with no ambiguities. And one phoneme is mapped to only one grapheme, so there would not be several ways to write the same pronunciation. At the same time, you should have an orthography that caters to the universe of all possible sounds. There are languages where the p phoneme is not present, or the r phoneme is not present. You can see that it is more efficient to write fone than phone.

The Indian orthography supports single graphemes for such phonemes like ph, bh, th, dh etc. The Indian orthography is extremely efficient because it follows all of these rules strictly, since the very beginning. This was done thousands of years before anyone else thought about these matters. That is why we try to bring back the names of classical figures like Panini, so that you would know about, and take pride in the work they did for us, for our languages, and know the wealth of our languages. And we should be enormously aware of these things. Just like the conception of the place value system in mathematics. This was the place value system of orthography. One had to wonder at the quality of perception of the people of those times, who could think in these ways in abstract fields, and also institute these ideas as public standards. That must have been a time when the king was ready to listen to the sage.

Typographic reform The typography of Indian languages, for whatever historical reasons, became very complex. The complexity created problems everywhere, in their learnability, in implementation into digital systems, like the mobile phone, in display systems, like the segment display systems, and so on. Even if you wanted to put up neon lighting for your shop, it would cost you far more, because it was so large and complex to build. Everything suffered, like printing, legibility, space taken and so on. Interestingly, the scripts that we see today are not very old. In ancient times, we used to write in a script called Brahmi, which was a much simpler looking script. The script that you see in Ashokan pillars, of triangles, squares, circles etc. In the golden age of India, when all the great things happened, that was our script. Even Sanskrit was written only in Brahmi. Devanagari being used for Sanskrit is actually very recent, although you may not have thought so. The scripts that we see today are only as old as the 12th century, and several are more recent. Curiously, this period also coincides with the decline of Indian civilisation, and the advent of Islamic kingdoms and then British colonialism thereafter. Was the introduction of these complex scripts deliberately done in order to keep knowledge exclusive to some people, and away from common

people, with the country consequently dipping into darkness and slavery soon after? Are we ready to think about reforming this? We do not need to touch the language, we do not need to touch the words in any way, we will not have to touch the orthography, the spelling, or the sequence of characters, which is perfect anyway. We only touch the typography, the symbols, the graphemes, the jalebis. The stuff that serves no practical purpose, but only increases the barriers to learning very significantly. Large countries have gone through this kind of script reform in modern times. The Chinese had a 10,000 character script. They admitted it was a barrier to literacy. They reduced it to 3000, and then changed the complex ones with upto 64 strokes to simpler forms, with say 6 strokes. This is reform. And that new formulation was called Simplified Chinese, and that is the mandated script of mainland China since 1958. This is the only script today. The case of script reform of the Korean language in the 15th century, by Sejong the Great, is even older. Till then, the Korean language could only be read by the Yangban (aristocrats), and the rest of the people were illiterate. Hangul was designed so that even a commoner could learn to read and write. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days, it was said. And it was resented by the scholars, who called it names like Eonmun, or vulgar script, because it took away their exclusivity. They shunned it, and ridiculed their emperor. But people were getting literate, including women. An illiterate king who came later tried to banish it, but it prevailed through literature. Today, Hangul is the only script that is used in both the Koreas. That man-made script of Korea is actually inspired by the Indian orthography of conjuncts, with simpler characters combining to form larger characters in order to represent complex phonemes. Also seen in how the jamo characters had been placed into certain phonetic categories. Other countries are also doing such things. Spanish, which is a fairly regular script, has seen a script reform initiative from Andrs Bello, moved by the South American countries, who also use it. Nobel Prize

winning writer, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, has been an activist of that reform movement. We too should be ready to modify our typography, starting afresh from the drawing board, armed with the most modern objectives, and with an eye to a distant future. Then we would have perfect orthography as well as perfect typography.

A unified typography for India There is also the profound opportunity to unify the typography for all our languages into just one, because the underlying algebra is the same anyway. That would mean that anyone could read text written in any language in any part of India, by learning just one alphabet. A very simple alphabet. This would simplify everything and have wide-ranging unifying ramifications, social, economic and political. If we went ahead with such a vision, our neighbouring countries, which also use exactly the same orthography, may also start adopting these simplified characters. Why would they not, their problems are the same as ours. That would unify us in the region, at a far more fundamental level, and it would go down to the common people at a functional level, thus beginning to dilute the all-too-recent historical separations. The languages will still be distinct and untouched, only the typography would be united. So no one is threatened. Also, it would not be the imposition of anyones political hegemony, because the characters would be produced on a drawing board by scientists, and not belong to any existing language. It is not going to be easier to one rather than another. Thats what we wanted.

Towards a new script So, if you were to go on the drawing board to derive such a new typography, what would be the desirable attributes? Lets list down everything that we can think of, in terms of their priority.

The first objective is that it should be very simple to learn, made up of lines which are the simplest for humans to draw, as well as the simplest for display systems, like a segment display system, like in a calculator, or even an electro-mechanical display system. Second, it should be inclusive of all the languages. Every language has a few characters outside what the rest included. It should have a structure that accommodated them at the systemic level, consistent with the orthography, and orthogonal, with no overlaps and ambiguities. While doing this, it should use the minimum number of vectors or segments. Characters should have the quality of being easily recognizable forms, with clear readability from far, and with an eye also towards the needs of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. The same principles actually also apply to human learning and fast interpretation, i.e. reading speed. It should be efficient in space and be a monotype font. A monotype font is when all the characters are of the same width. This makes things simpler. The difference between Serif and non-Serif is when characters need to be spaced differently, for example, when v and w are placed together, are they given the same space? Finally an innovation called Deducibility. If you knew that you could dial the police with 100, and knew the STD code of Bundelkhand, you would know what to dial. If the DM of a district also had a fixed number, you could call him too. The number was not arbitrary, you did not have to look it up, you could arrive at it by rules. Such things are examples of deducibility. Every child knows that it is easiest to remember the multiplication tables of 9, 10 and 11, because they were deducible. Could we make the alphabet deducible? So that children are happy, like they were with the easy tables. It is possible, if we made the forms follow certain easy, sequential rules. Rules through which the shape could be easily derived, without having to remember them. Consonants looking different from independent vowels, dependent vowels being derivates of their independent forms, and consonant conjuncts being created by just writing them next to each other

with a prominent connector. Every character type being given only their designated quadrants. That would be so logical and so easy. If your language is easy, even foreigners will like to learn it. To the young students of IIM who were working with us, I assured them that in a few years they would be parents of little children, and would be faced with the task of teaching their own kids. So each time your child committed a mistake in not putting a slash or a bindi on a character, and would look helplessly in your direction, instead of tapping her lightly on the back of the head, you would have to ask whether the tap wasnt really meant for you, the adults. The children were being reasonable, the adults were being unreasonable. The simplification could provide a great fillip to literacy, and also to the cost at which literacy is to be brought about and sustained. The brain mule can then be given other things to learn, rather than obscure character forms.

Shiva With the above design considerations in mind, I used to scribble in a notebook in the early part of 2009. When I found a particular scheme, it was beautiful. It met all the requirements perfectly. I called it Shiva, and integrated it inside our Panini Keypad product. The Panini Keypad had a feature then that allowed transliteration between all the Indian languages, and also to Shiva. The idea was to make it apparent to all the users who used it, that all the Indian languages had a common orthography, and also introduce the curious name of a language, Shiva, at the bottom of the list, to which each language could be transcribed. A toy to play with, that also made the truth apparent. We also developed comprehensive workbooks on how to learn to write it, and exercise for it, and put up all the material discreetly on our website. If one studied it, one could master the script in a couple of hours because of the innate deducibility. In IIM-A, the students, Rajesh Premchandran and Sidhartha Sinha, and I discussed the feasibility and challenges of introduction of such a scheme, and how one was to go about it. We developed a marketing plan. It was a unique business plan, whose objective was utility for the nation, and we

put a value for it. The value of making literacy easy, with learning costs reduced, unification of our provinces which were divided by languages, and the perennial savings in system designs and implementations.

The unity of orthography of our scripts and Shiva script.

The marketing plan we made included support to individuals and groups who will form Shiva Learning clubs in the countryside, will go to a schools to teach for a period in a week. Distribution of workbooks and material to know more about it. Well publicized contests with rewards for those who have learned the most, introduction of the first books with that script, say as comics, the first road signs and posters written in that script.

We started putting support of the Shiva script into those of our products which were being downloaded by large numbers of people, so as get them familiar with the name, the concept and what it looked like. This was done so that on another day, an informed public discussion on this subject can take place. So that it may not look like an alien imposition to be fearful of, on a subject as sensitive as language. So that people would be aware of its merits, before being affected by any jingoism. The 16-page green booklets that we had been giving out since 2009, carries two pages of description on what Shiva is all about. India has the largest number of illiterates in the world, and is the bane of the nation. With 66% literacy obtained only in recent times, it is still well below the world's average of 84% literacy. China has 99% literacy. A script reform is one of the things that we could do to address it. The idea may sound outrageous or un-doable at first, but people who have heard us speak have felt highly influenced by it, and have readily believed in the need to begin talking about this reform immediately. A friend told me that it is credible only when people hear me speak about it, and not otherwise. So I look forward to being given opportunities where I can speak about it to larger groups, if that will help. We encourage people to download the workbook from our website, and give it a few hours, and thus know it and make it known. If it looks alien to you at first, that is natural, it is alien. The students at IIM with whom we worked, were highly influenced by it and the word went around a bit in the campus. Even to the jury of the competition at its various stages, the idea was very appealing. We were given a cash award of Rs 2 lakhs for winning the competition, and the journalists covering the contest wrote especially about this particular idea in their newspaper reports. The winners were felicitated by Mr Narayanmurthy that year, at a function in the capital. The students also took me to their professor, Dr Anil Gupta, Executive Vice Chair of the National Innovation Foundation, and member of the National Innovation Council. Prof Gupta liked our innovation very much, and took me to his classroom, where we discussed Panini Keypad and its technology with his students. Dr Gupta soon wrote an email to all the important people he knew that he thought ought to be informed about

this, or who could help in some way. But he did not hear back from any of them. He was so hurt by this indifference on the part of eminent technology leaders of the country, that he wrote lamenting this, in a column of his in the Indian Express in 2010.

Plagiarism? On 17 July 2013, there was a story in the Times of India that a professor in IIT-Chennai had invented a scheme to unify the scripts of Indian languages. Talking about exactly the same thing as Shiva! I have written to the editor of the newspaper. I have also written to his departmental colleagues, asserting that this was plagiarism, and citing the published references. The same institution (IIT-Chennai), the same newspaper, something very similar to the Spcial Interest Group affair that took place in 2009. Was there a pattern? Good, bad and ugly

Nokia:episode3 A gentleman named Gregory Smiley visited India in Jan 2011, with the idea of collecting innovation ideas for incorporating into Nokia phones. We had corresponded on email for some time. His primary interest was to showcase our technology on the newly released X3-02 phones, which supported a gesture feature. We did that. One could go to the Next Lists merely by swiping the screen itself. Gregory liked our technology, and saw that it was the right way to support the languages on the phone, and tried his best within the NOKIA establishment to support its introduction. Later in a meeting with him, in which Mujtaba was present with me, Gregory lamented about how our technology was being bitterly opposed by the team in India, who saw in its introduction the end of their careers, reputations and egos. An expose of the feeble nature of their previous work. A defeat of their large team, to a start-up consisting of just four persons.

I have some correspondence from this period, which shows the disdain exhibited by their staff in India, which Gregory was enraged about. We tried to seek his help to enter into Nokias European headquarters, to work directly with the white people as I had said to him, with some frustration. And he tried to do so. Gregory asked us to showcase his X302 phone in the Mobile World Congress where we were going to be exhibiting that year. The following year, when I travelled to San Francisco, he arranged a meeting for us with their Director of Disruptive Technologies, at the Nokia Research Centre at Palo Alto. TheassociationwithOracle We put up a stall every year at the Start-up City Exhibition in Bangalore. During the Startup City exhibition in 2010, our stall was visited by someone from Sun Microsystems, who was very impressed with our work. Sun Microsystems were, after all, the owners of Java and our apps were all in Java then. In 2010, when Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, and there was a lot of management turmoil on the way forward under the new management, teams were sent out to report on what the roadmap should be. A team of senior executives visited India to study the Java development environment, both for Enterprise and for Mobile. We were selected as one of those companies whose Java App could be of consequence in emerging economies, and were asked to make a presentation, which we did. Our presentation went off very well, and we were asked if we would like to present during the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, in the Oracle stall. We were delighted. For the last two years I had dreamt of having a stall at MWC, or at least attending, but could not afford the exorbitant charges. So it was a great opportunity. I travelled to Europe for the first time, and had the opportunity to see the land by train. Oracle asked us to develop the technology in their newly released LWUIT framework, with gesture support, which one of our developers quickly did. And Gregory Smiley from NOKIA wanted to demonstrate it on the newly launched Touch and Type phone they had recently released. The Nokia X3-02 Model, which compelled us to develop this for a 4x3 form factor, and we did that too, to

please him. Our first iPhone products had also been released in January 2011, so I carried an iPhone too for demonstration. Since I needed a visa at short notice, I took the help of my friend at the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi, Mr Jean-Pierre Muller, of AWEX. So I landed in Brussels. From Brussels, I took the train to Lige, where I enjoyed the couchsurfing hospitality of two young women, who lived in a beautiful home in town, by the river Meuse, along which long barges carrying coal from Germany could be seen passing by. And the house was full of books, including comics. Belgium is the world capital of comics, and the birthplace of Tintin. From Lige, I went to Geneva. I had been invited by the International Telecommunication Union to come when I could to make a presentation at their HQ, and so I coordinated beforehand to take advantage of this trip. I presented at the ITU, which went well. That evening at Geneva, I was invited by Ramita and her husband for a party in a local pub. The next afternoon, I took a train to Strasbourg, where I stayed a night with another couchsurfing friend, who taught democracy in the university. From Strasbourg, I travelled to Montpellier, a lively French town. And then to Barcelona. At Barcelona too, I stayed with several couchsurfing friends, one of them a vegan whose cat food was also vegan pellets. One night with an engineer who visited me later when he was in India and one evening with a remarkable gay couple. At the Mobile World Congress, Oracle was one of the prominent sponsors and they had large stalls. In the App Planet section, the Oracle stall was the largest one, right at the entrance. And in that stall, we were one of the 3 other Apps that were being showcased on TV screens, and we were assigned a pod each. There were plenty of Oracle staff deployed in the stall. During the course of the next 3 days, I had a chance to demonstrate our technology to lots of people. There was also a video playing constantly in one of the TV screens, and periodically there were also presentations to seated groups. I spent a lot of time visiting all the other stalls in the large exhibition. The opportunity we had via Oracle to exhibit in the MWC was truly unique, because even if we had paid to get our own stall, it would be have been impossible to benefit from the Oracle branding. We were interviewed by Nokia Conversations during the event.

But the MWC is an event where people just dont have any time to pay attention to anything, because there is so much constant bombardment with new information, from one stall to the next. I had a chance to present to the Head of Engineering of Gemalto, who also had a stall in another hall. I also followed up on that conversation later.

Our pod at the Oracle Booth during the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, 2011.

Oracle was pleased with how keenly we made use of the opportunity. They have been very supportive, and have continued to meet us later too. When I visited San Francisco, I had a chance to interact with their team. They also showcased our innovation during their Java One event, held in Hyderabad in May, 2011. Today we constantly hear about Android. But long before Android had come, Java was already supreme. It was present in almost all smartphones. It had a huge world of Apps and Appstores. It had a fairly robust, secure and complete application framework, with plenty of developers, particularly in India. They just let Java fade away to make way for Android. If Java had wanted, if it had picked itself up at the time Android was growing into a dynamic versatile platform, it could have easily been what Android is today.

Today, Mediatek chipsets have stopped supporting Java on the phones. This has resulted in most Indian OEM phones discontinuing use of Java. The excuse I hear is that it would increase the cost of the phone by a few tens of cents. Phone manufacturers think that Android comes for free. Its not free, as in charity. The users will have to pay in the attention economy and dependence. It is exactly the same game that Microsoft had played and won for the PC. It was about owning the railways tracks on which everybodys trains had to run. TheLGstory I had the first opportunity to interact with some people from LG during the meeting of the Special Interest Group for Indian Languages, in November 2009, for which I had travelled to Bangalore. The LG team invited us to present at their software development center, at Domlur. The man who was instrumental in this was Chatur Gadia, and I think he was being sincere. We made an impressive presentation, and afterwards followed up with correspondence, urging them to move ahead on this. But nothing further happened after a while. Much later, I tried to initiate matters again through their commercial end, which is located in their HQ at Greater Noida in May 2010. We managed to reach the right person and Surjendu, my colleague for Business Development at the time, put in a lot of effort, visiting them and following up the discussions. I too visited them twice, to demonstrate and talk about the many advantages, and our technical competency in building an embedded solution for their low-end phones. Finally a decision was taken, a royalty amount was decided, an agreement was drawn up. We were asked to go to Bangalore to present to their software team, to convince them about how it could be done, and explain the architecture. So I travelled to Bangalore and had those discussions. I convinced them about how easily it could be implemented, how we would offer them a piece of code that could work over an API to their display interface. I also elaborated upon the simplicity of the architecture, the code size, and so on, and they were convinced. The arrangement was that our developer would go to them, and integrate the code with their code base, without us sharing any IP on how the technology worked. I

shook hands with their CEO at Bangalore, a Korean gentleman, who said it was a great risk for them as well as us. I didnt see then what risk he was talking about. As soon as I got back to Noida, we began getting frantic calls from LG. They said the phone on which this would go was to be released in weeks, and we must send our developer right away. I insisted that the agreement between us be signed first before we sent our developer, but there was great pressure. I asked what the difficulty was in putting a signature on their own drafted agreement, which we had already signed, and which was now lying at their Greater Noida HQ awaiting their signature. But they mentioned some pretext for the delay. That it had to be signed by someone first, and so on. It will get signed tomorrow. Tomorrow came, we waited, but there was no signed agreement. It was suspicious, but not so much as yet. Finally, looking at the face of my Business Development colleague who had worked so hard on this account, work that my inaction could render infructuous, I immediately dispatched both him and my developer to Bangalore, to integrate the code. He was already working there for two days, but the agreement was still not signed. Finally, I sent my Operations Manager, Major Saurabh Vikas, to visit the LG office in Greater Noida, to serve an ultimatum that if they did not sign the agreement right now we would withdraw at once. Because there had already been a full week of their tomorrow stories, and this was after they insisted we send our developer, on the promise that the agreement was forthcoming. I told Saurabh to ask for the agreement that we had signed, and if they were not ready to sign it then, to tear it up in their presence and walk out of their office. Saurabh was there, and he made frantic calls to say that LG said they would sign it, but the man was not there, so what should he do. The General Manager in LG with whom we were interacting said he wanted to have a meeting with me, and requested me not to tear the agreement. So it was not torn. In a few hours, I got a call from my developer in Bangalore. The LG guys were forcing him to let them see his code. The same apparently decent guys who had cozied up to me when I was there. I tried to speak to them directly about this breach of trust, but they did not take the calls. I called

my developer, and asked him to delete everything and leave the office, and return to his hotel, which he did. After a couple of hours, one of the LG people from Bangalore called me and said that they knew how the code worked, as if in glee, with a sense of great achievement. The General Manager had the meeting with me in a mall in Noida, in which he tried to gauge what I thought of the whole episode. I told him about the disgraceful conduct of his company. It turned out that LG India had its HQ at Greater Noida, and the LG Soft guys sat in Bangalore. Two different heads, two power centres, and their own politics. He said that there was also politics about why the earlier recommendation from Chatur was not respected then, and thus explained what happened now. He said he would arrange a meeting for me with both the CEOs, for which I would have to travel to Bangalore once again the same evening. Even after all this, I was ready for it, and arranged the tickets at short notice. Come evening, when I was about to catch the flight, when he said that the man had to go to Singapore urgently, and hence the meeting stood cancelled. Maybe one day we will know what really happened. But this is a true story of Lucky Goldstar of Korea. Such companies operate with impunity in India. You may find it hard to believe, but there are just too many people who were witness to the whole thing, at every stage. I do not know whether this attempt to steal our technology was the brainchild of the Korean bosses, or of my fellow Indian countrymen. It was probably my countrymen, trying to do this to suck up to their bosses for brownie points, because their slavish lives are defined by that. Their salaries and their promotions. The Koreans cannot dare to do this without the cooperation of our countrymen. Much later, when I spotted the General Manager in an industry conference, he was careful not to meet my eyes, and left in a hurry soon after. So what happened? LG was practically out of the phone business in India. I hope they are kicked out of everything, and their factories lie abandoned. How did all this help either of the companies? We incurred a lot of wasted expenditures, efforts and time, compromise of our code, sleepless nights

and anxiety. LG lost even more. It makes us wonder whether there was a clever third party who were throwing a spanner, into the chaos of Korean bosses who did not understand the language much, and the complex ulterior motives of their Indian employees. I had seen for myself the calibre of their software team. They would be capable of doing nothing even if they knew how the code worked. And what were patents for? We were too well known for someone to steal and get away with it. The code too has changed over the years. But we had trusted them. A big company, a MNC. Samsung The first interaction we had with Samsung was at their Software Development Center, in Noida, in August 2009. My school friend Karan Bamba had connected me to his friend Sanket Magarkar, who happened to work in the user interface design group itself, as a senior engineer. So I went to make a presentation there. A demo was given, the presentation made, and I met some of their engineers, including a Korean gentleman, who was the leader of the team. Our presentation was translated into Korean and sent to Seoul. But we did not hear from them thereafter. The next interaction we had with Samsung was at their Development Centre in Bangalore, where we had gone for the Special Interest Group Meeting, which they were hosting. After the event, I requested if I could present to them, and they gave me a time and I presented. There were quite a few among those present who had known about us for some time now. There was a Korean, a Phd, who was the leader of the team. The person who probably knew most about whatever happened inside Samsung on this matter, would be Mr Srinivasa Morla. The third interaction with Samsung was with Nitin Gupta. He was one of the people who had attended our presentation at Proto.in, in IIT Mumbai, which had gone down exceptionally well with the audience. When he joined Product Innovation Samsung, as he later told me, Panini Keypad was on top of his mind. So he had got in touch with us, and we were, of course, always eager to present. Nitin had organized the meeting at the Samsung headquarters in Gurgaon, and he had arranged for a lot of senior people to be present to see our

technology, including the head of marketing of the entire Samsung product range in India, Mr C D Choi, a very senior executive. This was in June 2010. The meeting went off very well. There were many who attended, including Ranjit Yadav and Ashish Bansal. At one point during the presentation, Mr Choi asked, is this the best technology in the world? And the others said Yes. That was flattering of course. But we did not hear anything after that. Nitin too left the organization after a couple of weeks. We wondered why so quickly. I had known Mr Aloknath De when he was Head of ST Micro. He is a member of the ITU-APT council, of which I am also a member, and so I had a chance to interact with him. He had been present on the day we had made our presentation at the ITU-APT council meeting at the Assocham House. He had asked us to present in ST Micro later, when an expert was visiting, which we did. Mr De was subsequently made the CTO of Samsung in India, and I sent him an email, updating him about the current state of our products, and especially the embedded implementation work that we had successfully completed for a Mediatek phone. The next interaction was over Linkedin, with Ankush Chatterjee. Ankush was an MBA from Harvard Business School, who had joined the Samsung HQ in India, in Product Innovation. He liked what I said, and we went to give a presentation to his colleague, which Ankush had arranged. Rishi and I travelled for the meeting. I wanted Rishi to critique how I presented. Long after that, I actually got a call from the CTOs office in Bangalore, from a gentleman named Muniraja, who wanted to know the details, so we sent them a good presentation. A few months later, I got a mail from the Samsung Procurement Division, in Singapore. They had learned about us from the Wall Street Journal award story, and we were asked to file our product in their database for evaluation. We did so.

Several weeks later, we got an email from them that they had approved us as a Vendor, although they were not immediately looking at using our services. Ankush Chatterjee informed me that a high powered SWAT team was visiting India from Korea, and they were looking at innovations in India. The screening would be done in 3 stages. I travelled for the first meeting in Apr 2013, when there was one person to whom I presented. He seemed impressed, and said he would be recommending it to the next stage. The second meeting took place on 2nd May 2013, where 5 persons were present. Once again, I presented very well, and they said they would be getting back to us by 17 May, for the third stage of screening. We did not hear from Samsung after that. If they have really not understood what we offer, it is our failing, and they have failed too. If its a form of negotiation, its only they who have failed, because they have failed to understand us. They also seem to have a lack of understanding of how these things really work, because it isnt a touch and go thing. If they intend to violate the IP, like LG tried to do, lets see what our countrymen have to do about it. To me, their mandate will be acceptable. I suspect that a small section of their own middle management are currently acting on behalf of companies that have the most to lose. Something that should peter out in due course. If we are their partner some day, I would be genuinely concerned regarding my partner. And we would also have to be part of cleaning up of the previous mess.

Microsoft:Episode2 Despite the setback of the first fruitless engagement with Microsoft, we were open to fresh engagement. We considered developing for the Windows phone, another new phone. So we hired a developer for that. We built something for it, but very soon discovered that the Windows phones do not support the fonts of any languages. Not Indian languages, not even Arabic, probably because it ran from right to left. It supported

the Russian script, so we developed the products for one or two languages. But then the QA department were such bozos, that they would not approve our Apps for the store. So we stopped developing it altogether. We did not recommence even after the Lumia phone came around. But we had received an invitation to join Microsoft Bizspark in May of 2009. We applied, and were made a member. Later in 2010, Microsoft held a contest for top innovation companies in India, in which we were shortlisted in the top ten. Before the competition, each of the contestants had a phone discussion with Sramana Mitra, in USA. In her blog, Sramana had felt we were a hot contender for the prize. I travelled to Bangalore to make my pitch on stage for the event. The presentation went well, but a member of the external jury asked a weird question. Had we engaged a survey company to ascertain whether people were finding it easy or hard to type? I replied that we could hear the remarks of our users in the various download stores, we showcase in exhibitions, and hear directly from people. We also get calls and emails from our users, but we would not be able to engage a survey company to do a formal survey because this would be too expensive for us. Anyway, there was a big cash award for the competition so there was the usual politics. After the function, the Microsoft member of the jury privately confided to me that he had tried his best, but there were others, who had their own agendas. The organizer was apologetic that we were asked to travel all the way from Delhi. He said that the folks in the Microsoft Development Center in Hyderabad had spoken very highly about us. So it all adds up, somewhere or the other. We got a trophy of being a finalist. A few weeks later, a blogger commented that we were the only company from north India. How is that even relevant? Apparently some people thought like this. Strange indeed. I have a friend from my former school, RIMC, who works in a senior position for Microsoft, on the finance side, in London. We had lived in the same dormitory years ago. He decided to take up my case. He guided

me to build a suitable presentation, and ensured that it was sent to the highest levels within the hierarchy in Microsoft Mobile, putting himself on the line in the process. I have looked at the names in his email, and they go up to the man who reported directly to Steve Balmer. Peter Davis, Peter Mabee, Joe Belfiore, John McConnell, Achim Berg, Jean-Philippe Courtois, Andy Lees, Sanket Akerkar, Brandon Watson, Neil Holloway, Claude Changarnier, Jamie Rawlings, Byron Rader, everyone was in that email. This was in April 2011. The mail described it as an important breakthrough that the sender had found, by a company and founder whom he trusted. It had the Youtube video links, a presentation that we had prepared together, and a summary of what had happened so far including Gachibowli, Hyderabad. The context was the new partnership between Microsoft and Nokia that had just formed. Internal communications between themselves reveal an exchange where the management was keen to examine it, but the engineers were against it. In a mail from Itai Almog, Senior Program Manager of the Windows phone, he says, We dont need this for our kind of phones and we have similar things. I am aware that Mr Joe Belfiore was aware, that on this one, his own team was lying. Actually no one has similar things or similar patents. All that is hogwash. If they have one, could they point to it? We, our patent attorneys, and the patent examiners have examined this well. There is no patent for a dynamic keypad where characters are assigned positions that are not fixed. But these are things engineers can get away with, to preserve their work and careers in the face of external innovation. Its called turf war. AirtelBangladesh One day in Dec of 2011, we got an email from Airtel in India. We had made a presentation to them earlier. Now they wanted to connect us to Airtel in Bangladesh. We talked over the phone, and they were very excited about the product. We were very excited too, of course, because the best response for our products was from Bangladesh. Maximum downloads, maximum users. There were several reasons for this.

Bangladeshis greatly value their language, Bangla. This country went through great sacrifices and suffering, for a liberation that was primarily propelled by the aspiration for their own language. Linguistic nationalism had proven to be more powerful than religious nationalism for the people of Bangladesh. International Mother Tongue Day is celebrated by the UN on 21 February. That is the date in 1952 on which several student protesters in Dhaka were martyred, during the Language Movement of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). 21 February is a tribute to the ethnolinguistic rights of people around the world. Bangla is used everywhere in Bangladesh, including government forms and license plates on vehicles. Bengali literature flourishes. And Bangladeshis write in Bangla on their phones not because they do not know English. They write in Bangla because they love to. There was excitement in the team, and we trusted Airtel. As soon as we signed an understanding, the CEO of the Bangladesh counterpart issued an elaborate press release on the launch of this product for their national language, on the International Mother Language Day, Ekushey February. This was covered by all the major newspapers in that country in Feb 2012. The idea was to offer them a customized VAS product, enabling low cost subscription to the user, for short durations, which could be discontinued or renewed at will. A great deal of development had to be done at our end, which we did. This consumed most of our time and effort, from January to April, 2012. But when the time came for integration, the company and its partners, Comviva, were callous. They seemed to be disinterested in integrating our application into their systems. Weeks turned to months, and they remained unresponsive, apparently unable to integrate a simple architecture. What we learnt is that when you deal with large companies, it is extremely important to extract some of the development cost from them. They too must have their skin in the game. Only when that happens, could they be expected to conduct themselves in a responsible and professional manner. Athirdattemptatretail

In Jan 2013, I met Sujata, who had worked in a handset retail company, and appreciated very much the fact that we could go to the market directly. That the product could be sold in retail outlets, over the counter, as it were. I liked what she believed, and she had many contacts and knew good people who had delivered in the markets of north and south India. Hence we formed a team. Once again, for retail sale of our product, but this time in a more organized manner, with professional help from someone who already had the contacts. The percentage of phones where this technology could run had also gone up by now, and included Android phones, apart from Java phones, which too were growing in number. Our products had also improved a lot since the early days and we had many more languages to offer. Also the font eco-system had improved a bit, as there were now many more phones offering some of the fonts, with better rendering. People had also become more familiar with the concept, for example, with urbanites coming across Facebook posts of friends in Indian languages. And there was Neeraj, who had a great deal of experience in organizing distribution of phones and other products in the north. As he was based in Delhi, it was also easier for me to consult him. So we had several discussions on this and made plans and projections. It was clear that we would have to put our own salesmen in the affiliate phone retail shops. They would initially illustrate how our product could be sold, and as sales picked up, there would be an incentive for retail outlets to get their own staff to learn to promote the product and sell it. As the model would get proven, it could spread rapidly, countrywide, and we needed to be prepared for rapid scaling-up. An initial idea was to get our first batch of salesmen from one of those companies which supply in-store demonstrators. But we decided to have our own staff, hired and trained by ourselves, who would be far better trained by us directly, and would be loyal to our company and not any other. We would start with only 8 to 10 salesmen of our own, and have a training cycle of two weeks before they were deployed. This would then be scaled-up when required. So a new task was begun, of interviewing candidates for sales, selection of the salesmen, and finally their intensive training in all the aspects of

how to pitch, demonstrate typing, install, sell, register, support, based on our past experience. We worked out arrangements with major distributors who were ready to deal with our product. We started with one in north Delhi, where we deployed our salesmen, one per retail shop, in some major community markets. The salesmen were highly motivated, worked very hard, and nothing was lacking. But unfortunately, the results of the experiment were not good. Some sales occurred, but not the numbers that could sustain this. So we discontinued it after a month. The feedback was that people in Delhi were not interested in writing in Hindi or Punjabi on the phone, and most of those who were interested did not have compatible smart phones with fonts, on which our App could run. Our man in south India, who had been travelling, doing surveys, collecting feedback and so on, was more hopeful. So we decided to go ahead with another experiment in south India. We chose a section of north Karnataka, adjoining Maharashtra, where the people spoke in Marathi. Places adjoining Belgaum. The good thing was that with Marathi, the font would be available on more phones. I travelled to Belgaum to personally supervise the launch. I was completely satisfied with the distributor chosen at Nipani, who was to gradually coordinate the promotional effort over the neighbouring areas. He was an elderly Gujarati gentleman, with many decades in the telecom retail business, who was completely aware of both the opportunity and the challenges, compatibility issues and so on. I apprised him of our experience so far, and the difficulties he was likely to face. His son, an enthusiastic young lad of 20, had completely soaked in the technical understanding that would be necessary to provide support. I was taken around to the several shops which would start keeping our product, and I liked the response of the shopkeepers. There were many people who were connected to this, and everyone was enthusiastic. With words of encouragement to our team, I left Belgavi and returned to Delhi. For the first few weeks, we could hear support calls coming from the region. Font issues, handset issues etc, a few registrations. We could see that our guys were working hard. Calls came from retailers in places like

Sholapur and Kolhapur. But gradually this died down. We could see that they had not been able to find a headwind. The conclusion was that, in matters of Indian languages, the country was still asleep. It was still not time to retail this, but there still were a couple of places about which I was hopeful. The pull towards our own languages is a regional phenomenon. Broadcasting Awards In the years between 2009 to 2012, we applied for every innovation contest that we could spot, in India and globally. And we won every one of them. There were twenty. Among the most prestigious ones were the TIECON 50 award, The ET Power of Ideas awards, the NOKIA Innovation Award, the Wall Street Journals Asian Innovation Award, the Nasscom Social Innovation Award, and the Lockheed Martin India Innovation Award. The last was a gold medal, presented to us by the Minister of the Department of Science and Technology. RCR Wireless, a respected trade journal in the United States, declared our technology to be the most innovative mobile application of 2011. We cant but be grateful that the discerning editors of this magazine chose us, from among thousands of Apps out there, which have the marketing muscle to be far more visible. We qualified for the awards for several reasons, the first being applicability to very large numbers, particularly those in the developing countries, and at the bottom of the pyramid. The discerning could also see the labour and innovation that must have gone into building this technology. It was about the obscurity of the space, the niche area of complex Asian languages. Many quickly recognized that this was indeed the most efficient way to do it, and saw the technical breakthrough. And

the fact that the technology was already developed for dozens of languages, across countries, had been deployed, and were being used by people, made all this a terrific and credible story. It was not a proposed solution, it was a working solution. And its vital importance to the telecom world was perceived correctly. And finally, some saw bravery in this being accomplished by an unqualified handful in a start-up with barely any resources or backing. We knew this, we pitched well, and won them all. Rajiv Chatterjee, my entrepreneur friend in Toronto, once asked me why we contested for so many awards, or hungered for them. Heres my reply to him on Facebook:
Why do we participate in Awards? 1. Encouragement for the Entrepreneur and the team, all working for meagre wages. (Motivation) 2. Business is risky. It assures you that you are doing the right thing. (Validation) 3. It tells you - you must be doing it better than others. (Excellence) 4. Free publicity - the press coverage is free marketing. (Publicity) 5. It is also about Positioning. It is easy to be lost in the world of Apps. (Distinction) 6. Note how often companies will write Award-winning before their products. (Credibility) 7. For us crucially it is to tell our potential copycats all large companies that this is already too well-known, theft is no longer possible, only robbery. The biggest reason for us. To turn the floodlights on this. 8. You can get glory or money, you could get both, or you can get none. Get one at least. Glory excites me more. It is more permanent. 9. The awards are usually accompanied by a meal a great meal in a 5 star hotel is good for an ill-fed entrepreneur. The ambience does good for his self-esteem, is part of his grooming, it gives him exposure. 10. You get to network with people, exchange cards. The Jury usually consists of eminent people from the industry, to whom you have thus already sold your product.

I would recommend all start-ups to compete in awards. There is much benefit in it. It takes away a bit of your time, but usually I club my travel

with some sales calls. Applying for the awards again and again refines your product communication to perfection. Public speaking is good too. For us, all in all, awards are perfect. Do not apply for vanity awards, those that ask for money to apply. There are plenty of those. Then there are those from trade magazines, who offer annual awards to their important advertisers. Leave those aside too, for the big companies. UNESCO Literacy Prize In December 2012, we learned about the UNESCO Literacy Prize and we wrote to them. Over the next months, we interacted several times with their staff and regional language experts, and in June 2013 we were asked to apply, along with the recommendation of the India office, which was the Ministry of Human Resources Development, in the Government of India. We made a fine presentation in our application, but our application was not forwarded, although we were strongly urged by the Literacy Prize Secretariat at UNESCO HQ to apply, and this fact had been made known to our Ministry of HRD. This is the wonderful government of our country, so pathetic in its conduct in the eyes of the world.

Exhibitions We have participated in lots of exhibitions. We had a stall during Convergence India one year. For three years we exhibited at Start-up City in Bangalore, to attract the attention of the IT industry. For three consecutive years, we also exhibited in our own stall at the India International Trade Fair held at the Pragati Maidan, New Delhi every November. We have done many other exhibitions, like the Vibrant Gujarat Fair at Ahmedabad, the INFOCOM at Kolkata, a FICCI exhibition in Chennai, one at IIT Kanpur, and many others in the capital. We have exhibited in San Francisco, in Shenzhen, in Beijing and in Hong Kong. And we were at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona.

We did a total of 22 exhibitions, of all sizes, in the 3 years, 2009, 2010 and 2011. Our team was always ready for an exhibition, like clockwork. Every person could represent.

Our stall at the India International Trade Fair, New Delhi. We occasionally went out in the crowds wearing these jackets to attract visitors to our stall. Amit, Sadhna, Mujtaba, Abhijit, Shyam, Saurabh.

Through all these exhibitions, there were lots of opportunities to show thousands of people, all over the country, how to type using Panini Keypad. We always had our green booklets, which we distributed to those who visited our stall. Mediacoverage From 2009 onwards, and especially during 2010 and 2011, we were covered by practically every major media house of India, in some form or the other. Our story came out in the Wall Street Journal twice. We were covered by BBC World. We were on Economic Times quite a few times. In June 2011, Shali Ittaman, of the Press Trust of India, did a story on us, after extensive investigations in the industry. The PTI release was covered by many newspapers in the country, both English and vernacular. Even before that, we had been covered by PTI Bhasha, in Hindi, by Mr Ajay Srivastava, who spotted a story when he came upon us in the Trade Fair stall.

We did get a lot of media coverage, both in print and television, some nationally and some in the regional press. A lot of bloggers too covered us, as they discovered the product in seminars and exhibitions, or on the web. It is important to get your story out there. Its much more credible than advertising. Telling your story in a manner that appeals to a journalists sense of a worthy story, must be your skill. Nasscom gave us an opportunity to present this story to Mr Thomas Friedman, when he visited India in 2011. The Economic Times gave us an opportunity to present to Mr Aneesh Chopra and Mr Vivek Kundra, aides of President Obama, when they were visiting India. Mr Mark Temple, Scientific Officer at the US Embassy, who was supportive towards us, sent invitations for special functions, like during the visit of Ms Hillary Clinton, for an Indo US summit for cooperation on Innovation.

With Thomas Friedman at Nasscom.

In 2013, I got a call from the Channel Four of the BBC, who considered including us in their programme called Horizon, a program on Science that I loved to watch. But they later said they would like to do it some other time. Horizon would indeed have been great! I do think the story had gone around. Unknown to us, there were people in enabled places who were putting in a good word for us. For instance, an Italian NGO had marked us on an Innovation map of the world they had made. Advertising Long ago, I had come across an equation in a management book that said the relation between spending in advertising and resultant sales was a cubic function, meaning that if you spent Rs 2 in ads, you would get Rs 8 in sales, if you spent Rs 3, you would get Rs 27, and so on. That looked very good.

No wonder, there is a queue of companies who want to advertise. There is less supply than demand, and so the inventories of Internet advertisers do not remain unsold. There are about 400 television channels in India, and newspapers keep getting thicker. I mean the ones that are not in the business of news itself. Surely some people were getting the bang for their buck. And you are not spared a moment of existence without some form of advertising invasion or assault. All that I have said about advertising is about big business, which can afford very large budgets of heavy artillery shelling, which ensures that we see a lot of something, quickly, all over the place, in malls, on roads, on TV, everywhere. As a start-up, there is no question of your affording that kind of budget. So what you must do is spend very little, in extremely strategic advertising. What you lack in terms of resources, you could compensate for with micro-management of your spending. There is a magazine called MY MOBILE, devoted entirely to the subject of mobile phones. It has information on the upcoming phone models, what their features were, industry stories, and so on. It had good sales in certain parts of the country. It was quite visible in the capital, from where it was published. I had gone to talk about Panini Keypad to their editorial team, and they had also done a story on us in 2009. We put out some ads in MY MOBILE during 2010. The ads were designed to communicate to the users, as well as to the handset manufacturers. We are happy with the level of response we got from those ads, it was certainly a way to take the story quickly to many parts of the country. There were pictures that showed what the product looked like in each language, which aroused the curiosity of many to try it out on their phones. It was available as a free download. Our advertising was only with the objective of seeding the country, far and wide, with at least a few seeds. The seeds can then grow, creating more awareness in the course of time. To reach far quickly, you use advertising. Spending $10 to put a single fresh water hyacinth in a pond 8,000 kms away can be worth the money.

Even the Buddhas teachings required strong marketing by Emperor Ashoka, the emissaries to distant courts, the spectacular stone pillars with inscriptions in faraway lands. That happened 230 years after Siddhartha Gautama departed. Theartofpublicspeaking All communication, whether verbal or written, speaking to one person or to a group or an audience, is about understanding and connecting to the audience. Speaking at the pace and style suited to them, using the language and content that interests them and makes them aware. When the group is diverse, then the speaking too requires innovation. You choose not to miss out the subtle, while being lay at the same time. This is an art, when you care to communicate with everyone, something that grows with experience. You must look at their eyes and constantly respond to the cues being offered by members of the audience. The desire to couple can indeed be very earnest, dont we sometimes start speaking in the accent of the listener? A CEO must enjoy giving his demos. And he must be capable of answering comprehensibly every question that anyone may ask, and offer the honest correct answer. The good answer, even if the question was not articulated very well, because he should know better where the question comes from, what the question really is. People are happy with you when they have learned something, when you have offered them valuable new insights. Regis McKenna said that the best form of marketing is teaching. Communication skill is the ability of bringing forth complicated ideas and concepts, and delivering this to every member of the audience, correctly, effectively and in its maximum import. It has to be done in a sequence of self evident logical arguments. This is the Socratic way. The art of influencing. The highest stage of it is in passing on new beliefs. A belief is in your own mind, the other believes in another thing, perhaps a feeble thing. The communicator has to take ideas that he himself truly believes in, and pass them on to another, by recreating the logical framework, built with compelling logical constructs. Bringing out the vulnerabilities of the incumbent technology in dramatic ways. Beliefs are unshakable things. But beliefs are infectious things. Beliefs form the

basis of our behaviour. If you can change belief, you can change behaviour. Over the years I have relished every opportunity to speak from a public platform, and I had several opportunities even before starting this enterprise. And when you delight in doing something, and are completely engrossed doing it, you inevitably and quickly get better.

At VAS ASIA Conference, New Delhi

Public speaking helps a lot if you are an evangelist for your technology or business. You can influence far more people when you speak from an elevated stage, than you could by speaking to people one to one. You could destroy the misinformation spread by your competition. The credibility you win is the credibility of your products. No amount of brand expenditure in the standees can stand in for a CEO who is ready to capture the attention of an audience from the podium. As a small company, you generate leads from the podium, and are received well when you go to meet people, The secret is to be completely comfortable with the audience. To respect them, because they are ready to listen to you. And your aim must be to charm them. How could you do that if you are not smiling, and not having a lot of fun yourself? It is the opposite of stage fright, a precious opportunity and privilege. You must have a lot to say, all of it extempore. Dont hide behind a rostrum, and be sure to use sincere, forthright and an approachable body language. And the most effective way is to begin with

a remarkable story. Story telling has never gone out of fashion. Stories also involve picturesque metaphors and words, and effectively describe a lot with little. Public speaking is a gift from God, that can go away just as suddenly, any day. So put it to good use while it is still with you. Strategy To constantly change the strategy, is the strategy. By 2012, it was very clear that all the handset manufacturers in the right places were aware of our technology, so it wasnt lack of representation on our part. The fact was that they were unwilling to adopt it on their own. They would try to deny it for as long as they could. Because it wasnt theirs. The American dream is that if the average American invents something novel and worthy of patenting, he'll find someone to license it. However, for most contemporary inventors, it hasn't worked out that way. The independent inventor today still has an extremely difficult time convincing corporations that he has a product which deserves to be on the market. Most companies have a tremendous resistance to ideas and technology developed on the outside. Lemelson So we had to prove it on the ground. Proving it on the ground would mean getting people to use this technology, more and more, making them aware of it, making it popular. It was the usability battle. We were aware of it. We were one small start-up fighting against all the phone companies of the world. Awareness of our products was spreading alright, but not as fast as we would have liked. The biggest difficulty was that in states in India, people had a very poor understanding of how the sequence of characters must be written in order to write a word, the orthography. We had the job of teaching that. A very slow process.

Thedownloadfunnel Most of those who eventually tried to use our App, drawn to it by its utility, were people who had never installed an App on their phone before. This was going to be the very first App on their phone. Hence, they found it quite difficult to go through all the stages of successfully downloading, installing and finally using it on their phone, the stage that actually mattered to us. There was so much of depletion of potential users in the various stages, that we finally got very few of them at the end of the exercise. I used to describe it as a Download Funnel. We were interested in what we got at the end of the funnel. The following are the various stages where we lost users. 1. People download, but they cannot transfer to phone. 2. People transfer to phone, but the software is not compatible with the platform on their phone. 3. The software is correct, but the user is unable to install. 4. Able to install, but font not present. 5. Font present, but very poor font rendering quality. 6. Font fine, but user unable to figure out how to type. 7. Can type, but unaware of the rules of how to form complex words. 8. An individual who can effectively use the product and does. Only at the bottom of the funnel are the users who fully benefit from the product. They could be as low as 5% of all the users who downloaded. Potential users are lost at each stage, the biggest losses being at the font stage. There would be no such losses when the technology would be embedded on the phone by a manufacturer. There would be no downloading, installation or font issues faced by the user. Science and scepticism

When a new technology proves to be a credible risk to the incumbent one, it is met with scepticism. And science may be used to lend weight to the scepticism. In the textbooks of keypad design, there is an important fundamental concept, of Muscle Memory. That people get used to finding where characters are on a keypad, owing to which it becomes easier to type. Our design does not rely primarily on muscle memory. Muscle memory is valid, and important where that is unavoidably necessary. But for languages with large number of characters, the convenience of typing the character you want with a single key-press, even though you may have had to look for it, greatly overrides any potential advantage from a muscle memory of several key-presses. It is also true that learning-by-doing and muscle memory develops for Panini Keypad too in a while, for any user. For example, the position of the first character of the word within the lists is known, so a user can go for it right away. For the subsequent characters, they are very often on his fingertips anyway. People learn the patterns of key strokes for familiar, often used words, and can type them with little attention. It is because of this fundamental difference that our invention and patent is distinctly different from every other kind of input option from the past, spread over dozens of patents. In every other attempt of the past, what was being preserved was the sanctity of muscle memory. Everyone wanted to use it to their advantage. These are systems where the same characters are always allocated the same keys, in some way or the other. Ours was the only one where any character could be allocated to any position. It is completely arbitrary, and does not try to take advantage of muscle memory at all. In fact, characters are allocated to keys where they would be most ergonomic to the texting thumb, which would mean every character of the alphabet can and does occur on that same key. In a patent dispute on a future day, this unique character of this design is what is going to hold up against every other design of the past. And you must be aware of it. On the other hand, there is Fittss Law of human computer interaction and ergonomics, which states that it becomes exponentially simpler for people to type, point or click on a button when it is bigger. This is clearly

favourable to our designs for the touchscreen phones, where a limited number of larger characters appear on the screen, instead of a large number of smaller characters which are difficult to discern and touch even when on two levels. Scepticism, such as referring to muscle memory to argue against our technology, may be seen as opportunistic, where someone tries to take advantage of the lack of technical understanding of most people, often decision makers too, to pooh pooh a new thing. That itself makes it evident that its a desperate, last resort. They call it just an App, when they know very well it is really a technology for usability, ready for embedding into all kinds of phones, beginning with the lowest cost phones, and going up the product ladder. "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein, 1932.

Diffusionofinnovation Every major technology that the world has seen has taken time to spread. For its merits to be widely known, accepted and introduced. For it to have emerged after destroying the powerful incumbents. Digital cameras replacing film rolls, introduction of ATMs or credit cards by banks, or use of a new drug or a new method of surgery. All these are examples of diffusion of innovations. It took 30 years for a super cool invention like the Zipper to see adoption. The study of how long it takes for a new product, a new technology, to become mainstream has always been a subject of interest for researchers. It is called Diffusion of Innovation, and you will find lots of references on that on the Internet. It is given a gentle S shaped curve, called the Sigmoid function of growth, with Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. The same curves are applicable for spread of infectious diseases, or growth of bacteria in a petridish. The dynamics for each case is special and complex. It is an extremely important subject for research, and that is well known, because so many economic decisions depend on an understanding of this.

We constantly read about products going viral. Things like Messenger apps, Facebook, angry birds, viral videos etc. Perhaps you yourself intend to build products for which you hope to depend upon their going viral, and you make your plans accordingly. So there is a need to thoroughly know about how this works. We too had assumed that our best bet of success was that the product would go viral. It had so many ingredients in it to support such viral propagation, the word of mouth phenomenon. It was a cool thing, unique, the first time, a curiosity item in terms of how intelligent it was, a talking point. So every time a user sent a message to someone which showed in that language on the other phone, the other person would call back to ask how he had sent it. Hence every message sent is a potential seed. A phone is carried by a person at all times, it is often an object of pride and discussion among young people, and the App could be shown around by those who had discovered its magic. If you were in a public place, like a bus stop, and were typing in a strange new way on your phone, someone next to you would be curious, and perhaps ask you about it. Yet we were unhappy with how slowly it was spreading. So it is really about the rate of diffusion. The mathematical treatment of this subject will tell you that a thing will grow virally if, on average, every user gets at least one other person to start using it. Now thats very hard to achieve. Even if the user had made five other people aware, thats not enough because none of those five may have a compatible phone. Or the users could not successfully emerge through the download funnel to start using it. And getting one other user alone is not enough, for that will only bring steady linear growth. You need it to be at least a little more than one. Thats called the viral coefficient. If that coefficient is two, an explosive growth is assured. The next thing is about cycle time. How long does it take, on average, to get a user to get another to start using it? If it is 10 years, it is no good. If it is 10 days, it could be extremely good. For certain things, it could even be 10 hours, or 10 minutes. And the last thing is the network effect, which is something completely extraneous to the previous mathematics. It is when a sufficient density had been achieved, so that people start noting other people using it, and

then they are influenced by peer factors to adopt. That kicks in when the density is already high, and the additional numbers coming in results in truly explosive growth. People have described that packing order as a critical mass. The critical mass will depend very much on the quantity of total substrate in the petridish. For a country as vast as India, that density could take a long time to achieve. If it was Mauritius, you could do it quickly. It is definitely a function of a higher order polynomial. If you looked at the curves of the highest polynomials, you will find that their growth is slowest in the beginning, when the independent axis still shows less than one unit of growth for its domain. So do not be disappointed by slow beginnings. It could merely indicate the slow start of a giant juggernaut. The heavier the thing, the slower it will move in the beginning. We are often given the impression that celebrated products had become popular on their own, through virality alone. That is the press story we are led to believe. In reality, each of these products have required tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money, spent in advertising, press stories, strategic alliances, in-built placements inside other products, and many other techniques, that explain the fact that they went viral. That has made some of the products win, and the other almost equivalent products lose or suddenly disappear from the sky. I used to joke with my friends that our product is growing virally, but it is growing like the swine flu, which is no good, it needs to grow like the plague. Very high viral coefficient, and very fast cycle time.

GoEast,GoWest

China During the course of my stewardship of our enterprise, I had four opportunities to visit China. The first time was when I visited Hong Kong and Shenzhen, as part of the India Sourcing Fair, in 2010. The second time was to receive the Red Herring awards at Shanghai, also in 2010. During that trip, due to a glitch with the connecting flight, the airline put

me up at Guangzhou for a day, so I could also visit the Asian Games which were then on. The third time was in 2012, to attend the Global Mobile Internet Conference at Beijing where we were given a complementary stall after an innovation contest. Having grown a little confident after two trips, I tried to cover some other cities this time. I wanted to see the countryside. I took a train to Tianjin, and then made bus rides to Datong and Taiyuan, and travelled up to Xian on that trip. In Datong are the Yungang Grottos, where there are 50,000 statues of Buddha, large and small, carved into the caves from the 5th century onwards, which have been well preserved, with great care. The work of artists who produced exquisite likenesses of someone they loved, from 3000 kms away, across a huge mountain and large deserts.

With a two humped Bactrian camel at Shanxi province, China.

The fourth trip to China was also in 2012, to attend the Asian Innovation Awards in Hong Kong, sponsored by the Wall Street Journal. I had fallen in love with the Chinese people. The interns we had from China, and their dedication and strength of character was part of that relationship. Several years ago, in Mauritius, I had lived next to a

prosperous Chinese family, and that was the first time I shook hands with a Chinese person, our national neighbours, and known about them and their households. China was the new United States, and one could see it happening wherever one looked. Chinas rise was at first much maligned, then discounted, then suspected, then grudged, then accepted, and is now patronized. The most spectacular thing for anyone to see is the quality of Chinas infrastructure, the airports, the roads and highways, the factories, the industrial parks, the cities, the malls, the public amenities, and the numerous high rise apartments, where every Chinese family actually makes do with very little space. The Chinese were building so many cities at once, that they were consuming half the cement produced in the world. Some of the cities had been built, but no one lived there. Built in anticipation of future need, when the average Chinese would have aged, labour would be less available, and the export economy of manufacturing may not enjoy the same global supremacy. Their population would have stabilized with the one child policy, and they looked forward to a prosperous life for everybody in the future, with adequate resources for everyone. Even the superb highways of the North were relatively sparsely used, because there was not much of traffic I saw, compared to India. No long queues of trucks. China has the same population as India, but it has three times the area, and hence much more resources. In Taiyuan, I saw a slum in the middle of the city, which was now mothballed because all the residents had been sent to live in some of the high-rise apartments that had been built for them elsewhere. The Chinese people did not have land rights. China was strange, I could not understand everything or add up everything, and it Im sure would take a lifetime to figure out. When you see the ancient buildings of China, like the Forbidden City, or the Great Wall, then too one gets the impression that China had been very wealthy and powerful even in the past. The long tradition of ingenuity of the Chinese in their everyday lives, with their tools and practices, was visible everywhere. The palaces, old buildings and the wood work, extremely tasteful and artistic, every piece built with great deal of effort and thought. But today, the Chinese themselves, in their western clothes, look asynchronous, just like us, tourists from the rest of the world. They

called themselves the Middle Kingdom, and considered the outsiders barbarians. That is true even today. Whereas in India, we discounted whatever was our own and sucked up to western ideologies. Our minds were colonized. When I saw such a wealthy country, I thought about what must have gone into its making. I think the secret is the discipline of the people. You could see that they respected themselves, because they worked so hard. It was very hard to find a person who was obese. They were also habitually ethical, much more ethical than Indians are. You dont know the language, cheating would be so easy, but they didnt. They respected law and order, which was strictly enforced. Security guards were everywhere, not to intimidate, but to assure. You could see from their faces that they were rural kids, overwhelmed by the urban prosperity they were in charge of, but if you crossed the line they could react with the undiluted authority of the Chinese government behind them. The death sentence was common and not delayed upon. A country of more than a billion people had one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. The coastal cities were extremely safe, even for a foreigner. The government may be corrupt at the highest levels, and crony capitalism is common and a bad thing, but corruption was less common in the life of the common people. Everything was extremely systematic, and every man or woman assigned to a role did his or her job well, and with pride. Women drivers could be seen in inter-province buses. These are the reasons for their spectacular success today. It is also true that a section of the Chinese people were becoming very rich, very quickly. An economic divide and cruelty to the masses was responsible for a revolution, at some point of their history. Today, the rich are not yet seen as oppressive, rather they represent something that most Chinese people want to become, somehow, during this ongoing transformation. The true contemporary history of the Chinese for English readers is only coming out now. They had begun from almost where we were in the middle of the last century. That early period was full of idealism, patriotism and very large sacrifices that affected everyone. Their country had never been colonized like ours, but their large coastal cities were compromised by western powers. Their imperialist enemies were the

Japanese, who planned to colonise the entire country. The Chinese were not in a position to extricate themselves militarily, although a deadly war was fought, which cost a million lives. There was also a civil war on in the countryside, from the south to the north, between two powerful armed factions, both with the aim of unification of the country, but under two different ideologies, and supported by the superpowers. With the victory of the Allies in the 2nd World War and the defeat of Japan, came their opportunity to liberate themselves, just like in India. And it is that opportunity that they seized and then rebuilt their country. The mandate of the people went with the faction that was perceived to be incorrupt on that day. When they cleaned up their country through the continuing revolution, the public shaming of people who were perceived as corrupt and profiteers was so high, that they committed suicide on their own. Apparently, for a time, it was dangerous to walk in the pavements of Shanghai, for the fear of falling bodies. This was also happening in the villages and towns, a purging of hoarders, with related injustice. And then came the Great Leap Forward, from 1958. That leap was much maligned by many, but today is recognised for its resolve, which through many rights and wrongs, but great sacrifices both ways, built China in 50 years to where it is today. But it could not have come about as fiercely as it did in the last three decades had it not been for the pragmatic leadership of a statesman named Deng Xioping, who met patriotic scientists of his country more often than he met its politicians. America TIE, or The Indus Entrepreneurs, was a club of entrepreneurs of South Asian origin, both veterans and aspiring. They had chapters in many important cities of the United States, and also in Delhi and Mumbai, where members networked through events. Many of these people had held powerful positions in the tech industry, had run their own companies, were strongly networked, and many had become investors today or were associated with VC firms. Vinod Khosla or Kanwal Rekhi, for example.

The TIECON conference that is held every year at Silicon Valley is the biggest event of the TIE fraternity, and it has grown in popularity over the years. As a run up to the TIECON, they also organize the TIECON 50 competition, during which companies from all over the world apply to become one of the 50 top companies that a panel of jury selects. 10 each from Software, Internet, Mobile, Energy and Life Sciences. We had applied for the TIECON contest, and were selected in the top 50, which offered us an opportunity to present during the TIECON. I thought this could be an important opportunity to showcase our technology in the heart of Silicon Valley, where virtually every attendee would be from one or other of the important tech companies there. As well as a means to attract the attention of potential investors and technology watchers. For a little extra fee, we could also have a stall during the conference, and so I opted for the exhibition also. I travelled to San Francisco in May 2011. It was a wonderful trip to a beautiful land, and was packed with so many events. So let me describe it a bit. Its also an important city to know well if you are going to be in the tech industry. Whenever I travel overseas, I always try to stay in peoples homes, as a member of couchsurfing. This time I had written to many people, and had heard positively from two of them. One of them was David, who was 50 years old, single now, and lived near Los Gatos. I arranged to stay a few days with him during my trip. I also make sure I read up everything about a place before I travel there, getting completely familiar with maps, roads, public transport systems, amenities etc. I then try to immerse myself into the place, like a local. San Francisco and Los Angeles are the two most important cities of the state of California, along the hill-studded Pacific coastline of United States. SFO to the north and LA in the south, connected by a 500 Km highway through the Central Valley, along which are some of the most cultivated soils, in which live also a large number of our Sikh community. Northern California was the seat of the high tech industry, and Southern California the center of media and entertainment, marked by Hollywood. LA had crime and crowded, unruly, honking traffic on its streets, and SF was free of crime and had quieter streets.

Silicon Valley, which was in the North, has grown up around a large inlet of the sea, covered by mountains on all the sides, which trapped the ocean fog that entered the inlet, thus cooling the valley even in summers. In the middle, is a very large, blue lake of ocean, with highways that encircle it. Silicon Valley is set on its shores, with dales in all directions. It is densest in the south of the inlet, in the largish city of San Jose, and on its western shoreline. On its eastern shoreline are places like Fremont, where the large Indian community of mostly tech workers lives. In the north shore is the city of San Francisco, which is a big city in a hilly terrain, with several skyscrapers. Over the ocean inlet is the famous Golden Gate bridge. I had to go to San Jose, which was south from the international airport. San Jose also has its own airport, which is mostly for domestic flights. So I took the BART Rapid Rail from the airport to Millbrae station, where I could board the Caltrain that goes to San Jose. Along the Caltrains picturesque route I was delighted when the train stopped at places like Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View. These were all familiar names of places, which I had read on the Read Me files of software for decades. Places you read about constantly, if you read anything about Silicon Valley folklore, or tech stories. The weather was most charming, there was a fine chill in the air, the sky was a perfect blue and the people were all cool. After a couple of changes I reached Winchestor, where I had to call David to pick me up. But I didnt have a local phone yet, so I requested someone to lend me his phone and paid him for it, but I got Davids answering machine. There were no taxis in sight for a long time. Someone said one would have to go to the nearby mall to find a cab. I was having some difficulty because I was also carrying my exhibition luggage on my person. Anyway, I reached the mall and got a new local GSM SIM and called David, who arrived to pick me up. The telecom world in USA was less competitive than India, with far fewer number of major players, and so prices were relatively much higher. We decided to have our dinner at a restaurant in the mall. David had a nice home on the side of the hills that lie to the south of San Jose. His home, like every other home there, had a nice garden and

backyard, which were full of flowers, violet, white, blue, red, including some unfamiliar flowers and hedges that fascinated me. People had brought flowers here from every part of the world, all of which grew happily due to the temperate and cool climate. A metaphor of the place in general. He showed me my room, and I settled in. The next day, he took me around to meet some of his friends, and I also confided to him that I was in need of an assistant to help me in the exhibition. He quickly arranged a suitable person for me. His own nephew, Daniel. His nephew came in his car the next morning, and picked me up on our way to the Santa Clara Convention Center. There we set up our stall nicely, and I taught Daniel about our products and how to represent them in my absence. Our stall had a very good response from the Indian community, who tried it out on their phones and iPads. People congratulated us and left their cards and business brochures. We even won an award for one of the best stalls in the exhibition. WomenNow TV did an interview with me. There was a bit of a buzz about our innovation among the delegates, who shared it with each other and visited our stall. I also bumped into several people I knew, members of Tie from India. I visited the stall of PlugnPlay Tech Center, an incubator in the Silicon Valley. I thought this would be a good place to be in, if we were ever to have a presence here. It would give us far more and constant access to the world, and enable us to take advantage of its opportunities. The next day, my presentation in the afternoon went off extremely well, and there was a lot of interest from the people who attended. We got our trophy. We were asked to come and present at the Intel HQ after the weekend, and several investors wished to meet us separately on other days. I was interviewed by Startup America as well as by Tiecons own video production team, where I put across our points charmingly. There were many people I could pitch to individually, demonstrate the technology and hear their opinions and advice. That year, we were one of the two Indian companies in Tiecon 50.

Being interviewed by Startup America as a Tiecon Winner.

Over the weekend, David arranged a pizza party to inaugurate his newly made DIY Pizza oven in the garden, which I also helped to build, with bricks that came from a supermarket in paper bags. Plenty of guests came by in the evening for the potluck party, including couchsurfers. I discovered what is called an artichoke, being unfamiliar with how to eat it. I tried some of Davids Cuban cigars and wines, and answered everybodys questions about India. David was an inventor of innovations for the electron microscope. He ran a company that offered consultancy on these matters. He owned a small private plane too. At Davids place, I met the formidable innovator and entrepreneur, Mike. He had done a lot in his life, building innovation companies. Now retired, he taught the hot statistical subject of Map Reduce at Hackerdojo, where employees of Google, HP, CISCO and every other major name, showed up to update their knowledge. He told there were quite a few Indians among his best students. After the weekend I shifted to a motel in downtown San Jose, but I was helped by a friend from my school, RIMC, Bhaskar Ghosh, who came to pick me, and took me to a Greek restaurant in Cupertino for lunch, very near the Apple campus. I think at the restaurant, Bhaskar parked his car in the same slot where Steve Jobs may have been accused of wrongful parking. Then he dropped me to my motel.

The motel had Internet, so it was easy to connect to people. There was a complimentary breakfast that could fill you well for the better part of the day. There was a presentation for me scheduled at the Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto. Kind-hearted and beautiful, Mita Das Mayoraz, whom I had met at Tiecon came to pick me up to take me to the Google campus where her husband worked. I had the multicuisine lunch at Google with them, like the employees. I showed our innovation to him, and expressed the wish that we would like it to be shown to the Android team. They were trying to get in touch with the team of Andy Rubin for me. On the way, Mita showed me the street near Stanford where many of the multimillionaires of Silicon Valley lived. They were simple homes, just like any other, but they were the most expensive. There were no security guards or servants outside, which you would expect to see around a millionaires home in India. Then she dropped me off at the NOKIA office, where my meeting was scheduled. The meeting with Dr Quinn Jacobson, Director of Disruptive Technologies at the leading NOKIA Research center, was coordinated by Gregory from the Europe office, who wanted us to show our stuff here. We were treated very well, and I did make an impassioned pitch with all the information. I asked them to get it evaluated by someone in their office who knew an Indian language. Then I took the Caltrain back to my motel. On another day, I also gave a presentation at the Intel HQ, also at Santa Clara, where the Intel Museum is. I took a taxi there, and the cab driver was a Russian, so I showed him our Russian keypad and he liked it very much. While here, he didnt have a phone in which he could write in Russian, and this would only be an App on his existing phone. At the Intel HQ, my presentation was excellent. Sridhar Machiroutu was the one who had organised the meeting, and he had brought in quite a few people from their research team to see our demo and presentation. Then there was a meeting scheduled with Pagemill Partners, the same M&A people who worked with Nuance. Gaurav Bhasin, who was a Director of Pagemill Partners, was present during our pitch at Tiecon. He had arranged a meeting close to the Intel office, because they were afraid I would not be able to make it to their office on time on my own, which was probably correct. The meeting was with Nels Nelsen, one of the

MDs of the company, and Gaurav also attended. It took place at one of the swanky restaurants in the vicinity of Intel. It went well, in my view. I think I had said that I would like to prove the technology on the ground before I wish to get acquired at such an early stage. Keep in touch, he said at the end of the meeting. And we did actually send them updates from time to time. On another day, I had a meeting scheduled with the Oracle folks, in the open spaced Sun Microsystem campus at Santa Clara. They knew us well from before, and I had the opportunity to show the tech to their in-house engineers. But the place was already looking sleepy; Java for phones was being allowed to slip away. On the way back, I hopped on to a tram for a small excursion, which took me through a neighbourhood where, after a while, almost all the people in the tram were wearing sweat shirts to support their home hockey team for the match. The Sharks against the Canucks, who had come from Vancouver. I had seen notices in a strange new language, not Spanish, in certain bus stops, and when I enquired I learnt it was Vietnamese. San Jose has more Vietnamese residents than any single city outside of Vietnam. One day I went to the Stanford campus. I had got a freak email about an exhibition being held there, and since I was in town I thought, why not. When I reached there it, turned out to be an exhibition and contest of innovations by its own students. That was a very nice thing, because here I was at one of the worlds best universities for technology, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Here was a chance to see how good it gets, and what I had missed. There were many nice innovations, of interesting diversity, across various engineering fields, but I did not think there were any that some of the best Indian engineering students could not think of, or build, if given the equipment. But there was one exhibit which was truly exceptional. This was by four students who had already passed out, and they had a computer which was designed to detect lies from the gestures of a speaker. Let me explain. Lie detection is currently done by polygraph tests, for which a person needed to be wired up. It was invasive, time consuming and probably needed a court order. This machine had cameras instead,

that kept track of eyes, pupils, voice stress, heat map, movement of brows, nose, chin, head, arm movements, everything, numerous different parameters, all of which was being fed to a statistical analyzer as training data. The field of statistics was such today that one could be sure that some correlation would emerge out of it all, which would allow the detection of lies. Because we definitely do something when we lie. For example, the increased brain activity for the effort of lying, or the stress, could show up as a syndrome of symptoms, in non-verbal cues that most of us cannot ordinarily detect, but which the machine could. The right eye or the left eye are really protrusions of the right brain and the left brain, and lying needed creativity, said to be a function of one of the hemispheres. This would be very useful at border checkposts, immigration counters, for airport security, and so on, where the system could flag a suspicious case for a thorough check of the baggage or the car. The machine was still collecting training data, but its future seemed bright. This exhibit was the winner of the contest, and got a few thousand dollars right away from the Dean. The Stanford campus reminded me of the National Defence Academy, which was similar in terms of impressive, old world, grey buildings with red hats, columns and arches, long corridors and impressive avenues abuzz with student hustle. Stanford is made of bricks, while the NDA is made of stone. I walked around the beautiful campus, looking at the girls going by on bicycles. Beauty and brains I thought, while I waited for my friend Anirban to come and pick me up. Anirban was a recent alumni of Stanford Business School, and was now Director of Sales at AMD, a very senior executive who was down to earth, charming, and was visiting the city for work. What a coincidence! We had been neighbours and friends as 7 year olds in faraway Agartala, when we used to ride the bicycle in half pedal with Alok, Rana, Bittu, Parvez and Bakun. He took me to the Fishermans Wharf, for a view of Alcatraz, and helped me buy a jacket because I felt cold, it was May. I had made a young friend named Satvik at Tiecon. He came to pick me up one day, in his open top car, and took me on a drive along the Junipero

Serra freeway. Then on the way to the Half Moon Bay, we stopped at a farmers shop to buy several kinds of locally grown berries, strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, all antioxidants for additional longevity in paradise! Then we met the breezy Pacific coastline, where tiny yellow flowers grew all over the sandy grass. We had coordinated to meet another school friend of mine from RIMC in the afternoon. SK Upadhyay, alumni of CMU and then worked for McKinsey, he was now the founder of an 80person company named Lattice Engines, that was in the field of sales intelligence. His office was in the iconic, black, zebra striped building that can be seen in the distance from the main highway to the airport. SK, or Shashi as he was now called, took over the rest of our day, as we laughed our bellies off remembering some of the stuff from our old world, and how I made fun of them. The gracious man that he is, SK took us to see the California Redwoods, the Golden Gate bridge, a Korean restaurant for a kimchi lunch, and then for a drive around the San Francisco city, which in some places had streets on ramp-like inclines. We drove through Castro, the famed gay and lesbian capital, and I had to ask if I could assume that the two men walking by together were gays. I was assured they probably were. There is a part of the town which was very spiritual, with Yoga, Buddhism, Meditation, Tarot cards, magic carpets, and such like being very popular. Then we went to a large park, full of people who were just lazing on its slopes. A bit like a shot from the 60s California, which I had longed to see. Finally, we went to a Mexican restaurant for a dinner, well before sunset for the days were long here, and suppers were eaten early. Shashi then put me into the Caltrain back to San Jose. Before we said goodbye, SK gave me a book, saying I had probably read it. I said I had heard a lot about it, but hadnt got a chance to read it. It was The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, the famous psychologist and linguist. The next day, I packed and settled the motel bill, before leaving for the airport. I had been so busy that I hadnt been able to visit the Pink Poodle, the gentlemens club, also something I had planned to do. I picked up some T shirts from the airport, which I wear every now and then to office. San Francisco, they read out aloud, in various colours. I was helped there by so many friends.

Northern California is a beautiful place, in every respect. It was a place where the pines, the giant Redwood Sequoia, grew within miles of the palms. It was cool in summer and fine in winter. There were flowers growing everywhere, and most homes in the Bay Area were single or two-storied, with gardens. Peoples lives were very busy, with many activities packed into it, and life was planned to accuracy of minutes on a calendar carried in a smart phone. Public transport was not very accessible, but friends were willing to drive miles to pick you up. The kids were all multicultural and they were very happy in it. A melting pot of the east and the west, the place was truly magical. Almost everybody seems to have worked for the computer industry, either hardware or software, at some point in their lives. Everyone understood the language of innovation, products, venture, risks, equity and opportunity, having seen a lot of that with their own eyes, even the cleaning lady. People failed and succeeded many times in their lives without losing their belief in themselves or their friends. It had the perfect climate for start-ups to flourish, and had a long culture of it, with many helpers in the ecosystem. The people who made the world of technology work were living down the lane, in approachable homes, where you could just ring the bell. When Swami Vivekananda visited America, he had visited San Francisco too, in the year 1900. He had come from Los Angeles, and then travelled to the eastern States. While at San Francisco for several weeks, he lectured, held classes in meditation, and formed societies. He had stayed at peoples homes, in places like Turk Street and Oak Street, and visited Chinatown often. He had been taken to the theatre and art gallery, visited the Golden Gate and Cliff house, and invited to many dinners which he enjoyed. He lived in a tent at Camp Taylor, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and also lived in the Home of Truth at Alameda, across the Bay, closer to the other great university, Berkeley, where he had an artist friend, Mr Charles Neilson. It is in America that Swami Vivekananda was discovered by India. Till then he was a controversial, non Brahmin, meat-eating, occasionallysmoking, a western educated monk, who spoke about clarifying Hinduism at the roots, and had many enemies amongst the entrenched Hindu holy order of various temples. He was also deeply resented by others, for the patronage he received from some.

Learningtodo The story of the Decimal system If you are an Indian reading this, you need to know this story very well, because it should be a matter of our greatest pride as Indians. It is not the Taj Mahal, or any such monument. Its something that made the modern world possible. Most Indians are apprised of the fact that India is credited for the invention of zero by the world. But there is a little mistaken understanding. It is not true that the concept of zero was invented by the Indians. If you gave a kid five oranges and took away all the five, and asked him how many he was left with, he would say none. The word none, or nullity is the concept of zero, and it was a familiar concept in all cultures and languages since antiquity. It doesnt matter what word or symbol they used. What the real invention was is the place value system, the decimal system in particular, within which, for the first time, there was the symbolic representation of the concept of zero as a mathematical digit. That is the clarification we must be aware of. Zero is not the big deal, the zero in the decimal system is a very big deal. The place value number system was the breakthrough. So lets look at it. The number systems of antiquity that we are aware of, the Greek numbers, and then the Roman numbers, both similar actually, were based on numbers having names. A thousand was a name. A million was also a name, and so on, for practical purposes. If a number in the middle was to be described, it would be described in terms of other numbers in the middle, which were also names. Like one thousand less than five thousand and six tens and four added to it. That was the system. It worked. It could be considered cumbersome, because arithmetic like we do today would be impossible, but it was the best system known until the 12th century in that part of the world.

But in India, some time between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, someone we dont know, worked out a new system which is today called the place value system that we are all familiar with. The discovery must have been based on the understanding of the constant, amorphous, continuous and infinite nature of the number line, on which the cycles of any pattern would have to be necessarily itinerant. And then the master stroke of a sophisticated representation of the numbers based on the above premises, which would make numbers completely arbitrary thereafter, with no names but only a sequence of digits. In this system, a sequence of digits only represented one number, and a number always represented only one such digit sequence. To the person who invented the place value system, the variability of the index was surely evident, but he chose the index as ten, based on the number of fingers on our hands, which were often used for simple arithmetic. We have no knowledge of how numbers were described in India until that invention. The merit of the invention was recognized early and applied universally in the country, because all the documents of a mathematical nature from ancient India describe numbers in the decimal system. It went to the Arab world in the 8th century through the trade routes. The Arabs were going through their own golden age then, with much mathematics of their own. But it probably took a century or two to become the reigning system in the Arab world. The Arabs had put the new number system into great use, and it was already in the hands of common people, because they were essentially traders who traded between Europe and Asia. We find that in the book, Liber Abaci, by Fibonacci, the celebrated mathematician of the European renaissance, who lived in 12th century Italy, there is a description of the new system. He had the chance to learn about this system because he spent his childhood in Algeria. He tried to get it introduced through Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful figure of the Middle Ages, and someone deeply interested in Science and Mathematics. But there was great resistance to it, under different guises. Accountants felt their livelihoods were threatened, and the clerics were against it because they assumed it was Islamic in origin. The zero in it was the easiest to attack. Zero represented the void, that which God destroyed to create the Universe, so zero was hell, and so on.

It was not adopted in commerce, and science began to use it only gradually. The Emperor failed in introducing it, despite his great influence. In 1299, the government of Florence had outlawed use of Arabic numerals, using the pretext that it could be used to cheat customers, or send secret codes, hence the word cipher, from sifr, Arabic for zero. But even before Fibonacci and Frederick II, there had been Pope Sylvester II, who had tried to introduce this in the year 999. A prolific scholar and a teacher, but for all his efforts at various reforms, it was widely rumoured that he was a sorcerer in connivance with the devil. It is said that in his system he had tried to keep the zero symbol out of it. It was only by the time Columbus set foot in the New World in 1492, that all of Europe was using the Decimal system. It had taken 2 centuries. Today the entire world uses it. The Decimal system was the change that made complex arithmetic possible, and brought about the world of engineering that we see today. Much later, the computer used another place value system, this one with the index of two, called the binary system. Why was it so difficult to introduce the place value system, when its merits over the previous system were so self evident? Would you engage in even a minute of argument on this today? Why did it take so many centuries? The introduction of the decimal system into Italy proved to be one of the harbingers of the European renaissance. It is pertinent to quote Nicollo Michiavelli, a contemporary of that period, who wrote about the times. He was a keen observer of society and an adviser to kings. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had the actual experience of it."

In the India Digital Summit held in Jan 2012, I was one of the speakers. I chose to present the story of the place value system to the audience, as a case of diffusion of innovation. A story of diffusion of an Indian innovation. If you only want him to be able to cope with addition and subtraction, then any French or German university will do. But if you are intent on your son going on to multiplication and division assuming that he has sufficient gifts then you will have to send him to Italy. German Merchant, 16th century. (Quoting Georges Ifrah, historian of mathematics,) KnowingSteveJobs,2012 I was first hooked to Steve Jobs after hearing his Stanford commencement lecture. Here was a philosopher in businessmans garb! Thats when I became keen to know more about this man. I had never used an Apple product in my life, because they were always expensive, and I felt they were hyped beyond their merit by a charisma that extended from the man into the brand. His eccentric ways, and how his stories were told with committed devotion or telltale bitterness by yet others both helped. I saw, on television, people queuing up the night before to buy iPods or iPhones, just like we had seen people queuing up to buy Harry Potter books. It was more a cult-like phenomenon, ritually participated in by the devoted, rather than about the merits of the products themselves, and the participant media ensured that we got to see it happening. Or so I thought. Because I did not know any real, rational people who would do anything like this, or become hysterical for a consumer device, as shown on television. I think the appropriate reaction to be face to face with something truly great is to be calmed by it. I looked up every bit of video I could find on him, anywhere, every bit of biographical information, every note, anecdote or description by anyone. The video which I liked most was the one with Jobs sitting in a red

couch, at the All Things Digital Conference, 2007, where he is asked what he thought the rules of success were. This is what he said. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing and its totally true. And the reason is because its so hard that if you dont, any rational person would give up. Its really hard and you will have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you dont really love it, if you are not having fun doing it, you are going to give up. And thats what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being "successful" in the eyes of society and the ones that didnt. Often times, its the ones that were successful; loved what they did so they could persevere, when it got really tough. And the ones that didnt love it, quit, because they are sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you dont love it. So its a lot of hard work and its a lot of worrying constantly. And if you dont love it, you are gonna fail. So you gotta love it and you gotta have passion. And I think that is the high order bit. The second thing is you gotta be a really good talent scout. Because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you gotta figure out how to size people up fairly quickly. Make decisions without knowing people too well. And hire them and see how you are doing, refine your intuition. And be able to help build an organisation that can eventually build itself. Because you need great people around. I think that is the most succinct take on entrepreneurship I have ever come across. It says what matters the most. I particularly like the part about worrying constantly. And if you see the video, you should note how he stretches the word hard. It is as if he was trying to actually indicate how hard it really is. And the terribly important thing he talks about in the end, is about being able to size up people fairly quickly. Its

not about the potential employees alone, its about your potential partners, to detect a friend or a foe, people who would be happier if you failed, because these are some of the most expensive mistakes. But you have got to make those decisions quickly. If you are a mindful person, after only a few mistakes you would have learned something. The most difficult part of arriving at a partnership relationship is to arrive at a realistic understanding, appreciation and agreement on how the two sides value each other's role. Very often, while working with an inexperienced or uninformed partner, it could be a very one-sided assessment of the criticality of the role he would be playing. Like all marriages, such relationships are about expectations. And it is not a good idea to engage with anyone who wants to engage with you. Sometimes, someone wants to engage with you only with the intention of eating your lunch. After Steve Jobs biography, by Walter Isaacson, became available, I had a chance to completely internalize his life and thinking, to see all the parts for myself. I would know the context of almost everything known about him, as available in the public domain. I quote him often in my conversations with friends, on almost any topic. I think I would be able to tell you what was in his mind even at times when he was perceived to be heartless towards others. This one life had almost everything that I needed to know. He is also the most spectacular example of an entrepreneur. So why is he the most spectacular? The company that Steve Jobs created went on to introduce the Personal Computer to the world, and thus revolutionized the life of its citizens within a couple of decades. That computer was full of all the innovations he could find. It became a very profitable company. Eventually, after a power struggle, he lost. The board made him leave the company that he had created. Many years later, he was asked to rejoin that same company, at a stage when it was about to go bust within 90 days. He rebuilt the company in a decade, to become the most valuable IT company in history, exceeding the market capitalization of Google and Microsoft put together.

During this second tenure, he worked on an annual salary of $1, demonstrating his rejection of personal wealth, even though he was in the business of creating copious amounts of it. He lived simply throughout his life, with very few requirements. In the early part of his life, he went around barefoot, to say the same thing through action. By the time he died, everyone in the world acknowledged that no one like him had lived in living memory. An entrepreneur who had revolutionized the computer, the mobile phone, the personal music player and animation films. But the context of his life is Silicon Valley, which is really very, very different from the dynamics of the developing world. People say Steve Jobs was great because he had a great eye for producing great looking designs for his products, or that he was great at marketing. No, no, no. He was into everything. That is why his company produced those great products, which worked so well in the hands of the users. Jobs had fixed all that plumbing within the organization that dissipates and creates inefficiencies, and he removed bozocity. He was a system level thinker, on how the organization should actually work. The organization was a system just like any of his devices and their internal parts. In Pixar, he had designed the office building in a manner that will lead to more interaction between members from unrelated departments that need to talk to each other. It is because of this that his company could do everything. He had built a fully automated production line for building PCs in 1985, which could produce one computer every 27 seconds. They did great retail on the ground, and they did great retail on the Internet. They could produce computers, they could produce music players, they could produce phones, the chips, the factory, everything. Just one of each kind, and the best in their own species in each case. How? The company could completely take care of vertical integration, from design to selling to users, entirely by themselves, without any dependence anywhere. They were not interested in fraternizing industry meets. In fact, in the Mobile World Congress held every year at Barcelona, the biggest exhibition for the mobile world, there isnt even an Apple stall. Their devotees attend their own event annually, and thats it. Steve Jobs hardly ever spoke in others events.

There must be a very strong reason that Steve Jobs believed in vertical integration of everything. Why had he rejected the world of you rub my back and I will rub yours, even if our products are not the best? He knew that the product is truly central to the existence of an enterprise. He had put every other thing downstream of product creation. That is not at all common. If you had a great product, there could be a hundred different ways to solve all the other problems. If you did not have a great product, having strengths in other areas, great tie-ups, and cousins in the Congress, would be of no long-term help. There are companies where the CFO is more important than the product head. Isnt that the case in most companies? Steve Jobs is someone who knew that you dont produce innovation by naming a new building after it, or appointing a Vice President for it, and then putting only your second rung in charge of it. Someone you no longer wanted in the heart of the action. Innovation is not produced by allocating a big budget at the board meeting, hoping that it would now happen on its own. When faced with any problem or challenge, the truly innovative bring into immediate application anything that they may have ever learned, from anywhere. So the most innovative is one who has noticed, registered as many tricks as can be, can bring that knowledge to new application, and can also extrapolate and mix varied tricks to make some of his own. The innovator loves to face challenges, which allow him to express himself. Innovation happens in an organisation when innovation is encouraged. Encourage has the word courage in it, because everything is not going to work. And finally, a paradox, that is well known today, namely that for tasks that demanded the slightest creativity and innovation, larger monetary rewards actually led to poorer performance. There are never too many people worthy of being followed. In our times, Steve Jobs is one of the finest you can follow, and it is a good thing that so many anecdotes of his life survive, and he had also taken care to get a fine biographer to document his life. Because he had realized its importance to those who would need to follow him. In our times, in our field, he is almost the only one to emulate.

And then he suddenly died. My desire to show him our technology remained unfulfilled. On that day, I wrote on Facebook: I am proud that we lived during the times when Steve Jobs also lived. Amateurs People sometimes assume that I am from the field of languages, or the field of statistics, or of input technologies. When they hear I was an Army officer they are taken aback. I had not studied any of these things before I had started. It is also perhaps the reason that teams of specialists in big companies dont wish to acknowledge our existence. To such a small team of non-specialists, working on zero budgets. But this is really the age of amateurs. Amateurs have always been there, but it has become unstoppable ever since knowledge has become accessible to anyone, anywhere, over the Internet, with no limits imposed. You can know as much as you want, as long as you are ready to apply yourself to it. The specialist who is lax enjoys no special advantage, compared to someone who could be working from his home through the night. The amateur can collaborate with dozens of sources, and can change course any time. Already in the field of astronomy, collaborative development of software, (like LINUX and Open Source), higher mathematics, theoretical physics and many other fields, amateurs exceed specialists, despite their lack of facilities. Asteroids that threaten planet Earth like the one that made the most dangerous pass by recently are being discovered by amateurs, and not by large professional institutions like NASA. A protein folding problem, required for a better cure for AIDS, which had baffled scientists for over a decade, was solved in three weeks by online video game players, when the problem was given to them. Because their minds and methods were entirely different. So the world is increasingly going to become like this. You can take your teenager child seriously if he says he thinks hes got a theory for gravity, or she suspects all the DNA considered junk today were just space for the human to undergo metamorphosis one day. That day will come. The musically inclined four year old has always wondered what makes music

tick, in a very specialist manner, quite unexpressed, and oblivious to the elders around him. So lets bring in the amateurs. When Albert Einstein had come up with the theory of relativity, he wasnt even a physicist. He had been a patent clerk for seven years, with no hope of advance. Marconi was a 27 year old amateur, with no formal education, and the Wright Brothers were owners of a bicycle shop. In both cases, they had finished ahead in the race for a known lucrative challenge, where numerous mainstream scientists had been working with much more funds. Closer home, the early work in quantum physics by Satyendra Nath Bose, working from a laboratory in Dacca University, in colonial India of 1924, which probably had equipment like tuning forks and Leyden jars, can only be described as the work of an amateur working in isolation. Over the past decades, Nobel Prizes in Physics have gone to people who worked on bosons, which are a class of elementary particles named by Dirac after Bose. Nicholas Copernicus, who discovered that the Earth goes around the Sun, had been a doctor and a lawyer. Amateurs actually have a better chance of solving long-standing problems, because they choose their problem themselves, and can bring a completely fresh way of thinking into solving them. They are unaffected by any text book theories, dogmas, personalities or prior training. They are also more self-motivated.

People and products TheHRmodel I may have given the impression that while all our work was getting done, everything ran smoothly within the organization. That there was never any occasion of unhappiness or insecurity among our employees. It is definitely true that we had a marvellous experience with our employees. In our office, everyone just did their work, there was never small talk or office politics, or any other time wasting activity. That was the culture. This was true of most companies in the incubator where we are based. This is very different from the environment in other places.

I was always required to be in the office among my colleagues. For the same reason that, many years ago, my mother had to sit with me on the table if I were to do a good job with the homework. As long as she was there, I was fine. If she went away, I would run away, and do other things. Similarly, a founder may be required to sit with his brood of chicks, grooming them. Picking them up from the flanks by the beak and bringing them into the centre, into the warmth. In the office, I occasionally went around looking at who was doing what, I asked whether someone was stuck in something, and if I had an idea from my experience, I shared it with them. I would call someone to my desk, or to the conference room, to discuss a stupendous idea of something we could make, and ask him to try it. He would then be busy on that mission, and inevitably succeeded. If I had any hunch of how I thought it ought to be made, I would give it to him for consideration. In the workplace, I would occasionally share an anecdotal story from somewhere else, that brought a little bit of distraction, but also fresh inspiration. People came to show me, or to one another, something that they had made, and it would be appreciated. Other opinions would be sought, and then these ideas were quickly discussed, democratically, for their merits. Finally, a mandate was passed by the boss, who always explained the rationale behind the decision, which offered the juniors something new to learn. Thats how we worked to produce innovation. Innovation is a product of an environment. The incentive can consist primarily of appreciation and admiration, while being mutually aware why the output is exceptional, and how valuable it is. But there was always one problem. That is about employees leaving for better offers. We were hiring freshers, and the group that stayed longest with me were the initial team, who stayed for over 2 years. Since then, we have had many freshers, who came and left in six to twelve months. After we had trained them, and after they had grown productive, they would leave to join some other companies. This disturbed me considerably, with resultant feelings of insecurity, unhappiness and anger, but later I got used to it. Since we were only a handful anyway, there was too much of mutual dependence. Some of the incidents put our companys very existence on a

slender thread of survival, but we hired new people, taught them all over again, and rebuilt everything from scratch. We were fortunate, for we always had some people from the old guard putting in their best to ensure continuity. But it has always been very, very risky. But while they were there, everyone gave 100%, willingly, and happily. In Japan, people join a company to retire from there. In India, it has become a fad to keep changing jobs for small increments in the salary. I dont think the companies are winning, or the employees are winning either. Its all about short-term thinking. With long-term thinking, a good company will be willing to do far more for the employee, looking after him till his demise. I believe Tata was the first company in the world that introduced the employee provident fund. Yes, the first in the world. Who can stop someone from going a few steps farther? Interviewingcandidates We have always worked with freshers. My policy is to spend some time talking to anyone who turns up, at any time. We try to judge whether he or she is someone we could have in our team. We sometimes ask them to sit on our computer to do some simple task. The way we interview candidates is odd, unique and interesting. All our interviews are carried out in Hindi, unless the candidate will be advantaged in English. Our method might teach you something about how to mine for merit. First, the people who turn up at our door are usually people who have not been hired by anyone else. I can often see that this must be because of how they look, their clothes, the way they carried themselves, the general lack of an impressive surface patina that city-folk had mastered. But good candidates from rural areas could be unaware of such things. These people were simply ignored, so it is from them that we find our ore rocks. In fact, it is when I see someone with a hairstyle, fancy belt and boots and a swagger, that I know this is someone whose life in the recent student years revolves around these elements, rather than being focussed on studies. In our office, we called such people rockestars. Everyone knew what I was talking about, and had learned to laugh at the joke. The joke was about the value system of the deluded amongst their own generation. A consumerist, shallow life, that had to be shunned. It turned out that all

the rockestars had found jobs in all the other companies, the companies we used to go to sell to. But everyone got a chance for a fair assessment for some time, through conversation. We would not let anyone meritorious slip through our fingers, simply because it was so hard to come by. Just a few weeks ago I interviewed a candidate. When I looked at him waiting in the reception area, he looked like he might have been the delivery-boy of the courier, most unimpressive. But he had been sent by someone who had left recently, who had been good, and was trying to fill the void. So I sat with him and started talking. What you do as an interviewer is to observe. You throw occasional glances to see what he was doing with his body when you were not looking at him, when you were going through his resume, for instance. In the resume, I like to look at the section at the end, where things like hobbies and extra-curricular activities are often mentioned. These say much more about the intrinsic nature of the person. For example, if someone said his hobby was reading books, I would ask about the last book he had read. We would have a bit of a discussion on that. Sometimes you might find someone, who had written books as his hobby, fumbling to come up with the name of a single book he had read. Normally, someone who reads books will enjoy answering this question. So this could reveal a basic insincerity in the resume. If someone mentioned art, I would ask him to draw a donkey, or my face, at the back of his own resume, using his own pen, because I wanted to see how well he could sketch impromptu. His reaction and attitude to this apparently trivial task would reveal something about both his artistic talent, as well as his ability to work in our team, with an attitude of good humour. If I saw he was offended or was unhappy, I would know something about him. If someone mentioned chess, I would give him the 8 queens problem to solve on a piece of paper, and leave for a break of 10 minutes. When I returned, I would see whether he had made any progress, or had given up. Was he even trying? How logical were his attempts so far? Someone who really liked chess would take the problem as an interesting thing to try. I could then know that he enjoyed challenges, and took them up happily and advanced in his attempts.

The hobbies that people mention are things that they had chosen to do themselves. Anyone who took up additional things sincerely, outside of what was the grind of the syllabus in India, was already someone superior. How much he did for his own self the self-declared passion of a young man or woman revealed how much he or she could ever do for anything at all. Nobody expected any elaborate discussion on something that lay at the very end of their resume, so it would take them aback. It would be awkward, and would destroy their guard. The idea is to ask unexpected questions. I like to do this kind of destructive testing. In all of these apparently trivial matters, I kept probing for the many qualities we were looking for, one of which was his attitude. It is only through the fractures that much more is revealed of the structure underneath. Also the reason that the armed forces believes in destroying the self concept of the recruit before building it all over again on a common mould. The next thing I look for is academic temperament. I ask them about their favourite subject in school. And then I ask what their favourite topic in the subject was, which they still remember. If someone said Physics, and the topic was light, I would ask him to explain to me what really happened in a total internal reflection. Any good student would know that it is a fair expectation, from someone who had been a diligent student during his school years, to remember this. Most people didnt remember anything from their school days. Thats because they studied only to vomit it out in the exam. They were the kind who had spent their formative years in insincerity, got out of the school system somehow, picked up some professional degree from a lane somewhere, and were now looking for a place to sit with Jabha in their jhola as their sole possession. But I was interested in those who were academically inclined, those who studied for learning, remembering, and putting the knowledge to future use, even when they were in school. They were the kind that was required for research. I often ask if ice is heavier than water, as a warm-up question, and you will be surprised by the number of engineers and graduates being produced by the middle and lower-tiers of the Indian education system, who get that answer wrong. Try it. That question is not in the syllabus.

A student who was self-aware, about the preciousness of the knowledge he had retained for so long, would also recognize the system that valued it, when it was not even relevant to the role. He would know that he was going to join an organization where his intrinsic merits, and his distinction compared to others, had been both noticed and valued. This can be very motivating for some. They are the right kind of people for us. Those who never value this process, or are left bewildered by it, are probably not right for us. And thus do I try to assess a candidate, keeping in mind the specific role he is being considered for. My best experience was with Tanuj. He had said his favourite subject was Mathematics, and the topic was Trigonometry. Since he was a Computer Science graduate, I asked him how it is that a calculator can always tell us the value of Sine 30 or Sine 31 or Sine 31.5676923, to any number of decimals, but always with a slightly different answer. How did he think it was implemented inside the calculator? How can it have look-up tables inside, consisting of the infinite possibilities? And Sin (A+B) is not equal to SinA + SinB. The answer I was looking for is hidden in the last pages of any trigonometry text book, where there are Taylor series expansions of trigonometric functions. It is usually not in the syllabus, but a curious student is expected to turn his text book around to see what else was in it. He looks for the odd stuff. And the discovery is fascinating. Why should the ratio of sides of a right angled triangle have anything to do with a summation of an infinite series full of factorials? If he understood this, and could apply it when it was required, that was marvellous. Tanuj did. It wasnt important to remember the infinite series, just describing a bit of it was enough. There was no need for any further conversation after this. This boy really did us proud later. That amazing thing, of the Sine of an angle being derivable from the expansion of an infinite numerical series, was invented in the 14th century, by Madhava, of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. It is such an astounding breakthrough that one can only wonder what his education was, what the society around him was like then, for him to have even speculated in these ways. What did the rest of the world look like at that time?

We too have had our share of staff problems, wage increase demands, leave demands, rare incidents of indiscipline. One has had to deal with these matters both firmly and with understanding. For people who are doing their first job, everything is new and expectations are sometimes different. In general, it is better that way. Running an organization is not about trying to win a popularity contest. It is not possible for everybody to be happy all the time, but it works out fine so long as it is known very well by all that every decision is taken for the interest of the organization, and for no other interest. I dont think anyone ever holds a grudge against such decisions. When you are dealing with Intellectual Property, this is everything that you have. It is a risk too. My father once asked me how I viewed the question of protecting our intellectual property. What would happen if a rival company just hired one of our employees? I had no answer for. But to him, my answer seemed philosophical. There are children who steal money from the pockets of their Dads trousers, hung at home. And there are children who have never even entertained that thought. For most of those reading this, it would be like that. Why does it vary? Where did the father fail? Where did the family fail? Similarly, in the battle field, it would be the easiest thing in the world for the enemy to bribe the cook who served breakfast to the general, instead of investing in high technology missiles and aircrafts. It would be a million times cheaper to win the war this way, and achieve the desired objective. It is such a huge, gaping vulnerability. But the cook is not bribed. That rarely happens. Wars are not fought like that. How does it work? The only way to prevent this from happening is to offer the quality of leadership that is akin to a good fathers. My father is a man of great administrative experience himself, who had seen enough politics, intrigue and betrayal himself in his younger days. He was impressed with my answer. But could I be sure that this is the solution? Could anyone really be sure? Only time can tell. India will be what Indians are ready to be. At some point you have to take the risk. As a small company, with very few staff, this could be the way to do things. You have to trust. In return, you get trust. You cannot demand trust from others when you do not trust

them yourself. The prescription could well be different for a much larger company.

The product side On the product side, the story is that we try to build products that we ourselves would like to use. We use it, and change things in the manner that we think appropriate. We discuss among ourselves the pros and cons of various alternatives. And then the boss takes a decision and justifies it to everyone. When we get a feedback from a user, we usually always support it, or explain to the user the reasons why it was not done. The products are there for you to experience. We are not perfect, but we will keep on trying. Ours is a usability product that is absolutely at the front line with the user. Usability products have to offer the right balance between assistance and the users own control. Many times, you are left annoyed by user interfaces that try to do too much for you unnecessarily. For example, you may be using a word processor and there are so many changes being made automatically that you did not want, or which are beyond your sight. Sometimes it is hard to obtain what you want, because the system tries to second guess you so much. Or theres a wizard that pops up and tries to arrest your flow. This particular one was voted as the most annoying thing in the entire software world in an online poll. The simile is with someone trying to tie your shoe laces while you are walking. You dont want that. I had said to James K Vance, of the Lockheed Martin India Innovation program, that our technology offers the right balance between assistance and control, and he was most impressed. Because the need for this was so true. We try to help by putting the likely options before the user unobtrusively, but we never try to second guess the user with our own prediction. I think this is an important fundamental principle of our product engineering. The T9 model, of completing words for you in the old world way was so pesky mother can become movies, bus can become cup, kiss can become lips, of becomes me and so on. There are videos on the Internet making fun of this, and the resultant

unhelpful obtrusion became the prime reason for people to switch it off. Try Googling T9 jokes or dictionary collisions. The most complex challenge was that we had products in over 25 languages, that were offered in Java, Android and iPhones. How many products is that? Even among Java phones, between the Candybar phones and the Qwerty phones, there were two different form factors. So we had to make products for that variation too. Then there were free versions, paid versions, versions we have developed for VAS offerings, and yet others. Hence, a combinatorial explosion. It was a very large inventory of products, that one had to kept track of, maintain, fix bugs for, introduce new features to, release new versions of, and all by an extremely small team, of one, two or at most three people. The entire credit for this impossible-to-do thing goes to the team. It was possible only due to the highly structured nature of our code, and the understanding and intuition of our developers. All of them were writing commercial code for the first time. An interesting story I can relate is how on one occasion we used product design to improve user understanding and adoption. The biggest difficulty after everything had gone right in the download funnel was people not being able to figure out how they were expected to use it. If you make a very sophisticated car, which has a panel in which there are many buttons, levers and gears for a hundred new features, the driver might actually fail to find the ones he needs to drive the car. It would work better if he was given the car to drive for some time, after which the features were gradually released, like a button to release slippery slime for the car chasing you, the lever to inflate the tyres instantly, or the one to take a picture of the inside of the cylinder. We did the same. In our case, the problem was that when a user installed the product on a keypad phone, and saw a grid on the screen with characters on it, his instinctive reaction was to start moving the navigator keys, assuming he was expected to steer something to the character, a common thing in games. This will not work, of course. Rather, it would move the cursor on the text editor, change the predictions accordingly, and get the user into a bizarre situation. And we would lose some users at that stage.

So in one release of our product, we locked the navigator key so that nothing would happen if he did that. This would force him to look for other things, and soon find the right way. After he had used the product a few times, we would unlock the navigator button, and allow him to undertake more advanced functions, like insertion of words in the middle of a sentence, and release other features lying further down the usage. By then, he would already have learnt how to type correctly. This modification did dramatically improve the number of people who could understand and use the product. We had used engineering to condition or control behaviour.

PaniniKeypadasanambassadoratlarge I dream of a day when this way of typing will go to other places of the world. When people in countries far away from us will use a means to type that was invented in India. That would be a happy association with the country of its origin. Panini Keypad would then be a kind of an ambassador at large, of goodwill. It is already being used in many countries. We get mails from them. But instead of being used sporadically, it needs to become mainstream. And then it will stay. What would it mean if our Chinese technology turned out to be the one that the Chinese people eventually start using? From what I gathered, the Chinese wish to respect Indians. They are always looking for new reasons to do so. They had a few from ancient times, and they liked our films, like Three Idiots and Fashion, which struck a chord in the lives of the young urban Chinese. What does it mean for the Tibetan script to be supported on phones? What does it mean that the Pakistanis have found out, and already prefer Panini Keypad to write in Urdu on their phone? And it will be the only way that it can be done conveniently on a basic phone. Panini lived in an area between Gujarat and Pakistan of today. He studied and taught at Taxila. He is as much theirs.

MoreresearchonCleverTexting

There was so much to explore inside the combinatorial space of scripts. While we were extracting data for our products, there were many questions that appeared, many ways that things could be better optimized, the products made leaner, imbuing them with more capacity in the same space. So much that will require more sophisticated tools to know the answers. Tricky situations, tricky problems, that point to the need for developing cunning new algorithms. Even greater information about the languages needed to be extracted, and made use of. We could not do all of that. It needs to be done in the future. We have gained some insights, but many more remain to be discerned. When all the questions are asked and their answers explored, the subject can become a minor discipline. Thefutureofthephone The future of the phone is small. A phone is something that is carried on a person at all times, and so it is most convenient when it is small. It will be full of functions, but it must still be small. Some of the functions may move to other devices, also carried on ones person, like the wrist or waist. All the phone companies were in a race right now to built those first wrist appliances. What kind of a keypad is likely when the space is little? The future phone will have a touch-screen, but it will have buttons for typing, because no amount of sophistication can take away the tactile feel and speed of typing on buttons. It could have great speech recognition, but that will never be enough. People will still need to type. People will type for accuracy, speed, privacy and in noisy places. And when the phone is small, our technology will always be useful.

Ourowndreamphone Steve Jobs was lucky. He could make his own phones. So he had a way to directly go to the consumer. His innovations could not be shortchanged by others. He ruled through them, and made sure that he controlled everything to ensure that the end user experience would be the highest. The quality would keep away his competition.

But I can quite understand that it was not fun to choose to do so. A technology company having to take up all the responsibilities of top to bottom vertical integration in closed silos. Apple products sold in no other stores, and his stores sold or branded no other products or affiliations. Steve Jobs must have been forced into doing it by the realities of the market. I too want to make a phone. A dream of a new phone. A phone designed for this part of the world, that would be very good. So many of the real needs are ignored. I wish to put a hundred innovations in it, of which Panini Keypad would be only one. We have already collected 58 of those innovations, and I am sure a few more could be contributed by the others in our team and friends. The aim is to have 100 in all. Production is not easy, but if we could, it would be ambitious. Maybe someone will make it possible for us to do this. We need to make our own phones, instead of importing every single one of them. 20 million phones are sold in India every month, at an average price of, say, Rs 3000. Thats a huge amount of money, most of which goes outside India. A huge drain on our resources. Making a phone, whoever does it, would herald the burgeoning of a serious electronics industry in India. An area we are very poor in currently, and which cannot be allowed to continue, because it is such a crippling strategic vulnerability. We do not make any semi-conductors at all in this country. A phone for India could support a home grown electronics industry, because the demand here alone would be sufficient to sustain it. How can this vacuum be allowed to continue? We must start building phones of our own. I would like to do it. To go to the consumer directly with innovations.

Panini Keypad for the digital future Panini Keypad was made for the phone. But its future is also for all types of other digital devices. Like the television, gaming consoles, instrument panels, and so on.

In future, you will type to your television. You type to choose programmes, to choose movies or songs on demand, to search for content, and so on. You chat with others while watching television. How would you do that? Would you do that by sitting with a keyboard on your couch, or would you do it with the same slim remote control? Would you be doing it in Roman, or would you be doing it in all the languages of India? The dynamic keypad would be the tiny pop up on the screen when you wanted to type something from your remote. A patent is what you teach to the world. That is what the law states.

Reflections on a finite state machine When I played around with Panini Keypad to test our software, I often kept pressing the same button, just to see what predictions came up when the sequence I was entering had long gone past any meaning. But the predictions had to keep coming, and so I kept pressing. After some time, I noticed that the predictions had fallen into a closed loop, and the same sequence kept coming after fixed intervals. When I tried this on different keys, once again the same thing would happen, but the loop could be bigger or smaller. It seemed to me that this related very well with whatever I had understood of a finite state machine. Whatever you tried, the alternate pressing of two buttons, or whatever other scheme you could think up, there would always be a loop, however large, may be as large as 5000 characters in it, but it had to be a finite one, it could not be an infinite one. That was a definition of a finite state machine, however complex its internals. I wonder if we could put whatever happened inside our algorithm in a diagram, and find an inverse transform of whatever happened inside it. We would always be able to find a fixed response to fixed inputs in predefined ways. We could always decide what would be the transform required inside the box, to get what we want. We would know what would happen to it, what possibilities it would create. Would the logic to create this be simpler than our current Von Neumann computer architectures? Could the resultant circuitries be less complex, or cheaper,

or more arbitrarily designable? Or more well suited to a particular class of problems? Could our micro-processors change? Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. - E W Dijkstra (attributed)

Free thinking

Creativity Do you enjoy creating? Painters, writers, architects and scientists all enjoy creating, and many other people, like housewives, also create in the kitchen, thinking up new things with love. So many others, leading ordinary lives, enjoy creating in their own ways. The newspaper boy may throw the rolled-up paper accurately to the third floor balcony, and in such a skilful manner that its a joy to watch him perform it. The creative ones apply creativity and innovation in their everyday life, and they would be bored without it. But not everyone does it to the same extent. Creating is a source of joy, a great compensation in itself. So great is the reward that you can easily forget hunger or the heat. You seem to need nothing else, and you dont want to stop. Creativity is inborn in every child, and we can encourage it to grow, or succeed in stifling it early, through positive or negative stroking. When we were children in Kunjaban, in Agartala, a new truckload of wet sand from the riverbank, left in our lane for construction work, used to be a great source of joy. We played so much in it, building forts, roads, tunnels, bridges, that there purportedly were holes on soles of our feet from some dangerous hookworms in the sand. When it got dark after sunset, our parents had to yank us away from it, dragging us by the arms and legs to our homes. Such things are an early signal of creativity. You like the form of play where you create something. In a world where increasingly more will be taken over by computers, creating will be the only job left for humans to do, as this century advances. Its going to be our most important life skill, just plain creativity, demanded to be applied to different things on different days. Innovation comes from the desire to create, to solve, and it

is that colourless sap that will keep the tree alive, enable it to put out new leaves. Creativity is an act of giving to the world, and not a desire to hoard. Delayedgratification Decades ago, in a play school inside the Stanford campus, a curious experiment was begun. Little children of 3 and 4 were offered two options, of whether to pick up the sweet placed before them, or to wait for 15 minutes and receive two of them. The sweet was placed before them as they waited out the torturous 15 minutes. Many of the kids chose to get two, and so waited, during which a camera recorded their activities. Some picked up the sweet, smelt it and put it back. These were all kids of the faculty or students, so one could assume they all had a good upbringing and fair opportunities in life. 15 years later, the same scientists went to track what happened to the kids who chose delayed gratification. Their findings were astounding, because the kids who had chosen to wait had done far better in life than what statistical likelihood would foretell. Ever since, choosing delayed gratification is seen as an important indicator of the prospects for the future. Entrepreneurship is about choosing delayed gratification. And it may not even arrive. Youknockatthedoor,andthemasterdoesnotopen. Youthinkhehasheardyoubutyetdoesnotopen. Youknockagain,andhedoesnotopen. Distrustgrows,andthenyoufeelguiltyaboutit. Yougoonknockingforalongtime,andthemasterfinallyopens. Hewantedyoutoconfrontyourfaithbeforeyoucametohim. Themasterknowssomethingaboutyouthatyoudontknow. The100thmonkeyeffect A phenomenon supposedly observed in Macaque monkeys in Japan has led to the popularization of an interesting theory.

Monkeys in an isolated island were being thrown sweet potatoes by scientists, which fell into the sand and got dirty. In a while, one of the monkeys learnt to wash the potatoes, and this in turn was learnt by others in that community. When the number of monkeys who had learned this trick had reached a critical number, said to be the 100th monkey, other monkeys, in other islands, also rapidly learned the trick Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a 70 year old scientist and author, with the finest academic credentials, who had studied at both Cambridge and Harvard. He had been a university professor all his life. But he has courted controversy ever since he began attacking the dogmas of science, questioning things like the gravitational constant and the constant speed of light, amongst other things, with evidence he is ready to share. In any case, he makes a most friendly, trustworthy, scientific, and persuasive speaker. He has been saying what he believes for decades, but it is only now that he has begun to receive a larger receptive audience. Dr Sheldrake believes that everything that we think about, or call our consciousness, is not restricted inside our skull alone, but extends beyond it. One of his fields of study is the subject of collective consciousness, of which the 100th monkey phenomenon is a part. We too have noticed a strange thing. In 2009, when we used to give a phone to users, allowing them to type in a new way, almost no one would intuitively understand how to do it. We needed to explain to them how to use it. Over the next few years, we tried very hard to spread this awareness. A lot of people learnt it on their own, and taught others. It is 2013. When we give the phone to people now, many more people are able to figure out how to do it by themselves, and especially children. People who would have had no opportunity of knowing about this before, from anyone. This makes us wonder. It is as if a new intuition has taken form. In this case, the effect could actually be measured by designing simple experiments. I wrote to Prof Sheldrake, and heard back from him. He does consider this to be a very interesting example, if it can be proved. I assured him

that we would share with him whatever data we can gather, which could be admissible as proof of the phenomenon. Science is not true. Only the scientific method is true.

Thinkingbeforedoing Write an email, but dont send it. Go back to it again after an hour. You will write it differently, and in every case you will be happy that you deferred. For something very tricky, it might be after several days. There are emails I have written which are still in my draft box, I have never sent them, situations changed. Whatever you have to do, prepare a lot for it in your mind. Trivial things that happen in our life, like a delayed visa causing you to miss an important conference, a loss of an important file in a hard disk crash, emails that do not get delivered, and things like that what kind of superstitions does it lead you to? Does it make you think that destiny is telling you not to go that way? Or does it tell you that destiny is making it difficult in order to test you before a good thing, to see if your endurance is up to it? I have generally chosen the latter. But sometimes I have had the opportunity to see why something going wrong was actually a good thing. Does a smile appear naturally on your face when you are faced with an adversity? It will, when you know that you will always overcome all adversity, all challenges. Procrastination means that you are very happy, relieved even, to find an excuse not to do something. There is a lot on that list too. Like today is a Sunday, and a day I should go and fix my car, but I just thought the repair shop would be busy, so its better to go on another day of the week. This has been on my mind for a few months now. The car continues to run somehow. The good procrastinations are the things that you do not want to do until you feel you are fully prepared for it, when all the right ingredients are in place. This is because you have set a standard of perfection that you would like to achieve, and are aware of what it will take. You could be a perfectionist who also procrastinates, and that could actually be an

essential requisite of it. Karl Fredrick Gauss never published his findings till he felt he had put in every last thing that he could contribute to it. Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is about keeping your expenses really low, while getting a lot done. It is about how low you can keep your expenses, without letting productivity suffer. Hence it is something left to your own imagination and creativity. Our salaries were low. We used irksome, second-hand computers even when we had half a million dollars in the bank, because they still worked, and had served us a lot for a long time, they were like our reliable friends. No one wanted to change them, even when I asked. I travelled to Hong Kong, merely to receive an award. I checked into a $30 hotel in Tsim Tsa Tsui, changed into a fine suit, walked out, took a taxi across the channel to the Four Seasons Hotel where I had to present to an audience which included Sir John Major. I charmed him completely. Did it make any difference? It didnt hurt me at all, and it was a wonderful thing because the traveller inside me got more experience.

I loved to straddle this range, between the hobo and the CEOs in their stratosphere, and did it all the time. This two-way operation did me a lot of economic good and also spiritual good, and in both cases I was merely acting. It also helped me to keep my ears closer to the ground, where the poorest people lived. I didnt need any of the things that other people needed. Its only the skin, it didnt matter. But if you got carried away by the trappings of the hotshot CEOs because you hobnobbed with them a lot, you could easily be left bleeding and finished before you thought you were done with your task. Its the easiest thing to finish your money. To save money, you have to innovate. Being able to bootstrap is the biggest advantage you enjoy from operating from India. You can hire freshers at humble salaries, compensate them by teaching, offer them other things which can keep them motivated. If we used this competitive strength, we could do well in innovation, because talent is equally distributed all over the world. Frugality was taught to me by my father. I had seen my parents save all their lives. Save little bits in every action. Their children will never be able to exceed them. If they earned 10, they spent only 3 or 4. They saved the rest. The only thing for which their purse strings were ever open was anything to do with education or self-improvement, the music, arts etc. I have only one memory of having gone out to a restaurant to eat. We

hardly ever watched movies in a cinema hall. We didnt miss anything at all when we were growing up. And we were not different from most people of that time. That is why, whenever my parents needed money for anything, they always had it, they never had to take a loan for anything. We never lived beyond our means. So we were always rich. Feeling rich is about enjoying the freedom to spend if you want to, or need to. The poor are the ones who need to spend to begin to feel rich. Bootstrapping is good for the culture of the company, even when you are profitable. This will sow the seeds towards ensuring that profligacy is not the cause of your death in the future. We also teach our employees to be frugal in their daily lives, and I was surprised how well they did it themselves, well beyond my expectations, or what I would have done had I been in their places. I had once read about David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo, being so frugal that his colleagues made fun of him. Instead of Chief Yahoo, he was called Cheap Yahoo, a title he liked and put on his visiting card. People who had observed him said the same about his habits, about saving costs and delivering with less. The company has survived for a long time even though they dont seem to be funded by any clique. Bootstrapping is essential because it is going to take much longer than you think. It will cost you much more than you think. This is because you are only thinking about production. You are not thinking about all the other stakeholders who are going to block you for a long, long time. You will need the money, three to four times of what you think you need, and even more time. It is much better to be in a position to operate when you know you have enough reserves, than to be operating in a position when you know that you will not have a second go. People will then exploit you. I am terrified only when I had to open emails from my patent attorneys. These were the only costs over which I had no control, and I had to pay them. This is a scourge that we have to rescue our innovators from.

 HowaboutLiteracy? We live during a time when most urban people already write only on the PC or the phone. Hardly ever on paper any day, and sometimes it is hard to find a pen close by. As the century progresses, this would increasingly be the case with everyone, including todays disadvantaged. Literacy will not mean writing on paper, but increasingly be only about writing on a digital device, without which one is virtually illiterate. Therefore our typing technology is really about literacy. When you are on the borderline of literacy, it helps a lot if you could be prompted about what characters follow, and which one to write. Panini Keypads assistive presentation of the likely next characters, helps one compose his first words, a learning tool to push people at the borderline of literacy to step into full literacy. It is also about the preservation of our languages, which, without being supported in these digital times, can only perish quickly. That would mean an incalculable loss of heritage, which we would not want. Themythoffreemarkets The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera

I had set out to explore. Is this really a free market? I am aware of people who are ready to work very hard, ordinary people, living their modest lives and also trying to set up some kind of business. Why is it so hard for them? It is as if the privileged lazy had to be protected by some external means or artifice. Is there a vested system in

place to stop all such attempts of these people, who try to enter the swarm of the producers? It is as if in this jungle, the carnivores and the herbivores are two different classes. The carnivores had their established pecking order, which they were bound to protect, because it would be better than a level playing field of all people. The herbivores were the consumers, the workers, the teachers, the writers and everyone else. And no herbivore with his ways and ideas could be allowed into the ranks of the carnivores. You could be admitted only if you were ready to become a carnivore, be ready to exploit the rest of humanity, look at them as the other, and respect the court of the existing pecking order. They would spot you if you did not display that you seek the same objects as them, follow the same ways. If you were unwilling to do that, then you would not be admitted into the club, or allowed to win in any big way. It was a deeply entrenched system, having survived several centuries, through monarchies, nationalism and wars, uprisings and people's revolutions, colonialism, democracy and now globalisation. Having been the mighty hidden manipulators all along, through all of this, ruling through the allegiance of people to money. It explained why countries went to war against each other on the flimsiest of pretexts, and why some countries did not wage war even when another violated them. The universal distrust between the races dissolved when opportunistic purposes were found, and it also resurfaced quickly whenever required to serve its machinations. The organism sends out signals to choose which products to go hysterical about, and everyone coordinates. It decides monopolies, it decides price, controls demand and supply, controls public perception of good and evil, all through extremely crafted public communications. It can make you believe anything. The organism chooses which products or even countries to abandon, and everyone cooperates. Powerful people are afraid to speak out against the acts of the organism, because they can read the signatures of the organism at work, and opposition is punished with unfailing retribution, permanent discredit and disgrace. Their protests will also never be heard.

It is as if all the means are deployed to keep the poor out of winning, and keep the lousy winners winning. Huge amounts of funny money can be put in, to keep the lousy performer in place and keep out competition. Occasionally, when we hear of rags to riches tales, it makes us think the world is fair. When, in truth, they are merely individuals who were propped to knighthood after the shenanigans are in place, to make the rich win even bigger through his apparent success. There are large investors at play. The stooge, who could be a dotcom founder or a popstar, or a new ruler in Africa or Asia, is not interested in understanding or analyzing what worked for him overnight. Why is it that our most insightful political scientists have pointed to the existence of a class conflict? Was this always at work in what we knew as the free society? Warren Buffet has acknowledged the existence of class struggle in his observation. It was as if the two fundamental poles of human nature, selfish greed and altruism, were fighting an all-out battle, on a global scale, to see who would eventually win. The people were only playing their roles as slaves, in the armies of these two powerful memes. AreIndiansbigoted? I have noticed the bigoted ways in which many Indians continue to think, even on professional matters. We judge and ascertain people by region, religion, language, community. Ours and theirs. That is so sad. This is not the way it should be. This has to change. This is not the way that the India we want to see can be built, when we are still divided in this manner, jealous and at odds on such lines. This is the reason we could be colonized, and if we do not wish to change, we shall always remain colonized. And if this is what our countrymen like to be today, we better fix it, or else, very soon, nothing shall merit any reason, belief, or doing. I had also become aware about castes, and how they operate inside business. When a foreigner asks me about the caste system in India, I usually think he means untouchability, and I say it is highly exaggerated. But the caste system exists in our minds. We are divided again and again, first by the longitudes, then by the latitudes, till we become particulate.

No one can build an integrated nation on a foundation where one cannot accept the success of another, is distrustful of and unwilling to acknowledge the other, unwilling to be of help to another. This only propels forces within ourselves to defeat any of us, destroy our own work, with everyone being ready to betray. It is impossible. In such a case, the fact that we exist as a nation is not to our credit, but only a feeble historical happenstance between two major wars. An incident of only a mere 60 odd years, in a period that spans over 800 years of being ruled by others. Of being ruled essentially through our fissures and our inabilities. In the community of the slaves, it was common for others to be very delighted when the gravest misfortune visited one of their own, like someone's limbs being cut off or even someone losing her child. This made it infinitely easier to keep them divided and enslaved for ever. If you ever felt that delight at the misfortune and suffering of another, it could be because you are one amongst some form of slavery. Teachinganation The need to put the halant in the middle of a word in order to write a yuktakshar will become common knowledge one day. What these yuktakshars are, and how each of them is written will become common knowledge one day, with hundreds of millions of people learning from each other. It will be common knowledge that a matra is written after the consonant, even though it could appear to occur before it in the typography, because it is known to be a dependent vowel in the orthography. There will be no mistakes. I am sure it would all gradually seep in. That would be an important role the Panini Keypad will continue to play, of a teacher to hundreds of millions of people. An inescapable part of the capability that will always be needed, all the time, to write in Indian languages, whatever be the device or the technology of the day. I am happy that I had directed my life to produce that utility to society. Bhattacharyas are merely teachers, the word means that. And our team gave it their all for very little material gain, it was an eventful part of our lives. With a ton of learning and experience for all of us to keep.

Once, when I was posted in Kashmir, isolated and reckless, a night plan from the other side could have taken me out, with no remains. Even a drunken driver or a clogged artery is enough for any of us at any time. I ensured that there were enough people who knew everything about what we had produced so far. So that it could be recreated at any time, even if something happened to me. There were also others with whom I had discussed my insights about what more could be done with our technology. In a choice between whether sorcery should be enshrouded or revealed, history has favoured the flourish of those who had revealed. Dealing with Unicode or Indian languages was no longer something obscure or challenging. It had become a familiar subject, as many more people had started building applications that dealt with these matters, creating content, building other tools, and so on. These are all good for the eco-system. Whattheecosystemneeds Why should it be so difficult to communicate with companies? Why does it take so long and involve such a waste of time to get a piece of work into its real function? Waste of time that could have been far more effectively utilized in doing more work, during the productive period of our life. How does it have any lasting value to discover how difficult a goal is during a particular juncture of human history? How does it help to qualify for the skills of an entrepreneur, when you could have been content being just an inventor? Why is an inventor forced to become an entrepreneur to see any success at all? How much good fortune he needs to have, and how much sacrifice and perseverance, and all that to prove what, and to what end? How much of human potential we lose, in hundreds of our inventors, who have lost their way through this maze. Companies should have insightful, capable people, a department designated to be the front door of admission of all new things. If they determine it to be useful for their organisations, they should bring it to the attention of their top management, and be the main agency responsible to drive its adoption internally in the organisation. And they should be held accountable for their actions, in both failing to act and failing to drive,

and culpability to corruption. This will be better than every door being open to multi-farious persuasion. Theneedforincubators

I am a grateful beneficiary of an incubator in Noida. Our country should be full of incubators. Hundreds of them, in cities and in the countryside, run by the private sector as well as the government, for anyone to give a shot at whatever he thinks he could accomplish. It involves a low level of expenditure, with the possibility of generating a lot of output for the nation. Administrativefunctions

How much of our money, time and headaches we waste on useless things, such as carrying out the many formalities that are expected of us. We didnt make any money in the last five years, but we have paid many lakhs of precious innovation money to the government on various pretexts. For example, tax deducted at source, and all the hassles it entails. We have to pay a chartered accountant a monthly retainer, for his book-keeping services, which is higher than the salary of some of our employees. Then there is audit, and filing of returns, and what not. Why is there any need for all that? There ought to be a provision to simplify these things for companies at the start-up stage, when we have much bigger challenges to take care of than filing TDS returns. Who is going to do it? Are you expected to keep special employees just to fulfil all these administrative functions? What a waste. We operate from an incubator. If we were outside it, we would have been bothered by tax inspectors, and this inspector and that inspector. Is there a way that we can keep out these bugs from the entire innovation ecosystem? Fablabs

There is a concept of Fablabs, or Fabrication Laboratories, that has come up all over the world. Some of them are operating well. The idea is to offer a facility where almost anything you wanted could be constructed, any prototype. For example, if you want to build a new kind of a gear or an electric motor, how would you be able to build such a thing? Particularly in the field mechanical engineering. For example, for two years now Ive had an idea for a new cooler design, which could do a better job in our weather, I think. But how could I be sure unless I could build one and test it? To build a cooler, a simple thing, I would need many different types of components, many kinds of parts, materials, many types of powerful motors and fan blades to experiment with, and I would have to mill all these to my own specifications. A Fablab would be expected to have all these machines for mechanical work, along with technicians who can help you build those things. This would be fantastic for producing innovations, in many other fields of engineering besides IT. A chemist might need a special decanter that has to be custom built for his special needs. A biologist may also need to build a special tool to measure the hourly growth of a plant. Or a prototype of an organic filter that mimics a kidney. We desperately need this for every kind of innovation to flourish. It can run on grants from industry or government, and the users will be expected to pay the actuals for materials and the work they needed to get done. And a fair-minded, industrious man should to be put in charge of it. James Watt had to move to Birmingham, where there were many metal working firms who could provide the parts that would be required to build his first steam engine. That is how the Industrial Revolution happened in England. Today the importance of clusters for specific industry is recognised, but it is hard to produce a cluster. Fab Labs could help the earliest pioneers. Changeineducationsystem Our education system has to change from a regurgitation-oriented system to an application-oriented system. People should learn things with the aim of putting it to some use one day, till that becomes the culture. We have to train people in the skills of critical thinking, and then much will take

care of itself. The reason the Israelis produce considerable innovation and new science from their tiny country is because they are taught to think differently. To constantly be vigilant about what is the big deal, about why they are being asked to learn this, what the key thing to understand is, the essence. And because there is no scope for complacency in that tiny nation, there is no crab mentality, of pulling down others. The empowered people support what needs to be supported, patriotically and without hesitation. The system of education must be such that knowledge is only offered and received by the student so as to experience it. And thereafter seen in action in everyday reality. Only then is this knowledge ready to be applied. Only then is one ever going to be a person who notices when reality offers the rare exception, a new opportunity. Being able to observe it, notice its significance even in a small thing, which could be a clue to the profound. The ones who can spot vital solutions from nature itself. When your knowledge is experiential, you learn constantly. Education must feed each ones curiosities, and let us encourage each person to have a sceptical mind of his own. If you are curious about anything, try to settle it immediately. Today there is also the Internet. And thus grows the ever-unquenched hunger for more and more knowledge. This is also a kind of greed. Greed to know. That is how the most effective education happens, and it is the secret behind knowing a lot. Examinations should be made optional. You can sit for the exam when you think you are ready for it, or think you need it. It could be several years after you have left college. And the exam is real, and held completely outside the jurisdiction of the teaching organization. It is to recognise the learning, and not how much could be vomited. There is no need to remember anything that could easily be looked up. In a world where information is in super abundance, of greatest importance are the skills that can sieve information to produce knowledge. You can come to college to learn if you are interested. Nothing happens in college except imparting education. If you come here for anything else, you are only wasting your own time. Industry should have its own ways of selecting candidates, which need to be much better than what they are today. In an independent assessment, of each to their own special needs, the degrees

are unlikely to have a great bearing. Finally, all wasteful activities in the name of education need to be dis-incentivized. Emotion, which is a neglected word today, would be the most sought after human quality. A good quality of it could be rarer than intelligence. Emotions are behind every kind of creativity. Machines would do everything better than humans one day, but they would still be devoid of emotions. In such a world, the only task that will remain for the human would be the creative work. Choosing, designing that which needs to be built, because the building could be done by machines. Painters, artists, singers, storytellers and other exponents of the emotional world, would be the most valuable among us. Teachers, who inspire students to serve, to be ethical, to experience the joy of wonder, to be brave, to be compassionate, to persist, to find happiness, and be bearers of the moral compass of our actions, at a time when almost anything that would be conceivable would also be doable. Such teaching is going to be more important than teaching how to count. And teaching all this is how the emotional side is built and shaped. India had inherited a completely holistic system of education in its gurushishya parampara. Everything about the systemic nature of how wellrounded education actually happens was already know to that tradition. Some of the principles from that system are the following. Education only happens when we love, respect, are devoted to and willing to serve our own teachers. Every student learns at his or her own pace, some slow to begin with, but fast later. The duration that one may need to spend in the Gurukul is never fixed, and varies widely from case to case. It is only when the Guru feels that the shishya has been given whatever he could receive, that one graduates. The Guru is never incentivised by material gains, and there are no fees, only the guru dakshina, or whatever the Guru asks from the student at the end of his training. The Guru lived an exemplary, simple, sustainable life in a humble cottage, and that was also the lifestyle of the students, who worked with their own hands. The Guru taught as much through his life as he did through explicit instruction. The Guru was enormously respected in

society, and the king prostrated when he visited him. The kings son and the commoners son studied under the same roof in the Gurukul. The Gurukul was maintained by the occasional grant of kings, who saw the value of these institutions to his kingdom, as well as the voluntary aid and contributions of some of its accomplished students. Students sought out the Guru they wanted to study under. After a Guru had given everything that he had to teach, he would sometimes pass on his students to some other Guru, for the next stage of learning. There was no caste system or sexism applicable in the Gurukul, including for the Guru himself. The Guru lived for the purpose of passing on to others what he had found out. Finally, the Guru is only a statue before whom we practise. Diogenes had heard of Antisthenes, a student of Socrates who taught cynicism. This seemed to be the type of thing Diogenes liked. So he went to Antisthenes to become his student, but Antisthenes tried to chase him away with a stick. So Diogenes asked Antisthenes to go and find a stick that he thought would be thick enough to chase him away. Antisthenes had to relent. Today we remember Antisthenes as a teacher of Diogenes. Your very own teacher is very hard to find. If you have found him, be ready to sit outside his home, in the cold, through the night, for him to finally let you in. Whyshouldwepreserveourlanguages? Did you ever consider how we think? We think in words, dont we? The words come out in our mother tongue, in English if you have received your education in it, or any other languages that you may know. In each situation, the way your mind handles the complex subject it is dealing with, whether analytical or creative, finds the toolset of a language the most appropriate to use. So to me, the languages we know are the geometry boxes that we possess; the tool boxes for our thinking. If you have a tool box which is vast, including ladders, pulleys, levers, wheels, switches, counterweights, threads, knots, scissors, gum and so on, you are in a better position to do

mental gymnastics, extrapolate ideas, find metaphors, all enriched with a better toolset. The current scientific belief is that thinking happens with word-like mentalese deeper within the brain, that are clothed with words subsequently. Hence we sometimes fumble for a word when we wish to express an idea. So its the mentalese first and the word later. But even if they came in the form of feelings, you would be empowered very much to find accurate words to describe them, and interact and learn from others when something is expressed. A man from an isolated tribe may not be equipped with the same sophistication in his thinking. Just like I cannot understand the sophisticated nuances of a term sheet, which is about familiarity with a language and its specialist implications. That is why I think being multilingual helps a lot. How does humour work across languages, sometimes more in others? May be some day we will find out how these things really work. Why are some things so difficult to translate sometimes? Most polymaths of the world have also been multi-lingual, because they inherited the models and paradigms that had evolved from several different families of cultural evolution, over thousands of years. We are a multi-lingual country and that is a wealth we must recognise. Not a problem. It could be our big strength. In July 2010, by some good fortune, I found myself as one of the panelists in a debate on NDTVs, We the People. This discussion was on Language Wars. In the limited opportunity that I got, instead of dwelling on the divides that languages were posing, I tried to speak about exactly this, that multi-lingualism is our countrys biggest asset, in real economic terms. India is a hotbed of languages. There are over 1600 languages, 30 spoken by over a million, and 122 spoken by at least 10,000. There is no other country in the world that has as many distinct languages. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing? It really depends on who you ask. An anthropologist, a statesman or a system integrator. Language, and the power that it offers us in being able to communicate with each other, is the primary invention of humanity, a first primeval invention. Our unique ability among all other animals to be able to share

information, and hence be able to cooperate to harness our collective intelligence and discoveries, and be able to pass it on to the next generation as culture, is the crucial thing that has set the human race apart from all other living things, and brought us so far. Individually, and left to our own selves, we are not as smart from other animals, as we think. Our languages are also the eternal carrier of our net cultural inheritance, a repository, the slow flowing river of our memes. Even when everything is destroyed, a living language carries much of the essence of what was lost. Languages are the tools of our thinking. A language that is versatile, sophisticated and efficient indicates much about what the speakers of it have inherited. If we were to find 100,000 hectares of unexplored Amazonian rain forests today, filled with tribes that had dozens of distinct languages, each sophisticated and complete, what would it tell us about the region? Languages are like the precious diverse flora, that retain the information on how we gradually grew to be so intelligent, and where the roots of that are. The smallest little language will provide the precious tips that will one day help us reveal the grand algebra of how our thinking and its symbolic transcription really works. For us to effectively build machines that will simulate the hitherto irreproducible liquid human thinking. Till we have had any better understanding of what we have inherited, let us not destroy any of our languages thoughtlessly. On the other hand, in a multi-cultural country, a large number of languages can pose a great political and practical challenge. Challenges in applying a single-language, uniform education and information system. Challenges of integration of these languages into the automated systems of today, and so on. Therefore, notwithstanding the wealth in the diversity, there have always been movements towards trying to bring about linguistic and cultural homogeneity.

Thinkingaboutlanguages Spending an intensive five years with languages has given me an opportunity to ponder on questions that I would never have looked at otherwise. There is so much to study in languages. It is such a fascinating world, in all its diversity. I have not even been able to look further at the curiosities that have crossed my mind in the course of our work. For

instance, how do words come about in a language, and how is it that some words dont exist in other languages? What brings about the order of noun, verbs, subjects and objects? I want to study the languages of the primitive tribes, like the tribes of the Andamans Islands, who are frozen in time from 40,000 years ago. Just like I could expect them to have words for water, fire or pig, could I expect them to have words for red, which would mean a more sophisticated abstraction of colour first? Would they have words for a logical counterpoint like but or if, which would represent greater sophistication? Do they have a word for love, another abstraction for something very universal? Do they have words that we do not yet recognize or have words for? What if they had discovered a concept that made bravery better understood, and hence easier to achieve? Would it not be an indispensable part of human knowledge, at the brink of extinction? There is so much to look for in each one of the 5000 distinct languages of the world that exist today, each one can teach us something important. The Eskimos have many words for the one thing called snow, because it is everywhere around them, used variously in a hundred applications. Fresh snow, hard snow, dry snow, slushy snow. Why does a language have many words for the same thing, and none for something others consider important? What does it say about their societies? A particular language of the world has the same word for marriage and rape. The Chinese language has the same word for opportunity as the one for crisis, and is used as such today. Why? What paradigm does the word implicitly teach, a learning that the rest of us do not receive? Are there languages where a belief in God is implicit in the language itself, and others that assume no such thing? In Sanskrit and its many descendent languages, the word Nasht is used today to stand in for the equivalent of spoiling or destruction. But its real etymology stands for transformation. Implicit in it is the understanding that nothing is ever destroyed, or can be destroyed, only undergoes transformation. Similarly, the word Vish which commonly denotes poison actually only means opposed application, conveying that nothing is poisonous or toxic, only the application could be. These were implicit in this language long before conservation of mass or energy was a theory.

The above nuggets I gathered from a talk by Baba Ramdev where he goes on to explain the wealth of our languages in a far more profound manner. I have only tried to convey this to you plainly in English. In the 70s, my sisters studied in Bengali medium and in their books I saw the equivalent of every word from the world of science and engineering in Bangla. Reflection was Pratifalan, Refraction was Pratisaran. They had words for Mitosis and Meiosis and every other thing. All of these words for text books were coined with the sagacity of an Antoine Lavoisier by a committee whose member amongst others was Indias foremost etymologist of Indian word origins, Dr Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. The language had been made totally ready for western science. Long ago, the same Satyen Bose referred earlier, had insisted in the need of teaching science in the vernacular and had created the Bangiya Vigyan Parishad in 1948. Coming back to Antoine Lavoisier, called the father of modern chemistry today, credited with coining many scientific terms, and a pioneer of many scientific fields, was killed on the guillotine by a bitter adversary on a charge of adulterating tobacco, during the days of great injustice and unrest following the French Revolution. The great Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange lamented It took them only an instant to cut off this head, and one hundred years might not suffice to reproduce its like. A year after the execution, Lavoisier was exonerated of all charges and his widow received a note saying he was falsely convicted. A curious thing is that Indian languages have many different words for different types of love. In Hindustani alone, there are Prem, Pyar, Mamata, Sneha, Vatsalya, Anurag, Pranay, Pasand, Laad, Muhabbat and Ishq, to name just a few. Each word denotes a different type of love. Love between lovers, love of parents towards children, love of children towards their parents, love towards pets, love in cuddling a baby, sympathetic love, and so on. Each of these feelings is treated with a different word and cannot be used interchangably. The English language weighs very heavily on just one word, love, to describe each of these different types of loves. Thats the main noun word, others being affection, amity, fondness, passion etc, but the word love can work well in each case. There are other adjectives and verbs like

amorous, adore, admire, cherish etc. Perhaps I could not make a compulsive case, but it may be that the two language groups treat the subject somewhat differently in linguistic terms. Does that leave Indians with an opportunity for more sophisticated emotional intelligence, or does it make them miss the essential point, that all love is really the same? The influence of these linguistic matters on popular expression, literature, and the social and psychological lives of people may be something worthy of study. Autistic savants who see colour, shapes and emotions in numbers through synaesthesia, see more in the words themselves than cultures have chosen to represent. There is the famous Bouba Kiki effect. People had to choose between the two words for two given shapes, and over 95% of the people made the same choice. The rounded shape for Bouba and the pointed shape for Kiki. There are 850 languages in Papua New Guinea, in a population of 6 million, most languages being spoken by hundreds or thousands of people. One could study what words they include, what is common, and what are the differences. There are also languages in the world that are spoken by a dozen people or so, or even only by a last surviving person. Was there a tiny language that had a word for the pain that the woman suffers at childbirth, a universal phenomenon of grave importance and bravery, that all the others had missed denoting? Can there be a universal language, and where are we going to find its principles? Without having to conduct the forbidden experiment, researchers have found now that our language ability is inborn. If a few generations of humans lived in an island, with no connection at all to the world of speaking people, they would still develop a language quickly enough. What would their language be like? What would their grammar be like? There is a huge practical side of these studies. Studies that would help in building computers which can comprehend and communicate in more natural languages. If living with the computer is our destiny, we have to start thinking of the language that is to be our mutual language.

Thelonghaul Stasis "Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working." - Anonymous

You may have stopped registering the passage of time but the fingernails and hair keep growing to remind you of it. The phone had stopped ringing because no one called. It could be left at home the whole day, and there would be no missed calls. There were no calls from investors, no more journalists calling for the story, or invitations to speak at conferences. But occasional product queries continued to come. I had stopped caring what I wore to office, and often wore sandals instead of shoes, till sandals became the norm. I went late to office. The car needed considerable repairs, but nothing had been done, and there was no motivation to do it. Because I had stopped going anywhere except from home to office and back. The style of leadership had changed, from driving to being more deferring, requesting rather than ordering. But it was still working in a different way. I had stopped paying myself a salary till I was able to bring in some revenue. The size of the meagrely-paid team had also shrunk to a handful. In the literature of leadership there is a style of leadership called the servant leadership. It is familiar amongst parents in most urban cultures. I had stopped watching television altogether, because I felt it had nothing to offer. Instead, I used to download all the best documentaries on diverse subjects, and watch them through the night. I listened to what other business leaders said, the Stanford Business School lectures, what

Harvard taught, who LSE feted, almost all the TED talks, and history and biographies. Everything was accessible, and I watched and listened to everything. And I felt that there was no disagreement between what they taught and what I knew or did. I had not missed a lot by not going to a business school. It was reassuring. But why was I not being successful? Smaller companies, run by younger people, passed by and did well in their areas, as they stood up at the end of their own long struggles. But we just stayed put. It had also been a very long time. Such states create fissures, through which self doubt can enter. These are ways to defeat you. You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything ... Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel. Lemelson In the course of this long journey, I had been communicating to my friends through Facebook, and they too had noticed the distinct slowdown in my posts about awards, conferences, foreign trips and so on. Friends asked how I was. I had grown tired. I said I was just doing the right things everyday, to keep moving forward. This was when I felt I had to write a book. What we learnt from this experience ought not be wasted. If there was something that I saw in the course of this journey, it should be expressed before I stopped seeing it that way. Every member of our team knows exactly how much of effort was really required, to get something to fly in a sky as large as this. Every member knows how hard the initial growth of the sapling was, and how slowly it grew. All this is valuable experience. For anyone to know how hard it is, but to know that it is no harder than this. It is not harder than the task of the silkworm, or the weaver bird. I felt we must narrate our experience with honesty and gumption, just like things really were. So that it could benefit others, who might be enabled

to easily exceed it. I started gathering what I needed to write about. That also required some work. Writing a book would also meet a strategic need of the company. Getting out of the board game, when others had effectively managed to block us from every direction. And going public, to the people of India, for whom we developed the technology. Ajantacaves He described the Ajanta caves to me like this. Imagine there was someone who once stood there, and visualized what it would be like when it was completed, the entire conceived work, the whole superstructure. And then they went to work. The work continued for many centuries. Master craftsmen and younger artisans came, grew old, were replaced by younger men who too grew old, died, replaced again, and this must have gone on for 25 generations. Because the sheer quantum of the work must have taken some 700 years to complete, by some estimates. Imagine the earliest workers digging into the hard rock on the side of a cliff, carving into the stone, without any idea of what it would be like when it would be completed. Or without any assurance that what they had started would ever be finished by anyone. Across these many generations of workers, a period during which kings changed, reigns changed, religious hegemonies changed, but the original vision of the man who started it all remained unchanged. They just kept completing the original blueprint. And that is how such temples, carved into the rocks on the steep side of a hill, got built. An entire complex hollowed out of the stone, and carved from about the 2nd century BC to about 650 AD. Then the people there completely forgot about their existence. It was only during colonial times, that a British officer on a tiger hunt came across these caves, long overgrown with forests and dense undergrowth. The caves had been shelters for wild animals. And these were discovered, and

the exquisite paintings on the walls came to be hailed as the finest examples of ancient Indian art. This is not a description of the Ajanta caves you will find anywhere. But it is perhaps one of the most vivid, a description as if he was there among them. It is only one of the many ways in which it could be described accurately. One that could instantly stir in you an interest to know more about the ancient history of our country, the people who lived here, of our temples, dynasties, science, art and heritage. All of which was forgotten, overgrown with forests. If you set on a path to rediscover them, one from the other, the hunger would just keep growing as you fed it. That is what he did to me. He had a unique way of describing things. Different things on different days, opening up vast swathes of an entirely different subject every time. One day it would be sociology say, poverty, on another day it would be religion say, the life of Buddha. On yet another day, it could be travel like Holland. It could be as diverse as literature of an obscure revolutionary, or a relic of Iran, or a book by an author in Chile, in each of which he would have paid particular attention to the juicy parts, the nectar, the parts worth knowing, the parts that make them very interesting or even spectacular, the parts that almost everyone else would have left unseen. That was his particular way of telling. I longed to listen to what he had to say, and each occasion would open up entirely new subjects to my curiosity, offering grand vistas, of vast valleys seen from a hill. I had never been interested in such things. But he changed me. A change that I think is the most valuable one, for how I wish to spend the rest of my life. It was beautiful only because he shared exactly how beautifully he had himself seen it, curated it in his mind over years. I think, outside my parents, he is the single biggest influence on me as a teacher. He is a mystic amongst us. You will have to believe it if you see that his hair has not greyed in all these years. He is ten years older than me, but looks younger. He lives a reclusive life in a city where people still have time to venerate storytellers. If you meet him, you must try to obtain something from him for yourself. He will give it to you readily, if you do

not offend him. He might give you something even if you offend him. A mystic is someone who can laugh when others are weeping. In my start-up, I occasionally tell stories, to keep my small team of young boys and girls inspired. I told the story of the Ajanta caves recently, as a parable of a vision of completion that remains undiluted through time. Towards whose completion, everyone is just an anonymous worker. A story from India, about work that has no parallel worldwide. I tried to tell it like I had heard it. Synthetic happiness From a talk by Dan Gilbert, I learnt about Synthetic Happiness. Synthetic happiness is our ability to create happiness for ourselves entirely by ourselves, experiencing it only through imagination, our ability to simulate, in the pre-frontal cortex, as they say. The anticipation of the vacation is happier than the vacation itself, and so also are the nostalgic memories of it. Not as much happiness when you were in it. The mind was constantly up to tricks to make us feel happier. Simulated happiness can be developed to such levels of intensity, that reality can never equal or surpass the happiness you could just create by yourself, at your will. It can brim over. Happiness that which we seek most, and is the objective of all our actions, is created by techniques of the mind rather than by any external realities. Simply because there is no external condition that could be prescribed as a requisite to creating non-ephemeral happiness, nothing at all, we have found none. Billionaires are sometimes very unhappy, and celebrities weep, take drug overdoses and commit suicide. As unhappy as anyone else, if there was a gauge to check. If you can find a pleasant thing to think about when you fall asleep every night, you are indeed a happy person. For most people, howsoever successful, this is not true. Happiness is a technique, and it begins with our choices. And the precondition is a guilt-free mind, obtainable through a life so led. Deprivation of real objects or circumstances commonly associated with happiness can push us, by destiny or choice, towards development of such specialist techniques of the mind, so as to be able to meet any adversity with equanimity.

Synthetic happiness does not come accompanied with the insecurities that real objects of happiness come with, like the fear of the object diminishing or being destroyed, or its comparison with another object. The highest level must be when the body is also abstracted, and physical pain too does not register, like Thich Quang Duc the Vietnamese monk who immolated himself. When you can create your own happiness you can be led by no other. You are only led by your own choices. Finally, it is really chemicals in our brains, called neurotransmitters, and our own ability to produce them, without harm. Then life is not about how much we can obtain, but about how much we can experience. That is the great leveller. Alexander had occasionally heard of Diogenes, who also lived in his kingdom. Everybody had. He was a bitter-tongued, shameless and uncouth beggar who lived in the city, who went about preaching to everybody, heedless of anything. He was either considered a nuisance, or really wise, depending upon who you were, but probably both on some occasions, by anyone. But the wise Greek citizenry loved him, and no one really wanted him to go away. And they replaced the tub that he lived in when naughty children broke the old man's stay. They knew he was saying something very right, holding up a rare mirror before them. Alexander, a kings son, was scholarly himself, having been personally tutored by Aristotle all his childhood and youth, and he had already accomplished a lot, master of most of the known world. One day he made a personal visit to the street corner where Diogenes lived, in a large stone bucket. After some small talk, he asked Diogenes, "What could I do for you?" In reply, D asked him to move away a little bit, so as not to block the sun. Alexander was shocked at his temerity. He asked, "Are you not afraid of me?" D asked him in return, "Why, are you a good thing or a bad thing?" Alexander thought over it and admitted, "A good thing." D said, There is nothing to be afraid of a good thing. Silenced and flummoxed, Alexander left, admitting to himself and to those with him, "If I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes"

And that is a statement that has been given again and again to university students all over the world, to analyse and to take to pieces. Alexander and Diogenes died on the same day. Alexander was barely in his thirties, and Diogenes was well in his nineties. No one is really sure of how Diogenes died. Some say he died of eating a raw octopus, caught in someone's net. He had never written any book, or asked someone to note what he said. But the world has painfully pieced together his life from whatever remained. Every small thing he said, or did, has been remembered in great detail. And raconteurs have spun stories around them, in the way they imagined it may have happened, 2400 years ago. "I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly." - Diogenes. Narcissism In 2005, on the Internet, I came across the writings of a self-declared Narcissist, who suffered from a huge amount of self-recrimination. The gentleman, Sam Vaknin, had produced a copious amount of writing. At the same time, the writer was a recognized scholar in many fields, most of this pursued on his own. The subject has been a curiosity ever since, and I occasionally reflect upon it with my friends, because there was an apprehension that at least some of the symptoms were present in me. A particular nature in certain people had made it into the list of the DSM IV, an authoritative manual which lists all recognized psychological pathologies of the world, like schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD, was first recognized in 1968, and its inclusion in the DSM is still controversial amongst scientists. Psychologists had suddenly come to recognize that some unusual people, said to be up to 1 or 2% of the population, with a certain set of symptoms, which were a syndrome, suffered from a malaise, and were, in general, terrible people, most resistant to cure, and most difficult to endure. Although in any relationship they first come across as extremely charming. The popular literature also claims that many highly accomplished CEOs and leaders of the world suffered from it. Steve Jobs and the founder of Facebook are some of the people accused of it. Some of the symptoms of that disease were: a very large ambition, an air of superiority, a large sense of entitlement, grandiosity, poor opinion of

most other people, but most disturbingly, a lack of empathy, it is said. They were also said to be highly manipulative of other people for their own purposes. And they had no friends. There were also many other behavioural symptoms, like wearing terrible clothes, being unclean and unhygienic, living a reclusive life by themselves with very few personal requirements. Not giving valuable gifts to others is also mentioned. They were supposedly failures in forming long-term spousal relationships, and so I had to consider this seriously. It is curious that many of these things did indeed occur together. You may have met people like this, or could read about one. But a symptom that troubled me most, making me feel as if a mirror was held up to me, was their exaggerated sense of self, which was not a true reflection of their accomplished abilities. That could be true for a lot of wannabes, of whom I too was one. They were said to be dabblers, rather than being possessors of any real merit. If you had a personality that craved greatness, a little positive stroking from society could set your belief firmly in a certain direction. The language and body language would then swerve into that direction, in a manner that could seem enraging to many others. You could generate resentment amongst peers, and lose the support of your supporters. But you could still retain a small coterie of friends, who really knew you most closely. Having a poor opinion of the majority of the people had come to be regarded as a malaise, but I wonder whether doctors have examined whether this was really the case, from the point of view of the person in question. Can the feelings of people who had worked really hard to lift themselves out of the sea of mediocrity, and were now frustrated with the callousness of others, be called a malaise? Was the man who rebuked society a terrible person? It is to people who wished to change the world that we owe the world that we currently live in. My close friends assured me that I suffered from no such pathology, and that my sense of empathy was pretty strong. But yes, there was great ambition, a sense of entitlement, readiness to sacrifice a great deal for it, independence, and a minimalist lifestyle. Since it was not a choice of life

or lifestyle like the majority, it could be called a malaise. Or there could be a real disease at the borderline of this, in a person for whom this is a mask under which he lives in some kind of denial. But the signature has to be some form of criminal behaviour. In the case of Steve Jobs, whose life I later studied extensively, it was his sense of feeling special from a very early age, which compensated for his equally strong feeling that he had been abandoned. The malaise is really about feeling special, and the unusual, onerous, single-minded pursuit by some individuals of its actualization, through a torturous life. Not necessarily a desirable life. We are very needy people actually. I cant imagine how one could take his life to any consequence, unless he aspired to it. I have not heard of anyone who exceeded his aspirations, unless he won a lottery ticket, and that too was surely from an aspiration. If you havent aspired, it will go away even if it was given to you. I remember that as a child in a boarding school I had once written in my diary: I am an ordinary child who wishes to fulfil the extraordinary dreams of my parents. And below that I had also written: I am an extraordinary child given to fulfil the ordinary dreams of my parents. Between the truths of one of these was a lifelong conflict. We will only be who we are when we are not trying to be who we are. Sren Kierkegaard (attributed) Awarenessofdeath On Diwali day, 2010, I got a phone call informing me that Rajesh Yadav, my best friend, had died of a massive heart attack at his home. He had collapsed in the kitchen, and died in minutes without even uttering a word.

I was completely shocked. As the body lay on the floor on the day of the cremation, I looked at my friend with the awareness that I was never going to talk to him anymore. Never say Thank you again, never say Sorry for everything between us. Till then, whenever I felt the need to have a deeply felt discussion with someone, or was bored, or didnt know what to do in the evening, I called him. The few nights out in the capital that I had, to restaurants or clubs, were always with him, in his car, and he usually paid for the dinner. His life was a lot like mine. He was an Army officer, also from the Signals, a bit senior to me, who had ventured out on his own to form his company, and ever since he had been going through the ups and downs of that. He was single, and lived by himself, and had already been through a lot of struggles in his business, and was now going through a period of financial hardship. We had similar vices, like smoking, irregular meals and lifestyle, and lack of exercise. I didnt have too many friends; he was one of the few, because we could relate to each other, in a way no one else would. He dreamed big. I dreamed big as well, and we would talk through the night. We talked about all those things that made winning so difficult, despite our best efforts. We talked about excellent people we had met, and what we had learned from them. We shared a vision, and we were trying to find out. Entrepreneurship is so hard that it can easily kill you. Many people came to pay their respects to Rajesh, because he was a friend to so many. He had helped so many people. He had taught me by doing. It is because I saw him that I dared to form an incorporated company, to take on all the hassles this entailed. Entrepreneurship is best learned by getting an opportunity to closely watch someone else go through the struggles of it. He taught me by being very brave, so brave as to invest in business, although all he had was just the humble middleclass savings that people like us possessed. I saw him, and so I could also do it. I didnt weep, there was only awe. Rajesh Yadav, my friend, died to teach something to others like me. Something that changed me quite a bit since that day. The awareness of death, the sudden unpredictable arrival of it, without any warning, without anything taken care of, before the

fulfilment of your dreams. Since that day, I have tried to live each day of my life as precious borrowed time. Extra time, bonus. Do the things that you have to do, as soon as you can, because you may never get the time. Say the things that you have to say. Rajesh continues to live inside me, watching over me. And I have started taking an aspirin on most nights. I have lived his death many times within me, just like I saw him. I too have lain on the floor, like someone who will never turn again, as the plumes of incense smoke run thick in the air. Some people had turned up, expected, and some a little unexpected, they talked outside, kind and unkind words, real or imagined events, that would remain unrequited. The only thing that mattered then to you, inside yourself, were things that you had to say and do that had been left unsaid and undone. "If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you'll most certainly be right." at the Stanford Commencement Address, 2005. MementoMori "Memento Mori" is one of the most fantastic stories I have ever read. When a victorious Roman general paraded through the city to glorify his triumph, the show of pomp and splendour reached a crescendo, a city full of people cheering and in festivity. He dressed in kingly regalia the gold embroidered purple toga. His face reddened like Rome's God, and wearing a crown of leaves. Slaves, women and the riches of the conquered followed him and his soldiers. A captured king or general also followed in chains, on his way to execution at Tullianum. Accompanying him in close quarters was an appointed servant, who followed his footsteps and kept uttering: "Memento Mori, Memento Mori" Memento Mori means, "Remember, you will die".

The drill was designed to bring humility to the man at the most triumphal moment in his life. How profound indeed, to impose this realization, in the midst of all the pomp. Dematerialization It is usually taken for granted that the motivation for entrepreneurship comes from the incentive of money. Although it must be true for the large majority of what we call entreprises, nevertheless that is a very surface phenomenon. It is true that the motivation comes from the expectation of a reward, but the reward may not be money. The reward may also be the sense of accomplishment; he wants to build a company that will be number one. If you want to be number one in ethical ways, it is only possible by doing the best job, serving the most, working the hardest. So what is seen as the triumph of selfishness is really about competitive altruism. The reward may be creation of wealth, but there may be very little motivation to direct it into ones own pockets. The reward may be getting to see the fulfilment of a dream, to see it making a real difference. There are many $1 CEOs today in some of the worlds largest enterprises. It is true that many of them draw a $1 annual salary while at the same time holding or demanding large parts of ownerships, stock options and so on, which translates to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Sometimes it could be seen as his way of demanding acknowledgement, of being valued, or taking something into his custody towards being able to bring about another difference, on another day. But there are also a few who do not take any of that. It is truly a $1 salary. Whats their incentive? The biggest reward of the entrepreneur is his opportunity to do what he wants to do, to see the completion of the vision, which his distant eyes constantly long to see. Being allowed to play, and the permission to continue playing. His permission to be at the helm of affairs, if he thinks he could be doing the best job of it, but ready to step aside if someone else could do a better job at it afterwards. Its not about him, it is about the vision. All the wealth that everyone else sees has dematerialized for him. There is very little that he needs. It is the very antithesis of the capitalist theory, at the highest levels of capital creation.

Having rejected everything that the world hankers for, you may be surprised to find that man tucking into all the pleasure he really cared for, in simple inexpensive things, like a dessert he relishes like a child, or a bus ride in the mountains. You will not see the money. The wealthiest person is the one with no material needs. Preach all the time. Use words only when necessary. St Francis of Assisi. Nottakingitlyingdown Angry and forlorn In early 2013, I was quite forlorn. I had written a letter to my investors, giving them an update about how long we had been in existence, about resources being low, but expressing the hope that we could hang on, and that we were starting a new year which was going to be a decisive year for us. One day I got an email from a journalist named Leo Mirani, and we soon had a long converstion which he recorded. Leo represented a publication called Quartz, published from New York. It was on the lines of WIRED, and had grown quickly to become one of the most respected periodicals internationally, on matters relating to the digital world. Leo was a respected journalist, who had reported for The Economist and Guardian, and covered stories from several continents. Leo Mirani caught me on a day I was ready to express my anguish, because I felt it was important for some people to know. It was a deliberate and grave injustice, of monumental proportions. In the scale of a country, where hundreds of millions of people went without the ability to write anything on their phones. But this happened when the solution was present, proven and known to all stake holders. I explained to him what was really happening in the technology space, and after a few weeks of his own investigations into the matter, he wrote a bold piece which was published in Quartz. In the article, Leo emphasised the importance of the solution to the people, and how the operators would be the biggest gainers if they

embraced Indian languages. How they would make more voice revenues, if only people could save their contacts, and how the major phone companies like NOKIA, Samsung or Micromax were unready to comment officially when contacted in this regard, about supporting Indian languages. A spokesman of an operator was quoted as saying that they (the handset manufacturers) dont want to do it, and we cant make them do it. Seneca said we get angry only because we are surprised. It is because we have a different expectation from reality or from people.

Evidence of collusion Two businessmen only ever meet together to collude. To fix prices, cheat customers or avoid government regulations. Adam Smith What was the meaning of all this? What had been going on for all this while? Was it that the phone companies really did not comprehend the importance of supporting the languages on the phone? Or were they actually colluding so as not to do it? Their coming together in the bizarre Special Interest Group meeting of 2009, to suggest something totally absurd, and then, after that, doing nothing for years what did it indicate? After all, if the need to support languages on the phone was recognized early, then what happened to that recognition afterwards? It started making sense why all these participant phone companies, who should have known better, were tacitly ready to go along with something as absurd as the suggestion for introduction of 7 bit encoding. Why were they ready to nod their heads when someone claimed that their phones did not support Unicode encoding, when every single one of them did? These were the technical teams of the phone companies, responsible for exactly such matters. There cannot be a bigger proof of collusion than this. What does it say of all the repeated interactions with them, over and over again, when nothing eventually happened at the end of these efforts? Why was all the recognition we had received apparently at crosspurposes with what the industry was doing about this technology?

At some stage in 2012, through a friend who is an industry forum insider, I learnt that the phone companies had internally decided, and communicated to the industry forum, that they would not do it. Simply because they did not want to do it. Was it the fear of dependence? Was it the hubris of not admitting a collective defeat to a tiny Indian start-up? Was the big company that held a monopoly in Roman keypads organising all this obfuscation? Was there a reluctance to license technology from India? Was it sheer complacency, given the fact that their phones sold anyway, and people hadnt found out about the possibility of Indian languages, or werent asking for it? A competitive divide had not yet resulted. Were they waiting for us to perish, so that they could violate the patents or our goodwill in the market? Were they waiting for matters to cool down, for when we had faded somewhat from public memory, or were maligned in some manner, so that they could take advantage of that situation? Were they waging a PR battle to suppress information on this, or disseminate some other misinformation? Such a battle could well be fought through proxies, called shills, who cannot be directly connected to them. What would they have done if it was they themselves who had solved it? Did they have any solution? Have they ever gone to any other country, say Thailand or Egypt, without supporting the language of the country? What was the role of the regulator here? Is it not the job of the regulator to have intervened? In no country in the world are phone manufacturers allowed to sell phones in which the countrys languages are not supported. The telecom regulator in Bangladesh had made it mandatory to bring in only phones that supported Bangla. Several consignments of phones were actually held up in the airport, and disallowed entry for non-compliance. This was much publicized, and even Indian phone manufacturers had been affected. Why did the Indian regulator not act in similar fashion? On one occasion, as a member of an industry body, we received a circular asking for recommendations for the National Telecom Policy. Another time, it was about suggestions for the Union Budget. In both cases, we had sent recommendations that support of Indian languages be made

compulsory on phones, and tax rebates be offered to the companies that first complied. These went unheeded, in each case. Why? These were good suggestions. They mattered the most to the Aam Admi, and could also be politically significant announcements if they were made. If you were aware of how much corruption there is within our government, on matters of telecom, spectrum, licenses and so on, you would find it easier to understand why such suspicions are actually credible. But this was a matter that touched the lives of people at the functional level. Hundreds of millions of people. Legalrecourse We hear of cases of Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court. An important case was the PIL that resulted in the court order that all diesel buses must exit from the capital of India overnight, threatening the public transport system for millions of people to come to a grinding halt. And it halted, but the government was forced to take action. Today there are no more diesel buses in the capital. Ordinarily, we could have thought that a decision to run a vehicle on Diesel or CNG is a decision left to those who run it, after all there is no law against running diesel vehicles, and millions of other vehicles did so on the same roads. The point is such a decision was taken in the interest of public health, of the citizens of New Delhi. Similarly, the Supreme Court should take cognizance of the fact that hundreds of millions of people in India have to make do with phones on which they cannot store an address book, and cannot send a text message, and are thus denied the ability to do anything that the future would offer to them. This is simply because the manufacturers did not include language support, when they could. This would be a judgment of immense public interest and utility. Consumer angle: I buy a phone of a particular manufacturer, and I receive a message from another person, in Telugu, which does not display on my phone, because the fonts required to display it are not provided on the phone by the manufacturer. Does it not constitute an injustice, absence of a reasonable support on the phone? The consumer was not informed about this particular inability when he or she purchased the phone. It was

an essential requirement that the phone manufacturer should have been aware of, and should have accommodated. I am not expected to know these things, just like if my car brake fails on a rainy day I am liable to sue the car company for poor design. The question here is not about suing the car company, the question here is about the Supreme Court taking cognizance of this need, which is vitally important for hundreds of millions of people. And ordering the phone companies to comply with the language support requirement immediately. And also ordering that the phones that are already out there be fixed with a free firmware upgrade. This kind of matter can be dealt with best by the Supreme Court of India, with no time lost in appeals. I asked someone how we can get a case directly into the Supreme Court. He said such a thing can be done if it is a case that violates a fundamental right. I told him that SMS is a means of expression, and it is this freedom which is being stymied for hundreds of millions of people of India. Revolutions have happened in the world based on people communicating over SMS and Twitter, for example, in Libya, it is said. Every now and then the Government of India stops SMS in Kashmir, or all over India, when it suspects communal unrest. So how can SMS not be considered an important means of freedom of speech or expression? They dont stop voice, they stop SMS. It is an even more powerful means of expression, particularly social expression. I wait for an advocate to join me on this. Antitrust In the world of law, there is something called Anti-Trust. Thats when it can be proven that companies have deliberately employed certain tactics to keep other players away, or introduced features that will make it difficult for a particular player in the eco-system to operate. These are matters which are considered illegal, according to the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, and action can be taken against them. Things that companies do to disrupt a level playing field in unfair ways, particularly directed towards smaller players in the eco-system.

You would have heard about anti-trust actions in the news, for instance, when Microsoft was sued for bundling its browser and making it the default browser for the operating system, thus killing the reigning browser of the day Netscape, a publicly traded company. You would also have heard about the anti-trust case for Windows Media Player being the default multimedia player in their operating system. In this case, the European Union slapped a fine of $794 million dollars on Microsoft, which they paid in full, after much lament. The transcripts of the testimonies of Mr Gates on these matters are on the net, and this offers anyone a good understanding of what anti-trust practices consist of. They are also funny if you have missed them. Look for Microsoft Vs United States. Other examples of unfair practice would be, if a major search engine is found to deliberately underplay what your position should have been in a legitimate search on a keyword, in order to aid its own interests or products. Or when a phone manufacturer makes it impossible to enter a password for the screen guard for the user, if an external input method editor was chosen by the user. This results in a severe penalty for the user, of being locked out of his own phone, and hence he will not use the third party IME (Input Method Editor). Take the case where phone manufacturers do not allow third party editors to be employed by the user at any time, while allowing only their own editors to be integrated to it. Or when an App Store will not highlight your App even if it was merited, because it competes with their own products or interests. When external software is made to crash, or is not permitted to access a critical functionality. All these are about subtle ethical expectations from a company that controls the eco-system in a major way, in a country where the rule of law is ripe for more sophisticated application. Finally, it is also about phone companies deliberately failing to introduce something as simple as Indian language fonts on the phone, with correct font rendering, which will encourage the demand for and adoption of technologies critical to it. These are areas in which they sense vulnerability, obscurity, dependence and costs. These are all Anti-Trust matters. But it would need a capable lawyer to represent it, a competent, incorruptible judge to sit over it, and the nations media following it.

What is the cost to the 800 million phone users of India, and the subcontinent, stemming from these phone companies deliberately not providing the users with a means to type, when it could have been done, and was completely technically feasible? This would support all the languages on the same phone, faster and easier than English is supported. One can type 16 words per minute on a basic phone using Panini Keypad, much faster than you can type in English on that phone. Maybe there is still time to sue them, before they are liquidated. The phones sold by these companies in India support Hebrew and Russian, but not Bangla or Tamil. The European Union judge had slapped a fine on Microsoft of 3 million Euros per day, in 2004, when the computer was used by far fewer people, and for a marginal thing called a media player. What should the damages paid to India, or to the companies affected by it, be? Protectingintellectualproperty For a start-up in the technology space, the most important thing it has is the intellectual property it has developed. In fact that is the only property it possesses. When it is robbed of this, it is robbed of everything. And so intellectual property is meant to be protected through patents. Before we discuss the subject of patents for start-ups, let us read this quote from a prolific American inventor. He was an activist in regard to protection of intellectual property developed by independent inventors or small companies, which form the majority of all innovations in the world, ever since ancient times. "Company managers know that the odds of an inventor being able to afford the costly litigation are less than one in ten; and even if the suit is brought, four times out of five the courts will hold the patent invalid. When the royalties are expected to exceed the legal expense, it makes good business sense to attack the patent ... We don't recognize that the consequence of the legal destruction of patents is a decline in innovation ..." Jerome H Lemelson, 1975, in a Senate hearing investigating the innovation crisis.

Being fully aware of this, we knew we had to adopt several different tactics to protect our IP. The vital imperatives were: complexity, pace, publicity and resultant ubiquity, and finally patents. If your technology is complex, people cannot figure out how it is done, or it would be too difficult or laborious to do so. Hence that is a natural barrier to your IP. The second barrier is your speed. If you are ready to go on producing much faster than a conventional company can produce, you are out of their earshot even before they have had their meetings. And the third is about getting well known quickly. This is the most strategic imperative, and is elaborated upon below. Either you restrict your case to the legal fine print, in an obscure patent document, that no one from the millions out there is going to read, and which could be adjudicated against you in a tiny courtroom of the world. Or you take your story to the larger courtroom of the world at large. To the people, and the important ombudsmen of the eco-system. Your lone voice could be easily stifled by titans shouting louder from the rooftops. In the battle between the Davids and Goliaths of the world, you cannot expect to win only through the conventional routes. I had written an email to my IP attorneys in early 2012. It will give you an idea of my perspective.
To my smart IP Attorneys, I have always believed that IP protection is not a function of the patent alone, but also very importantly, of ubiquity. Long ago, when there were no patents, what protected IP was only ubiquity. Everyone knew who created the Aesops Fables, or who invented the telescope. In fact it was so well known that some people have had to go through persecution, sometimes been burnt to death, because it was so easy to point to them for the IP they had created. We have tried to remember this. I list at the end of this, all the awards/recognitions that we have achieved so far, mainly to pursue that very aim, ubiquity, as much as possible. In India, and as much as we could afford, worldwide. This is also important information for my attorneys, because one day they will have to warm up to potential defence of it, and also prosecution. Or advise others who may have to do so. This is generally done in a jury, where ubiquity helps even more.

Ubiquity threatens the potential violator. He is warned, he doesnt want to be called a thief. I say this in seminars about IP with a colouful story of a mall with the Nizam's diamond (worth Rs 50 crores) in the middle of it, in a glass case. Everyone passes by, no one attempts to steal it, although there is only one weak security guard standing near it. But try switching off the lights of the mall! Virtually everyone wants to steal it. So people steal in darkness, no one wants to steal when the floodlights are on. Especially bigger companies, who have their reputations to protect. CSR and all that. In our case, the potential violators are all big companies like that. Or they are in China. I say all this because I want you to understand how important the thing which you are responsible to protect, is. We must keep the credit of this in India. And it is also a very big business. I wonder if I have ever gone into the details of that with you. At first, we too did not know that so clearly. How could we? But today, this is increasingly moving towards being the disruption that is actually going to affect the digital devices of the future, all devices. Definitely in the subcontinent, and potentially all over the world. About the Indian products, as you know, you only have to Google "Panini Keypad". The Arabic product is also quite popular, and its use is growing. The Chinese product has turned out to be promising, it is just the beginning now, we need to go there. Regarding the Korean product, it seems we have to work on it more. Lets see, if we can build something that the Koreans will get fascinated by. The phone companies were trying to stall its adoption, waiting for either Qwerty or touchphones to make this irrelevant, because it is not their own design. In fact it disrupts everything that they have believed in so far on input technologies. But actually there is still sufficient time in the interim, and we have been successful in awakening the market about this. The possibility of their being able to send messages in their own languages to each other. So this needs a fix. We have always been in talks with virtually every handset and tablet manufacturer, and now the first ones are moving towards adoption. Alongside, operators are warming up towards offering it as VAS. Lets see, how it goes. We still dont make any money.

One fine day, if a company violates our IP, what would we do?

Take them to court? Which court? Whats stopping them from doing it today? Which court in India is immune to bribery on a multi-million dollar matter? Isnt this the way the companies operate in India anyway? Always with helpful Indian subjects? Patents are for prophylactic protection. The last resort in the court of justice. A prophylactic is not the only way to prevent a pregnancy. Not having sex is a simpler first step. For small companies, if you can achieve it, ubiquity is your best bet. The violators fear of shame and disgrace can be strong, especially if public sensitivity can be built around it. Theft has to be made so counter-productive that stealing would be tantamount to tattooing the word Thief on the forehead of that brand for ever. Oops! That hurts! National sentiments and politics also play a very important role. A South Korean company will not dare to violate an American patent holder. A Chinese company could dare to. Why? Is there anyone to stand by the protection of the Indian inventor? Do we have any diplomatic muscle, although we sign all the agreements? Have we ever even thought about it? Will our consumers reject products which violate the work of Indian inventors? How will Indian technologists dare to invest their lives in the global technology space, if they were not assured of the protection of their IP? Indias role was merely to be the sucker at the end of the line, of all economic stories of technology. A large market of consumers is what we can offer quite proudly. A large number of phone users, Internet users, and so on. But we will never be the suppliers in the global technology story, only the suckers at the end of the line. Big multinational companies will come to sell to our consumers, and the function of our government would only be to preside over their set-up, grant exclusivities, distribute tracts and conveniences, for the rights to trade and sell here in exchange for gratification of the leader and his party. India was the fiefdom of its leaders, where tracts of its consumers could be sold off, quite like one sold tracts of shallow sea for shrimp fishing to an enterprising contractor who likes what he is seeing, the shrimps. Thats how well we are doing.

The common way for big companies to steal the intellectual property of individual inventors or small companies is by making a small modification in some manner, making it round instead of square, adding something to it, and claiming it is a new invention. The rest is about who can spend how much more for attorney fees, bribes, media story planting etc. That is why Lemelson argued for a First to Invent policy for patents. Once a large company is bent upon violating the patent, it would be impossible for an individual inventor to protect himself, even after he had done everything right. All of what I say will never be openly admitted, but it is easy to imagine. This is what it is all about. In a US court order of Aug 2012, Samsung was ordered to pay $1 billion to Apple for patent infringement damages. Their patent battles began in 2011, and by 2012 there were 50 patent lawsuits between Apple and Samsung, in a dozen countries. Apple got a favourable ruling in the US, and Samsung got a favourable ruling in Korea, Japan and UK. There were other rulings in other countries. Is all this something that is as simple as handing candies to kids? The patents under dispute were on relatively trivial matters, technologically speaking, like Bounce Back Effect, Tap to Zoom, Home Button and Rounded Corners. Compared to these, our patented innovation should clearly look like a real breakthrough. How tough do you think litigation would be, and how costly? Should we not be cognizant of these matters in our think tanks? Do we have a national policy for this? President Obama himself stepped into these matters by ordering executive action against patent trolls. "Settlements are not based on the legitimacy of the patent claim, but just on the threat of even higher costs through litigation. There is no question this is putting abusive litigation over innovation, and is hurting economic growth and is distracting some of our greatest innovators from their core economic mission." - President Obama, June 4th 2013. Patents are applied for by an inventor, at a stage when he is weakest. He has probably run out of his own funds, and is deep in debt as a result of the process of invention, building prototypes, and so on, which may have taken years. And now he is at a stage where there is complete uncertainty regarding what could come out of his invention. Will he be able to put it

to use, will there be a demand for it, will he be able to commercialize it? It is at this stage that he is expected to invest in good patent attorneys etc, who are very expensive. And he must do it as quickly as he can, even weeks could matter. How can that be at all possible, in any part of the world? But thats the world we have created for our inventors. Inventors will still invent, just like poets will write poems, painters will paint, singers will sing, like a tree will flower. It is in their nature in each case. They always did it even when there were no patents. Inventions are all around us. Do we know who invented the buttons we use in our shirts? It could well have been that you have a choice of a shirt that needs to be tied with laces, which costs a few Rupees less, and the ones with the buttons, which cost more, due to its patent. Inventions, large and small, surround us in our modern lives, and try to make our lives better in every possible way, thanks to the past efforts of others. It is for society to learn to respect its inventors, who change the world for the better. Patents or without them. If companies were ethical by nature, we would not need the patents. The current patent regime does not favour the individual inventor, so we will see much less of them, because it can be so unsustainable. Building and protecting intellectual capital as a nation is crucial, because practically everything that we do is about living off it. The single-point aim of the international patent regime should be to create justice for the individual innovator. The smartest countries take this matter very seriously, and try their best to create such an eco-system. That is why they lead. If there is only one reason that we were colonized by a country one twentieth our size, who came merely in hundreds, after a journey of twenty thousand kilometres over four months, it was because of our lack of technology. We had swords to fight against guns. What is the state of our indigenization today? Getting back to the practical issue of patents, there is a decision I have to make. I am looking at an email from one of my attorneys, asking for Rs 176,000 to be sent to his bank before he will act on the business at hand. This is

for the annual renewal of a European patent. There is also his reply to an observation from the patent office there, in regard to a modification in one of the claims. The renewal itself costs GBP 975, about Rs 85,000. My Indian lawyer wants Rs 30,000 for a few paragraphs of well considered reply. The UK lawyer wants GBP 400 to review those lines before filing. And he wants another GBP 300 because he was involved in this process. None of these amounts were negotiated, we dont know what they should cost, they have been just announced, and I will have to pay. I have two more days to make up my mind. If I dont act, our claim in the territory will fall through. We have already invested a great deal on this. We may have spent something like Rs 25 Lakhs (about $50,000) so far on patents filed in several countries, and thats after a lot of scrounging. Thats a lot of money for us here. Someone may say patents are very expensive, and this is relatively little, but it is easier to say that than to be the one paying it, as a start-up. And there are no guarantees, we dont know whats going to come of all this. If you dont patent, you are not even claiming that protection. You tell me what I should do? There is another invoice that I have not opened yet, because I am terrified to. But I can act on it a little later, say, in a months time. Such invoices keep coming. These always entail hard decisions, but I always have to say Yes. A lot of good money that can be used for something else, like getting some good employees, buying better computers, putting some ads somewhere. The savings can also help us stay alive for a while longer, if need be. We finally spent the money. The reply to the Extended Search Report of the European patent office for application number EP09838197.3 was filed in time, at the European Patent Office. A few words of advice on IP protection First, be convinced that what you wish to patent is indeed patentable, patent worthy. Too many people, not just in India but everywhere, think what they have done is an invention. Only a lifetime of keeping abreast with inventions can give you an awareness of what a true invention is,

and what qualifies to be called an invention. You can always research. If there is a prior art, it is not patentable. If you go to an attorney who is jobless, he will file a patent for you, he has no problem. Thats how most patents get filed. There are lots of cranky people who have the desire and the money. Or engineers working in big companies, who file a couple of them every six months, as a routine exercise. They have most exotic titles, like Non-Bayesian Sequential Field Mesh Optimization for Partially Congested Randomized Networks, written by three authors. Real inventions generally have simpler titles, and are usually by one author. Study the prior art in detail. Prior art means all other previous patents, objects that already exist in the public domain, ideas that have been published beforehand. Find a patent attorney who is very bright and understands your novelty well, and understands all novelties well. He must be very sharp, and be able to see clearly what the sequence of inventive steps was, what can be protected, and what needs to be protected. You will know it from how he speaks. Take someone who is experienced. There is too much that one learns only along the way, procedural stuff. Get personal recommendations from people who have gone through the whole journey. The original drafting of your patent should be done by you, because you are the inventor, you know best what the inventive steps are. You know the field best. You know what has been invented before. Be inspired by the high quality of patents filed by Tesla and Edison. Study them, study the diagrams etc. Write everything yourself, like it was the real patent. Get your attorney to work with you until you are of one mind, let him draft it for you in the legalese. Include a lot of diagrams to make things easy for anyone to understand, including a jury one day, to whom you could be trying to explain. If your attorney has no time for discussions with you, discard him. Dont try to broaden the scope by using language that tries to claim more than what is truly due to your invention. But if you can see that your invention will make things possible in the future, include those possibilities by describing the specifics.

Take estimates, compare. Be aware of the costs. Work with someone who is ethical and not greedy. Professional fees are worthwhile when they are worthy, and you can see it when it is worthy. Its a big subject. Choose the countries that you wish to file patents in judiciously. In our field, we had to do this, and so we did it. You know the story. If our own inventions are not protected when it mattered, Indians should have no business to be part of the international patent regime. Competitionandcommunication Ourcompetitors There was a time when people asked me if we had any competition, and I would say we had no competition. That answer could still be considered correct, because the question can be so nuanced. For instance, whether the question was about basic phones, or touchscreen phones. Is the question only about phones, or tablets or PCs? Whether it was about input in an Indian language script, or in Roman. Was the question about one particular language, or all languages? Was the competition a credible one? But if we looked at all these segments, we really did have some competition here and there. So lets look at the segments. Consider the case of typing in Indian languages on the phone. There are actually several products out there. The first ones are those which ask you to type in Roman to write in Indian languages. These are like Quillpad and IndiSMS, Avro in Bangladesh, and some others, including Googles. This was actually the incumbent even before we started, so people were aware of this. This will continue to have some users among the Englishspeaking population. For typing directly in Indian alphabets on the basic phone, there is no solution other than Panini Keypad. The only other means being multi-tap, which expects people to type with up to 9 key-presses per character. For typing on a touchscreen phone, where any number of keys can be created on the screen, there are many virtual keypads available. But the

problem here is that there are too many characters in Indian languages, and they necessarily have to be fitted over two levels, accessed by a Shift key. Besides, the keys are so densely crowded together, and hence tiny, that they become difficult to touch, and so typing is error prone. On touchscreen phones, what Panini Keypad offers to the user are large keys to touch, and also all the bells and whistles of dictionary prediction, like auto-suggestions of complete words. Touchscreen could have been a threat for us, but we made sure that people prefer Panini Keypad even on touchscreens. A large number of users who have tried every kind of keypad say that the Panini Keypad is the best one, even for touchscreens. A big aid for the user is the large key, which is easier to touch. And manufacturers can offer the same usability across both types of phones, which will co-exist for some time to come. Your phone may be a touchscreen, your wifes phone may be a keypad phone. There is no attrition of learning across the devices. And there is no renewed cost of marketing communication, or support for the companies in question. Panini Keypad will make it possible for companies to support phone models with smaller touchscreens, and yet offer the means to type conveniently. The low-cost phone user is likely to stay on keypad phones for some more years. Even when he migrates to a touchscreen phone, it may suit him to have a small one, on cost grounds or for the convenience.

Swype There is a technology called Swype, also from Nuance, applicable only to high quality capacitive touchscreens. One can move ones finger over the sequence of characters that one wants to type, and the system tries to figure out what you are writing by looking up matches in the dictionary. There are several other similar products that do the same thing. Swype-like technologies are no threat to us, because Indian languages can only be accommodated at two levels, and Swype would not work. No surprise then, that Swype has not produced anything for south Asian languages. Lookeys, Adaptxt etc.

There are also other companies in the technology space, like an Israeli company called Lookeys, and a UK company called Adadptxt. They use static keypads. There were actually numerous other products, from shareware developers and smaller companies, who offer a large variety of static keypads for touchscreen phones. We do not have a competition that matters here, but we did have competition that was of considerable nuisance value. Some of these companies, seeing that there was no way they could compete on merit, decided right away to bribe the executives in the client companies to introduce their wares. These were well-funded companies, with senior executives in the business development department to lobby with the client companies and government. They may be able to stay afloat for a long time. But I do not think the companies in question would have taken long-term decisions that matter, in regard to users language interface, merely because someone in their organization was bribed. It would just not be sustainable. We also found a few of our potential customers patronizing some of our competition, with financial grants, or by getting them favourable press coverage on the subject, in which our technology was never mentioned. We could see through the game. If you want to weaken Hamas, provide arms to Fatah. When they know very well that they will eventually have to come round to our solution. A shill is a term for a person who is publicly helping a cause, without exposing his interests in another larger organization. These can also be journalists, an influential blog or some other public persona ready to lend such services. A lot of players have entered the space in recent times, mainly with various types of static keypads, or with Roman transliteration. This will actually result in people becoming familiar with the character sequence rules of Indian languages, and these users would then be ready to move to Panini Keypad in the next stage. It is like a reduction of one step in our download funnel. Hence we periodically study the developments in this space. Refining marketing communication

Marketing communication is a very important thing. Many times, one may stand before the stall of a company in an exhibition, and have no clue about what they do or make. If you asked someone, he too would give you some blah blah, without coming to the point. You get nothing. The stall does nothing. You see an ad and you get nothing. You get an email and you get nothing. These are all examples of failing to communicate. And it happens all the time. Its not so easy either. Its not easy, mainly because you want to say so many things, and are too worried about missing out on anything. But nobody cares to read all that. If they liked what you were saying, they would also be ready to read the small print on their own. We took a lot of time to figure this out, and so refine our communication, but we did become aware. We kept trying to improve in small ways, based on feedback, weighing our options regarding what goes and what stays, and also about what new point is brought in. Is there a fresh way of saying it, which is better understood, easier to relate to? Let me give you an example. Once, in an exhibition stall, after going through the whole pitch and demo with a user, we heard him say Ah! So this is a software! A revelation for us, because we had never thought about the fact that with all the pictures of phones in our stall, someone would automatically think this was a new kind of a phone, because most companies sold phones. In our pitch, we showed him the product and how to use it, talked about Indian languages, stated what the problem was, and how we solved it. But we never ever mentioned that what we really intended was to give him a piece of software to install on his phone. What should I say in the first ten seconds when an investor speaks to me? What do I say when a visitor enters my stall? What do I say in thirty seconds? How do I present when I am given only six minutes in a contest? Geeks have a fascination for technology and they love to use words like statistical prediction, dictionaryless, and so on, which is really of

zero importance to most people. The sentences also keep getting longer, to accommodate all the adjectives, till they become unwieldy enough to be thrown into the trashcan. So we constantly learn from feedback. To gather feedback one has to go out there and try. Every audience is different, so we take our guesses. But the geek disease has not gone away, as you can notice. Geekness doesnt help, except among other geeks. Having been forced to write Facebook ads that dont work for us, we are learning. Get to the point, silly. Think as the viewer: Whats in it for me? How do you make me even look at it? What have I understood? Steve, who advises me from Canada, keeps telling me look, companies will buy your technology when you can show them that they can make more money, or save some money. Only one of these two things. I try to do that, I meekly reply to Steve. The problem is we still have a lot of things to say. I still write long emails. Understandingthebusinesscase A bug-ridden software product could be patched up with an upgrade for better performance, but the business case is not about that. A business case is that the patch will allow the company to justify an upgradation charge to its customers. A horse cart that you took at the railway station may have a horse that could have a better life if its wounds were attended to. But there may be no business case here, because the horse pulled anyway, three times to the town and back everyday. I had been screaming at Nokia for years and then in 2013, I was asked to write a business case for them. I literally had to Google to know what was expected of me when I wrote a business case. I truly didnt think like that, never did. I thought the company who make the software should consider it their foremost responsibility to patch their software, in order to provide the best experience possible to users. Its their duty, even if they had to spend for it. A phone company should like to offer its customers a means to write, which would increase user

satisfaction. What could be more important than that? Why would a business case at all be required? I think that the Business Case question really makes it very easy to discern between companies that are run by MBA business managers, and those that will touch the sky of excellence. But the question did clarify a lot of things. You had better start thinking in terms of Business Case in order to justify your sales proposition. But unknown to business managers, the biggest brand value is created by companies that invest in excellence just for the sake of it. Put in more than what is required, exceed the expectations of users. Customers are ready to pay the premium for that excellence. They didnt have to compete on price, they competed on excellence. A report in The Economist in 2011, pointed out graphically that Apple, which had only 4% of the market share, made more than 50% of the available profit of the entire phone industry. Whereas NOKIA, with a 30% market share, made 15% of the profit. Another report of 2011 pointed out that the iPhone 4S 16 GB, which costs $649 in retail stores, has a bill of materials worth $188. A third party calculated that $93 was spent on labour costs, transportation, storage and warranty expenses. That leaves $368 of profit per iPhone for Apple. How could anyone make this kind of margin in the worlds most competitive market? If you are going to invest in introduction of innovations and features on your phones based on a business case, if maximization of returns is the only metric on which your managers are going to be assessed, if you are only going to live quarter to quarter, you are always going to fight only in the commodity space. You will always be led instead of leading. I dont think the other company made all its decisions based on a business case. You can go this far with a business case, but no further. As far as the horse cart guy. I did prepare the Business Case subsequently, the salient points of which were the following: 1. You currently produce different phones for different regions, using printed keypads. A phone with a Bangla keypad for Bangladesh, an Urdu Keypad for Pakistan, a Thai keypad for Thailand, and so on for Arabic, Hebrew, Russian etc. This involves a cost of

production. And a cost of shipment and logistics, because you have to treat them all as different products. You cannot trans-ship between countries in the region, on a need basis. And more than the cost, there is a risk involved, because when a phone model fails in a market you cannot sell it in another country. That inventory is wasted, or has to be refurbished for another market, but only by returning it to the factory. What has been the loss to your company this year for phones that did not sell in a particular market? When you produce phones with no keypads, it is the same phone for all regions. 2. In a country like India, where you should have supported the languages of the country, it would have been impossible for you to manage 9 different products, for each of your models. But you can do it now with this technology. 3. Similarly, your Resellers will find it easier to stock your products, because they too would not end up with dead stock, just like you. Even if phones with a particular keypad did not sell. 4. Give your users a great experience. Give them support for something they need. The need to store an address book on the phone, and send text messages. That feature is far more important than the camera, the music, the games or any other thing. It should have been the key feature to sell your phones with, in the entire heartland of India. Give them AI, give them ergonomics. With this in place, you would be able to sell your phones for more. Or there will be greater demand for your phones. 5. Unified usability. You will be able to support the basic phone and the touchscreen phone with just one way of typing, which everyone gets familiar with. Because both these types of phones have to exist simultaneously in the eco-system for a long time. It is a cost to the user to adapt to two different systems. It is also a huge cost for the company to teach users how to type and provide them support. Panini Keypad offers one simple usability for all languages, and all types of phones, with just two simple rules of typing. 6. Independence to choose form factors. You have phones with 12 keys, phones with Qwerty keypads, phones with 3x4 layouts and

those which have 4x3 layouts. You have square phones, tall phones and so on, even on touchscreens. Panini Keypad offers you the choice of supporting any kind of phone, because only the keys need to get resized or reoriented on the screen. 7. You have a competitive advantage because at least your company knows how to handle the fonts of all Indian languages. While the others are still struggling out there. You should take advantage of this strength till it lasts. 8. Operators need this, the government needs this. All vernacular publications, VAS etc need this. They are your partners in business and in the eco-system. 9. A keypad which is cluttered with characters that are difficult to read without a magnifying glass, is also poor aesthetics. Your designer would be very happy if he could do without it. 10. Did you enter any other market without including the support of its language, say Thailand or Egypt? You are lucky so far that this country has not enforced upon all manufacturers what should have been done from day one. You save money in production, logistics, inventory and risks. You make more money in sales, satisfy user demand and enable advantages to your partners. You enjoy universal support of all languages, on all types of phones, with the same software, and you enjoy total flexibility in design thanks to this. Thats the Business Case. Customersupport Everyday, we get a few emails and phone calls from our users, from all over the world. We have replied to each one of them, through all these years. From my shareware development experience, I knew very well how many users it takes for someone to write a letter of appreciation. How indispensible does a software have to be, for someone to write a letter seeking support? We deeply respect each of these users, and value

their letters, and so we reply to them. Users have contributed to pointing out bugs, or requested features. They have even contributed by translating our documentation in their own language. While going through data on downloads of our products, we once came across a phone number from which our application was downloaded almost every month. We were curious about this, and so I called the number, but there was no reply. When I called again later, I spoke to a woman who was the wife of the owner of the phone. It turned out that Suraj, from Maharashtra, was deaf and dumb, and he communicated by writing on the phone, using Panini Keypad. We immediately arranged a license for him. On another occasion, Shyam spoke to a 70 year old lady in Lucknow. We were surprised how she managed to download and install the software on her own. Shyam later visited the lady at her home, to know more about her experience and got a few pictures. You can send us an email, and you will get a reply.

Thejoyoffeedback I was looking at the download data this morning. Our products were offered in so many languages now, across all the platforms Java, Android, iPhone. For users of basic Java phones, there is just no other way they could type on the phone in their languages. The entire inventory of our products is being offered free from all the leading App stores of the world simultaneously. Every morning when I come to office, I ask to look at how each of our products are doing in the various App stores. How are the ones which were newly introduced doing? I looked at the download data for each of these languages from several App stores where there were numerous downloads daily, and it was steady. For languages that we had just launched, there was a big surge as they were being discovered and shared amongst friends. A surge that would calm down and stabilize. We see the names of the countries, they are all over the world. For instance, the newly-launched Urdu product being downloaded in Pakistan

and India, but also in Saudi Arabia, and other places. Immigrant workers. The same patterns that we saw for our Bangla and Malayalam products. Popularity among immigrant populations, who are probably thrilled by their ability to write in their own languages, in a distant land, using phones that they had purchased there. Every such person who learns to type like this brings us great joy. We know that this is something we gave birth to. Fiercely resented and blocked by everyone, right from the beginning, but it had proven itself. It was popular, and that was real. It was being used. It was in the hands of people. It had done its job. It can never be wished away.

SymphonyinBangladesh Symphony was the largest seller of mobile phones in Bangladesh. This was a Bangladeshi OEM who sold imported phones, but its market share, in volume, was larger than NOKIA, who were number two in the country. The company we had worked with earlier, for the development of the reference design on the Mediatek chipset, had relations with Symphony, and so they got them to agree to launch this product on 25,000 of their handsets. The integration was quickly done in China by the manufacturer and the phones were produced, and were launched in Bangladesh in March 2013. There was no marketing or public announcement, the editor was not the default one, and the user had to delve into the phone to discover the feature. But the name Panini Keypad was included in the feature lists of the phone. We were not expecting a big burst to come out of it right away, but it was a very important milestone for our technology. There was now a real phone where Panini Keypad was embedded, and it was usable. It was a low-cost phone, priced at about 2600 Bangladeshi Taka, or about $30. I had not met the owners of Symphony as yet, because I have not yet travelled to Bangladesh. Services,productsandtechnology In the world of IT companies, there could be three distinctions. There are service companies which form the bulk of the IT companies of India. Service companies take up assignments from other companies to meet

their customized IT needs, payroll software, automation, web presence, ERP, networking, cloud architecture, internal communication software, business intelligence, sales tracking, anything you can think of. Service companies start working after receiving an advance, so it is relatively low risk, but hunting for fresh assignments is an ongoing sales activity. The biggest selling point for an Indian company is usually the considerable labour cost difference. Service companies have a revenue model which is quite different from a product or a technology company. Life is good, but its a job. It doesnt make money from a cookie cutter. Then there are Product companies. Very few and far between in India. Is there any software product that you use in your computer that was made in India the self proclaimed software superpower? Any zip, any notepad, any chat software, video joiner, anything at all? Making products is risky, you build something over many years, not sure about how its going to turn out, and whether you are going to find any buyers for what you produced. Will it be unique? Can it stand up to the global competition in the market segment? What is the market share it will get? Thats why its risky business. But there are some product companies in India. I know a handful, maybe you know some more. A product company is one who has a way to go directly to the consumer. You can sell your product, its self-contained, you dont depend on anyone. And thats very good. Then there is the technology company. A technology company cannot go to the market on its own. It is necessarily a B2B business. It has to depend upon major companies to license their technologies. And in the technology field, there are never any runner ups. The winner takes all. Companies are not going to take the second best technologies, especially for anything that affects the interface to consumer. So the technology field is the riskiest to be in, and it is also the one where the biggest turf wars happen, because the second rungs, especially if they are well-placed financially, are not going to give up so easily. Because if they do, they will become penniless. They will use all the means at their disposal to delay the truth. Primarily corruption, also lobbying. Note that the real Silicon Valley is made up of only the second and third types of IT businesses. Not the first type.

 Eachoneplayedtheircard By mid-2013, each of the major companies had played their card regarding the usability they were going to choose. Nokia continued with its multi-taps that no one used, and they had introduced a static virtual keypad in one of their touch-screen phones. Google had introduced a keypad of their own for Hindi, which was a static keypad, with their transliteration approach. We were happy that none of them had chosen or dared to violate our patents. It was good to know that they had cast their cards in a particular direction, so they would have no public way to go back to our design when they appeared defeated in the public eye. Samsung too had worked with us, and knew very well that this was the right thing to do. It was just a matter of time now. Apple had their own static keypads of the past, which they were continuing with. Mediatek knew about us very well, and they were also aware that it had already been developed on their phones. We already knew, from remarks on our download sites, that tech-savvy people who had tried out all the other static keypads were convinced that Panini Keypad was a better keypad even for touchscreen phones. And there was no way except with Panini Keypad users could type in the basic phones, a market segment which still had a lot of life left in the developing countries of Asia. So the touch-screen feedback was reassuring. So it only remained for people to find out which was the best way for them. The sphere of Indian languages had warmed up, with many more players joining the fray, with their own products for content, games and other applications, and also with many more keypads. WordAssociation In our patent that was filed in 2008, we had not only included the possibility of supporting characters through statistical predictions but also of entire words. This was a new feature that we started adding to our products in 2013. On the touchscreen phones, where this could be easier implemented, entire words would now come up as soon as you finished writing one. These words would come from the statistical analysis of

corpora in exactly a similar manner. Such a feature was released for one of our languages for the iPhone in Aug 2013 and then it was being gradually developed for all the Indian languages and to be supported on all the products, iPhone, Android and any other. We are hoping that this innovation of word association for all the Indian languages will be completed before Nov 2013. This will add another feature towards the ease of typing in Indian languages on devices. Roleofgovernment In August 2011, I had got in touch with a Union Ministers office. This was the Minister of State for Telecom and IT. Working with the Ministers OSD, I was asked to plan for a pilot launch of our product in the constituency of the Minister. The plans and arrangements were submitted as a project report. Many people came to know about it in the Ministry since it was circulated. We were excited, because it would be a way to prove the validity of the technology in a rural constituency, under the watchful eyes of the government itself, and so it would be easier to get their mandate. Everything was going fine, and one day they asked me to submit a twopage summary about the Panini Keypad and the launch plan. If the Ministers office asks for a two-page summary for someone else to see, who could it be for? For the Prime Minister? The Cabinet? The Party President? An Advisor to the Government? We submitted the two-page summary, and that was the last communication with them. They stopped replying to our emails thereafter. Who shot it down and for what? Who was advising them? Who wanted the Indian languages to stop? Who wanted to stop an Indian innovation from flourishing? Who found it inconvenient to admit the fact that it was now very easy to write in all Indian scripts on the phone? Who wanted India to be a country which would eventually write in the Roman script? What was the politics here? There were also other Ministers who knew about it. We had received awards from the hands of two Union Ministers, one from Science & Technology, and another from Telecom & IT. In each case, we tried to correspond for support, but we never received a reply.

It was my father who recommended that I should try to show it to Mr Sam Pitroda. During the Pan-IIT Conference and Exhibition of 2010, held in Greater Noida, where we had a stall given to us by FICCI, Surjendu had a brief chance to talk to Mr Pitroda. He explained what it was, that it ran on the phone, and could be shown in a moment. But I was surprised to learn that he did not want to see it. Incredulous, I asked him again, He didnt want to see it? When I met the Seceretary General of ITU during the MWC in 2011, he specifically remembered to mention to me that when Mr Pitroda had come to meet him officially recently, he had brought this up with him. This is the highest level that it can get. What more could I have done? The Secretary General of the United Nations body on Telecom, advising a countrys Telecom Advisor, on record. The Secretary General did that for me, but I have never even got a call from the office of Mr Pitroda. He was the Chairman of our National Innovation Council. He was also the Advisor of our Prime Minister. The gatekeepers of progress of our nation. A childhood mate of mine had been the Prime Ministers aide, the officer who was always alongside, carrying the black briefcase. Through him, I arranged that a brief letter be delivered, to someone as close to the PM as possible, and he did that for me. But I never heard back from anyone. If you are wondering why our ministers never stood by our side, when this could be perceived as something to go to the people with, the reasons could be many. It could be an internal decision at the high command to stay out of it for reasons not known to us. It could be because of an internal check with the industry stake holders, who are important donors of funds. Politicians have a keen sense of what are big handles, and how big a thing can qucikly become. Language was volatile stuff, everyone could want to be seen to be doing the most for it. It could be the fear of letting something private and non-aligned grow too quickly, especially when it is not known what the political affiliations of this group might be. Or what the outcome of this enablement could be socially, and then politically, in the regions. What sentiments will it stir? Who will win ground from this, and who will lose? It is best to let it stay buried for as long as possible. In recent times, the rapid rise of several individuals and institutions in the public space in India has not had a favourable impact for any of the ruling parties.

Or could it merely have been their failure to see it? What should the role of the government have been in all this? What should the role of the regulator have been through all this? Onewaywewillalwayswin No one gets to keep anything for ever. It comes, and then one day they watch everything being taken away from them. You can indulge in as much politics you want, you can try to steal as much as you want, but there is one way we will always win. People will learn to type like this and will type like this, in this part of the world, and in many other parts, perhaps in the entire world. What could beat the satisfaction of being in every hand? You cannot steal that away from us. We gave it five years of our all. Only five years of our lives, during which we received so much to keep. Our experience will embolden others; warn them of every trick at the disposal of their enemy. There will be a stream of others, who will assert themselves with no fear, and will achieve greater success. The game is not about how much you can take from it to hoard it by yourself. Even the glory could be stolen from us in the earliest days, its possible. The game is about how much of a change you could bring about. Thats the only thing thats everlasting. In the end, it all works out. No one takes away anything. This will now stay. The dynamic intelligent keypad may be used one day in the multi-function front panel of the hatch of a space capsule, on its journey to a star. You would want to have buttons that only came up when they were applicable, perhaps statistically applicable, based on the environmental circumstances. You can delay a technology but you cannot kill it Kevin Kelly, 2005

China story On 18 June 2013, there was a CSDN (Chinese Software Development Network) story on Indian Telecommunication, on Chinas leading portal,

163.com. It spoke about the rapidly changing market shares of handset companies, particularly on smart phones. The article talked about the revenue woes of the telecom companies, and the regulatory issues. But the crux of this story was the issue of support of Indian languages on the phone. It had a picture of Panini Keypad, mention of it and the founder. And crucially, it brought out the point that Indian operators can increase their voice revenues if more people can use address books on their phones, by enabling typing in their own languages. A compelling theory, which we had been trying to bring out in the open for some time now. Over the week, the story was replicated in several other major portals of China, namely Baidu Tieba, Chinabyte, Yesky.com, hf365.com and many others and then in some 460 websites. I assume this unique, perceptive story would have been spotted by many tech watchers in China, and will continue to appear on Chinese searches. Maybe the truth has to arrive in India via outside watchers. The environment heats up July and August 2013 were significant months, in terms of the attention Indian languages received in some major newspapers. On 29 July, there was a story in one of the largest English newspapers, about the wealth of Indians languages, their disappearance and so on. But what was patently false, and perhaps maliciously introduced into the story, was that India is full of scripts. This is commonly done to produce an impression that it is impossible to support all the scripts of India. That is part of an agenda. To make it look so un-doable that no one will ask you to do it. It was also interesting to note that there were some newspapers that seemed to have taken up the task of spreading misinformation. The truth is that India has only 10 scripts, not one more, and their digital interface presents no challenge at all, because all of them are supported very well by Unicode.

On 13 August, Samsung announced that they would now support 9 Indian languages on their smartphones and Tablet PC. This was reported by almost every newspaper in the country. They were a big brand and important advertisers. The truth was that they were trying out their own static keypad, and were offering it only in the phones with the largest screens, the Galaxy Grand and Galaxy S4, besides Tab 3. Phones that were as big as the palm of a hand and costed between Rs 20,000 and Rs 35,000. The media never asked them or reported what was going to be their solution for phones with smaller screens, and most importantly, phones with keypads, which most Indians still use and for whom Indian languages were most important? Finally, on 22 August came a story from another major global player. They were looking at input for Indian languages based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so that you wrote with your finger on the screen. OCR cannot work for Indian languages for two reasons. First, people are not aware about writing correctly and will therefore write variably. And second, writing would be very slow. Optical character Recognition had already been tried for the Chinese language, and although the technology was fine, it never became mainstream because it was too slow. Typing was faster. Also in September 2013, there was a big press story of NOKIA including support of Urdu on a basic phone. A story covered by most papers and online media. It was again a multitap support. Whereas users all over the region were already typing in Urdu for over six months now for both keypad phones and touch screen phones using the Panini Keypad.

This only makes me think that people cant help being pathetically stupid, in public, before they give up. When I leave for a wash in the river everyday, I see six frisky goats tied on very short leashes to the fence of the Ashram. The goats look skywards and bleat away, as if a rescue party from heaven was going to come to their aid. That is most unlikely.

Making sense Galileo In Galileos time, it was firmly believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. It was a belief that seemed so obvious to relate to in everyday experience, that this Aristotelian view was never questioned. Disproving this belief was the famous public experiment Galileo had conducted at the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo had also invented the astronomical telescope, through which it became clear to him that the planets and earth went around the Sun, contradicting the widely held belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Galileo is called the Father of Modern Science today, but he was persecuted during his lifetime, and lived under house arrest. His book Dialogue concerning the two Chief World Systems, was an imaginary conversation between the proponents of the two opposing theories and a layman who asked simple questions, was designed to bring out the truth to the layman through a gradual logical debate. He tried to bring a matter which could scarcely be understood by the public into a form that they could comprehend and participate in. The book was banned well up to 1835, exactly 200 years after it was published, although it had been a bestseller when it was first published in 1632. It is commonly believed today that Galileo was persecuted because he opposed the religious beliefs of the Vatican at that time. But some who had done a closer study of the hagiography of the period, assert that he

was really persecuted for other reasons, which had nothing to do with his theories as officially stated. Galileo was well regarded even by the church officials. It is said, Galileo was the victim of his own arrogance, the envy of his colleagues, and the politics of Pope Urban VIII, who was considered a very cunning and cruel man by contemporary observers. The charge against Galileo was not of religious heresy, but an administrative one, of not following the papal decree of desisting from publicising what he had found. The charge was brought about not by Catholic officials, but by Galileos colleagues and scientists, who were afraid of losing their importance, reputation, position and influence, and were united in their desire to see him suffer. Galileo could save his life only through the influence of his powerful friend, Medici. So what was behind his arrogance, and why did he have enemies among other scientists? It was because Galileo had to fight adherents of other well-regarded schools of thoughts. There was the partially correct world view of an eminent astronomer, Tycho Brahe, which, while admitting that planets went around the sun, retained the Earth-centred view of the universe, of the sun and the planets going around Earth. This had some consistencies with observable records. It was just so hard to imagine that the Earth was moving at great speed, when no one could sense any of it. So Galileo had to engage in bitter criticism to dislodge that strongly held belief. His contemporary scientists, who were powerfully placed, were also unwilling to yield. Even those who thought he was correct scarcely came out to publicly support him, in a closely-knit society of astronomers. Kepler, for instance, lent only feeble support, although he continued on the path of Galileo. But Kepler had been an assistant to Tycho Brahe in Prague. Arthur Koestler writes, His method was to make a laughing stock of his opponent in which he invariably succeeded, whether he happened to be in the right, or in the wrong. . . . It was an excellent method to score a moments triumph, and make a life long enemy. Galileo liked to give the impression that he alone had discovered everything significant in the new sky, and this happened to be quite true because he was the only one armed with a telescope to look at it. This summarises whatever the bitter enmities were all about.

In 1962, a landmark book was published, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S Kuhn, which offered an insight into how scientific progress happened. Kuhn is the one who introduced the term paradigm shift. He says that revolutions of science are not evolutionary from previous works, but instead happen in a manner that so completely destroys the previous practices that it becomes impossible to even evaluate the new under the old paradigm. The opponents of our work were not the top management of the phone companies themselves, for whom it was an easy decision between choosing X and Y, and doing what was an important need for the relevant markets, which will invariably bring in more business. It was something that would have to be done anyway, eventually, for these large markets. Our opponents were the well-entrenched scientists and engineers who worked within these organisations, who had chosen to publicly work against the new system, because our technology made their employment redundant. When you understand this, it is easy for a smile to quickly streak across your face silently. Ours is not a matter of the sun and the moon, it was a matter of a practical need, to solve a problem of hundreds of millions of people today. This cannot be allowed to be held hostage by these besieged individuals desire for continual favour. Entrepreneurshipisleadership So what is entrepreneurship? Is entrepreneurship about being an inventor? Is it about discovery of a business model? Is it about finding an opportunity? Or is it about something much more than that? Entrepreneurship is about pursuit, to bring about a difference, to find meaning. You could not have carried on very long if monetary incentives were your only goal. You had to be pursuing something much bigger, to justify the efforts for so long, and all the personal sacrifices, not just your own, but also of all the others who walk with you.

The entrepreneur uses people. He does not use people for himself, but for his dreams, which he makes theirs. And of all the people he uses, he uses himself the most, and in the worst ways. If you hate the poor quality of your own work, whenever it occurs, you acquire the right to hate other people's poor work. Whether it will go down well or not is a different thing, but there is no sin in it. If you are trying to lead, you do not try to be like everyone. In society, each one of us tries to conform, dress like everyone else, look like everyone else, talk like everyone else, and believe like everyone else. This need to conform is the very anti-thesis of what leadership is about. The leader does not try to please by conforming; he tries to please by bringing about a change, to the better new. In the entrepreneurs journey, all the innate strengths of his character are his biggest long-term assets. Some that you started out with, others that you developed during the challenging course of the journey, and many that you reformed inside you. The journey is its own greatest reward. "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in blessedness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore are we able to restrain them Spinoza.

Abouttheauthor

I was born in 1970, so I am not so young. I have always been interested in computers since childhood, long before I had a chance to see one. I think I had heard of them somehow, because we lived in an academic campus, of a polytechnic college, of which my father was the Principal. There were friendly younger lecturers, whom we called "uncle", who probably mentioned it, or I read it in some book in the library or at home or school. I think I had a knack for digital sciences, and would wonder about artificial intelligence as a child can. I remember an argument I had with the elders on whether computers could do everything that a man could, when I was eight or nine. I find that hard to believe myself, considering the context of the 1970s, in Agartala, but the memory is

vivid. Maybe I imagine the memory. Sometimes two different and distant memories can join and become one. The first time I laid my eyes on a personal computer was in 1983, during a stay at the TTTI in Chandigarh, where my uncle was a professor. It was simulating the moving solar system, with dots on a screen, and also had some games. My father's subsequent office, at the HQ of the Institution of Engineers in Kolkata, had computers, but that occupied a whole floor, it was a mainframe, and no one was permitted there. Only in 1990 did I get the chance to write my first program on a PC, at the High Voltage department at Jadavpur University, where my father had taken me, his friend was a professor there. I remember spending the whole day entering the BASIC program that I had written on strips of teleprinter rolls at home the night before. The segments of the roll were torn and pinned together according to the flow of the algorithm. It was a program to find the unequal marble from 12 marbles in 3 weighing problem, which had been a favourite of mine. It was an appropriate challenging problem to write a program for, it was an algorithm. Those were days when the word computer was rarely on anyone's mind or lips. If I overheard that word in a bus or somewhere, I would try to sneak up close to hear what they were talking about. People rarely talked about it, very different from today, when almost everyone who works in an office works on the computer. Although the above is a complete recount of every interaction I had with a computer till I was twenty, I had actually been sneaking up on this subject. My real life, running in parallel, was a little different. As a eleven year old, I was sent to the Rashtriya Indian Military College (RIMC) in Dehradun, a fine military school. RIMC prepares cadets for entry to the National Defence Academy (NDA), and had a hectic physical routine, but there was also a sincere academic flavour, and I flourished. But there were no computers there then. RIMC usually makes it into the list of the top 10 residential schools of India, so I had gone to a good school as a kid, and from then on, everything of the good life I enjoyed was paid for by the government. So my life is really owned by my country. At the National Defence Academy, in Khadakvasla, I spent much of my time studying in the library. There was a series of Time Life books on

Understanding Computers, books full of helpful pictures, which introduced a layman like me to the work and thinking of Herbert Simon, Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse, John McCarthy, Allen Newell, John von Neumann, Marvin Minsky, Norbert Wiener, etc. I liked the books on Artificial Intelligence the most, and was most intrigued by the concept of mentalese, which I believed in immediately. The other subject of fascination was that of ontologies, an ancient question of classification and hierarchy of the world of all ideas and objects. There were a few classes on computers, but they were completely dysfunctional, and the stench of stinking socks was unbearable. I think the classes were about how to switch on the computer, and the names of its various parts, as if it was an elephant. Long before, as a pre-teen, I had made a contraption one fine morning. This was some kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, surely inspired by an illustration in a famous childrens book by Sukumar Roy, the father of Satyajit Ray. If you opened the cupboard door, a thread would slacken, to go over a pulley, to brush over a blade, which would cut it, and release a weight, which would hit a gong and produce a loud noise. My mother was in a hurry to get me ready for school, and was annoyed at the thread in her way and tore it. A little while later, she came back to apologize. I wasnt sad that she had torn it, but on that day, her coming back to apologize to a child taught me a great deal. It taught me about how much she cared. These were the very things that she was trying to teach us, which she wanted us to do. It was much greater than being appreciated. Parents are the entrepreneurs of their children. I would recommend young children to be exposed to complex subjects for their future, through books with pictures, in their parents libraries, among which they could spend time during idle afternoons. The child will not understand everything at once, but at a leisurely pace he gains insights into matters of the world of the elders which were already unexpressed curiosities and questions in his own little mind. Insights that find appropriate form when they grow up, to become the distinct works of their lives. Insights whose seeds were already there when they were mere children. Much of our formal education is reconfirmation of things we already knew or suspected. Exceptional pictures in a book, which help build an overview by subtle hint, are most helpful.

But while at the NDA, I actually did some work in the digital sciences. I think that was the most significant thing I ever did in my life. Its about a thing called balanced ternary but I will not get into it here. At the Indian Military Academy, in Dehradun, where I went next, there was another thick book on computers in the excellent library there. I had borrowed and kept that book for such a long time that an officer, who also wanted to borrow it, had to come to my cabin to collect it. So I must have been studying this, and a young mind was soaking it all up. After I became a military officer in the Corps of Signals, I was introduced to computers by Capt Alex Jacob, the computer-savvy ADC who had the task of installing all the PC-AT computers that had arrived at the Divisional Headquarters, at Meerut, in 1991. He got me started. He made the computer seem a fun toy, with infinite possibilities, and easy to work with. I bought my own computer in 1995, with Windows 95 installed on it, when I was doing my engineering degree at the College of Military Engineering, in Pune. It was very expensive for me, and I spent everything that I had. Everything in my provident fund, and half of what my Dad had given me to buy a second-hand car in view of the baby we were going to have soon. I bought a really old FIAT car instead. For a month, during classes, my friend Roy and I would research offers and calculate how we could bring down the cost of the computer, by assembling the parts, picked up from the best suppliers then. 540 Mb Seagate Hard disk, Goldstar 14" Monitor, SONY CDROM Drive, TEAC 1.44" Floppy Disk drive, TVS Keyboard, Logitech Mouse,16 Mb RAM. All of this for Rs 85,000 then, the best deal, the same price as a Maruti 800 then. I was looking around for someone who could teach me how to learn to operate Windows, but when it arrived I found that I was not going to need anyone to teach me because the PC had become so easy to use. That computer was the first personal computer in the CME with a student officer, and one of a hundred in Pune then, I guess. HCL Beanstalk was the only commercial PC on sale, targeted at the home segment and it cost Rs 120,000 for the same configuration. There was even a shop in town that sold edutainment CDROMs, where I bumped into another enthusiast, who asked me if I had tried OS/2 Warp. I hadnt even heard of it. Friends

used to come home with their wives in the evening, to see the computer, and I used to show them the multimedia computer as it played the CDROMs. The National Parks of America, the solar system, morphing software from Andover, etc. There was even one for the boys to watch at night, an interactive virtual show of Janine Lindemulder. I started learning the Pascal programming language on my own, and used to try out every piece of software I could lay my hands on. In 1995, the world of software was still very much a finite one. Especially the ones you could get your hands on. Then we moved to the Military College of Telecom Engineering, at Mhow, for the second leg of our engineering course. By a great stroke of fate, in 1996, Borland Delphi had already arrived in the campus through an officer at the EMC Agency, who had gone for a course to Europe. I installed Delphi on my computer. My life was completely devoted to the computer now, and every spare moment at home was given over to it. I started working on a program to simulate the 8085 Microprocessor, which was a popular and well-taught subject in the classroom. We had to use the lab kits, which were cumbersome, bug-ridden and difficult to input into, and you almost never finished entering your program within the 40 minute class. And if you did, it would not run or produce the desired results, and you would never be able to find out why. So the 8085 looked like a perfect program to attempt, because it was complex and it would be so useful to students. Also a place to apply rigorously everything that we had learned. Those programming days were something like this. I would be back from classes by 2 pm, after which I used to hang my wide military belt on the wall and sit down to program. Maybe I would have lunch during one of the thinking breaks, and then go back to work. I would work through the night, till say 4 in the morning, when my eyes would be aching and I had to shut one eye to focus on what I was writing. I would finally go to sleep only when my mind became completely inoperational. And then be at the class by 9 am the next morning. This was the routine most days, for the six months it took me to finish that piece of software. The software completely opened up the Microprocessor. It had an easy way to enter the assembly language programme, through an innovative

interface, and you could then run it, step by step, seeing all the Registers change, Flag bits change, and so on. It had everything; it had a Windows Help file, compiled with a Help compiler. It had the mandatory Read Me File, installation notes, version notes, a fancy Splash screen when it started, and an About Box. After all, it had to look like the real thing. Another notable program that I was writing was to solve the Karnaugh Maps, both of these software written in Borland Delphi in 1997. In MCTE, I had my first encounter with some form of the Internet. Major SS Rao was instrumental in activating an ernet connection in the campus, through which we could send the first emails of our life. Our course was given an email address. The first world wide web was already developing by now elsewhere, and for us the practical way to get a webpage was by sending an email to an address, @agora.jp, with the url in the subject line, and in a few hours an email could be expected which had the content of the webpage in text. Can you believe this now? You sent an email to get the content of a webpage on your email, because there was still no browser, here at least. It was teletype on a terminal. I got my first feel of the real Internet at the Centre for Advanced Technology, located midway between Mhow and Indore on the highway. It was a huge campus, a central government institution, dedicated to research on lasers, including some secret stuff. And I made several trips on my car to that campus, in the afternoons, after classes. The people at the computer centre kindly allowed me to experience the Internet. I was permitted in because I was an Army officer in uniform, and said that I had to do research for my project. I think they were just kind, just like similar people in other parts of the world then. There, on an Apple Macintosh, using the NCSA Mosaic browser, I saw the first webpages of the World Wide Web, loading at speeds like 30 bytes per second or even slower. There were pictures on those absolutely plain webpages, which were mostly personal webpages of professors or students in the United States. There were resources for further reading, which had been recommended by technical books. There were RFCs and FAQs. I brought up the subject of the Internet here so that those born later would know what it looked like, historically, in the lifetimes of people who are still fairly young. Since then, it is as if a century of the Internet has passed

by. The Internet is the biggest thing that happened in the world during our lifetimes. And so I graduated as an Electronics & Telecom Engineer from MCTE, Mhow, and was posted to Delhi. In January 1998, the Microprocessor Simulator was included in a free CDROM distributed with PCQuest magazine. In fact I had written to the editor, PK Roy, urging him to introduce a section called Indian Shareware in his CDROM, and during a visit to Delhi, I went to demonstrate the Simulator to him in his office, which was in a basement in Panchsheel Park then. It was a Windows software. When India did not yet have Internet, the hunger for knowledge and software used to be met by PCQuest and a couple of other magazines. But to be on the PCQuest CDROM was a sure way to get noticed by other computer enthusiasts across the country, who greedily checked out everything, every folder there was in those free CDROMs that came every month with PCQuest. CHIP was another such magazine that came later. My software went on that one too. The Microprocessor Simulator went quite far, as I kept improving it. When the Internet became accessible in offices and homes in India, over telephone lines in 1998, I was fortunate to be able to connect to it because by then I was posted in Delhi. I made a website in Geocities, and offered my software products, and they were being picked up well. Soon I was supporting users from all over the world, and also selling to some. The Karnaugh Map made it into a list of educational resources of an Australian university, and I used to get many academic questions from students all over. It was the only one in the world then, because it was believed at that point of time that a software for solving Karnaugh Maps cannot be written due to the nature of the problem. Karnaugh Maps was something in digital electronics, a means to optimize the complexity of flip-flop circuits. The manual method of solving was laborious, errorprone and involved back-tracking, due to which it was considered complex and perhaps unsolvable by computers. It looked like a good problem to attack, and I had thought of a scheme involving brute force to solve it, taking advantage of sets. The Pascal language was the only one that allowed the data type of sets. The program was adequate to meet the educational needs of students.

The Microprocessor Simulator too was becoming popular among students, as it was designed specifically with a pedagogical intention. It was mentioned as a learning tool in electronics text books, including by the Department of Education in the United States. Much later, from 2001, the Microprocessor Simulator, considerably improved by then, was included as a CDROM, together with a 11 page Appendix on how to use it, in the Prentice Hall International edition of the Textbook on Microprocessors, by Ramesh Gaonkar, which enjoyed worldwide popularity, and was also the prescribed text book in India. The Simulator was sold to many colleges worldwide, including 2 of our IITs. In 2008, it was also introduced as a prescribed learning tool for school children, in a text book for the ICSE syllabus. By then, another shareware developed by me, the Vocab Builder for GRE & GMAT candidates, was a popular software for learning difficult English words, which was part of those exams. The software was an innovation in educational technology. It kept track of the words you remembered and the ones you forgot, and optimised your efforts. It would offer statistics on your daily progress. These were new ideas for Flash card software. I tried many different ways of selling my software, through which I was learning entrepreneurship. Most of the sale was through the Internet and I used to receive cheques at home. It was common to meet engineering students who had used the Simulator. And GRE aspirants from the years of 2002-2006 had usually heard of, or used, the Vocab Builder. The name of my firm was Infotech Solutions, and its website was insoluz.com. There has probably never been a survey of widely used software products developed by Indian shareware developers. But if that was done, these two softwares would probably make it near the top of that list, in terms of utility and usage. I was associated with a DRDO project from the Army in 1999, and they sent me for software engineering courses at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Kanpur and IIT Delhi. It was fabulous for me to be in the classrooms of some of our finest computer science professors, an opportunity to ask all my accumulated, hitherto unanswered questions of years, all at once. Does the chip suffer more wear and tear if we give it very intense processing work? When we insert a record in the middle, in what manner does the database store it internally? How can we have

parallel computers? Arent there occasional errors in all of these millions of transistors firing? What happens then? What is the Discrete Cosine Transform? Can we have runtime creation of classes? So, Prof Karnik in IIT-Kanpur asked the class where we could have a need for such a thing. To SCDR at IIT-Delhi, I asked if he had grouped together the alternate odd and even terms on the blackboard, according to their mathematical symmetries, in order to reduce the complexity and cost of the resultant DSP hardware. Dr Surendra Prasad fascinated us with how every ounce of efficiency had been squeezed in the GMPSK till one could have no better idea in the classroom. I did distinguish myself there, winning the love of several of them for my endless curiosity, and the stupid questions. I got a precious affectionate letter afterwards from Prof Arkay at SERC. That period provided a very reassuring experience, for my self-belief, about my innate passion and abilities in this field. This built in me an unsettling aspiration, to stake out on my own in the field of computers. Every officer of the Corps of Signals handles telecommunications equipment, from the HF to Microwave, or even upto troposcatter, with a Fresnal feel of the spectrum, and the way radio waves worked over ranges, weather and topographies. He would be familiar with networks and terminal equipments. He would have laid twisted pair cables by hand in ditches in his younger days, and would have disciplined the cables at the butt end of a telephone exchange. When the digital equipment came, he would have rotated a directional antenna as someone inside would scream out about the Bit Error Rates. All of this was an exposure, across everything of modern telecommunications applied to the field, sometimes deployed overnight in a desert or a mountain. The benefit of text book knowledge, and the wisdom and best practices that were handed down by the men, as part of a century-old culture in the Signals. Young officers were expected to set up things by themselves, together with their men, from packing crates and with manuals, and through this build their reputations. When I was posted in Delhi, as a young Major I was a junior project manager, setting up the installation of the largest satellite antenna in northern India. We had camped on the site for months, during its construction, deployment and then tracking satellites, and every

demodulation and demultiplex equipment downstream. Signals gave me all of that, apart from the experience of managing the people who were to get these tasks and functions accomplished, for real operational requirements. And there are some great adventures and stories. I left the Army in December 2002, after a bit of lot of struggle, as I had not completed the somewhat mandatory 20 years of minimum services. I had done 12 years by the time I was released without pension. And so a transition, from being a well fed mahseer in a great lake, where I enjoyed a life of full protection and privilege, to becoming a foraging tuna in the big blue connected ocean. I left with no assured job or future, during an IT recession in India. I was somewhat like the immigrant who goes to another country, not with any fixed assurances or securities, but penniless and yet a firm belief that things will eventually work out for him. I needed to give this to myself. I first worked in a bio-informatics start-up in Hyderabad, for a very modest salary. I was very excited about bio-informatics, because I felt it was the next great application field in computer science. Newer, more powerful computers, with new architectures, would have to be made for its copious needs. I am sure it has such a future, but I probably thought that it was going to emerge faster than it actually has so far. I learnt some biology and genetics, which had always been a great curiosity. I thought this was part of an essential education for anyone in the 21st century. The start-up was actually writing software, so that genes designed on the computer would not fold in wrong ways and reduce the expression. I left bio-informatics after six months, by when I had learnt something, and made some friends for the future. One windy night, while at Hyderabad, I finished reading the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and understood that all that I had felt all along, were legitimate feelings, the feeling that belonged to an entrepreneur. Of being a free bird. I realized I wanted to be one. It is about wanting to do much more than you were being given to do. And to enjoy complete freedom and autonomy, as to bear the risks while doing so. No one in my family had been an entrepreneur, and hence that world, its language and paradigms were all alien to how we thought. Which was why that book was such a powerful trigger.

I started a firm with the hope of pioneering video streaming in India. I operated from my parents home, having shifted back to Calcutta. The technology was of a company in Canada, whose Founder & CEO, Steve Vestergaard, had been a dear Internet friend over many years, based on our common interests. I would represent their technology in my region. It was called Clipstream, a playerless streaming technology. Instead of having to download a player or a plugin, the video would stream into a Java applet that a Java-enabled browser could support. The video quality was decent, and the bandwidth required was really admirable, since the detected variable bit rate was supported. It enabled http streaming of recorded as well as live video. All this made it a good bet, in my reckoning. I knew that the future would see a lot of videos on the Internet, and if we were around at the beginning of this process, and for a very large country like India, it could mean a lot. Thus I began my life of being on my own, without a salary. From this point I would have to depend much more on my own mind, and I would have to work much harder than I ever had. This changed me, from the person I had been. I think the change was about being focussed on understanding reality, because I was now on my own, in it. A sad realization that in this world it is the fate of only the human that every individual had to find a master for himself if he couldnt find a way to survive by himself. In the following years, working from my home, I tried to create a semblance of a decent company through its website, branding, communications, stationary etc. But it was really represented by only one person, the CEO on the visiting card. Grus Media Works was what it was called, a sole proprietorship firm. I worked day and night on the Internet, travelled to Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai, making impressive presentations, trying to rustle up business from any segment possible. I got hold of lists of companies spanning the sectors of advertising, telecommunication, education, entertainment, dotcoms, events, television, Bollywood, even spiritualism, and tried my best to visit the relevant persons in these cities. I visited exhibitions to interact with people and to collect their cards. I made passionate pitches at meetings, I showed demos. I made hundreds of cold calls, and thousands of specific emails were composed by hand. I

remember being in telephone conversation with Ekta Kapoor, and a meeting at the Factory for a proposal of streaming the promo of Ek Hasina Thi. I presented at I Block of the DAKC, where I had at first demanded to meet Mr Ambani, which was childish, I now realise, but they did allow me to present to someone important. I did everything that I could think of, without ever getting tired. In the ESPN office at the Shakti Mills compound in Mumbai, there was a notice on the door that said Dogs and Salesmen not allowed. I walked in to find some women inside, and I introduced myself as a Salesman who had violated their notice. Nobody had heard of video streaming, or had any expectations of it. The Internet itself was still quite new, and there was no broadband, so selling video streaming was quite impossible. I failed again and again, sometimes within inches of getting an order. Some people were very receptive to the idea at first, and treated me well, but they thought they were going to see TV-like video on the Internet, while in practice the video only buffered, or shrunk to a postage stamp size and so disappointed them. I would set up a free trial with a great deal of effort, for anyone who would show the slightest interest, but usually nothing came of these afterwards. A vitally important thing about being an entrepreneur is your ability to live in perpetual hope, no matter what the evidence. Such hope could be seen as delusional by any sane observer, but that is the way it is. In India, we do not have venture capital, but we have social capital, said Ramaswamy, my friend. During all those years, I was supported for my essential needs by my parents, who were both retired government servants, because I lived in their home. It was more than a decade after I had been a self-supporting, 1st class gazetted officer of the Government of India, at age 20. A time when they could have stopped worrying about my financial future. They may have felt anything within, but they never asked me to stop. One day, my mother said that I had the quality of patience. I think that is the only time she said such a thing in that manner, a certificate I shall keep. This period was my university of business education, because I had to deal with almost everything single-handed, with no prior experience of any kind, or any advisers. I had to invent ways through it all, with

common sense. And I realized how hard this really was. Particularly sales and marketing, which had merely been words until then. I never quite figured out why this had to be so difficult in a perfect world. It was the biggest inefficiency in the business world, which surely dissipated the economy like a giant hole. Well over 50% of business expenses are completely extraneous to the real thing, the production. Expenses that could be greatly reduced by streamlining things industry-wide, driving down the cost of selling. And the colossal waste of human time it involved. How could this kind of capitalism be considered efficient? Nevertheless, I was successful in achieving a few prestigious sales. One was the three month trip to Mauritius, where I video streamed the election campaign of the Alliance Sociale party. They were then in opposition, and had no space in the state owned television channel. I should feel proud that we streamed political speeches live from venues all over the beautiful island. This was sent from a camera to a laptop, and then to the nearest Internet connection, a few kilometers away, over line-of-sight Wifi directional antennas on masts. It was then sent over the Internet to a streaming server in Canada, and then redistributed to the viewers in Mauritius on the party website. We were even covered by the local press, and on the final campaign day, Mr Naveen Ramgoolam, the party leader, made a mention of us, and of our being from India, as our cameras zoomed in on him from a stand in the crowds, and streamed live. The election saw a victory for the party, and we were there to celebrate it amongst the sega music and dancing. Another high-profile event was the Indo US Summit on Intellectual Property, for which we were commissioned by FICCI. We also undertook some other events and projects between 2003 and 2007. By then, the Canadian company had put me on retainership, and I did support work for their customers worldwide, and life was better. I worked from home, and spent the considerable amount of my free time on studying, via the Internet. Soaking in free form knowledge from Wikipedia, on anything and everything in the world I fancied knowing about. On a day I was curious about oceans; I would dive deep and see as much as I wanted. On the day I realized I really knew nothing more about Fungi than the word, I would go to discover that fascinating world at my

own pace, and rate of comprehension. I went chasing after any trivia that fascinated me, hopping from link to link. Knowledge is a kind of thing that after a while, it adds up to make something much larger than the sum of the parts. Discretion develops, to distinguish the significant from the chaff, which builds momentum to the process. Connections begin to emerge, revealing a greater underlying framework. When you visit the same thing again, you now see new and different things that you hadnt seen before, this time enriched with something else you knew. Seeing the same thing in different layers of awareness. You can never stand in the same river twice because the river has changed and you have changed. There was also a daily volley of email correspondence, back and forth, with my friend Steve and others, as we pointed each other to interesting directions and new things we had found. We engaged in discussions on new subjects, about the ways of people, and about the working of economics and politics in the world at that time. I also wrote long posts in news-groups, courting controversy or expressing lateral thought, and waited for peoples responses. I had a lot of time to think, and I was also trying out something or the other on my own. I had developed the skills to do a lot of things on my own. In May 2004, I made a website called videosonweb.com where I put up a huge collection of funny videos in the streaming format. I encouraged visitors to contribute their own, which would be put up if submitted over email. One pivotal video was from my friend, Cdr Abhishek Kankan, where he is seen chatting casually on the summit of the Everest. I thought this video content was unique, and ought to have a high viral coefficient. It did get spotted by mountaineering websites. I visited producers of short films in Kolkata, urging them to upload their content for free, but no one did. All this was before Youtube was founded in Silicon Valley in 2005. They too had struggled to find their first videos, and then get them viewed, till they found investors and became the great success story. When Adobe bought Macromedia for 3.4 Billion dollars in 2005, and moved from merely vector animations to full motion raster video, the leading industry players had combined to make it a monopoly on our computers. This drove out every other video streaming technology then

like Real, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Clipstream, and any other one. This monopolistic tendency is the ideological reason that Wikipedia uses the ogg format instead of any Flash, and iPhones do not support Flash videos. In fact none of the phones support Flash, which is really a crude, inefficient piece of bug-ridden software, particularly when video was introduced into it. It had originally been only an insecure Windows ActiveX control. But it brought about the helpful consolidation for some video content companies like Youtube, and people who need to show you videos inside those banners ads. Instead of burdening my friend Steve's company any longer in such a situation, I was back in a job with a large dotcom in Delhi, in mid-2007. I had some experience of what I had missed so far, in a corporate job. The good life, the utter lack of professionalism, the incompetence and the politics. The wasteful methods and the dissipation of wealth that is rife in listed public companies. All this on hefty, entirely undeserved salaries, of which I quickly saved as much as possible with my minimalist lifestyle. I wondered what the true dynamics of the market were, whereby such inefficient companies existed and turned out large profits. What unfair things were at play here, in what we laymen knew as capitalism in a democracy? How was this possible? What competitive advantages were the oligarchs being handed out, and in exchange for what? Did they operate as mutually supportive cartels of businesses, colluding together against the people, the consumers? An adhoc arrangement of persistence of might, over which the government of the day presided and arbitered, secretively, away from any prying eyes. An exclusive game, in which the media was also only a playing side. Within a year, I was again back at entrepreneurship, this time starting from an incubator in Noida. From here starts the story of the Panini Keypad. Tailpiece I am not a smart guy. I admit it. I never was. If I were, I would have been successful in some of the many endeavours that I worked so hard for. I would have been able to block and manoeuvre through the world of

people. Or I would have at least obtained a better life for myself. I had foregone all the things that make life happy, the nice house, the settled household, the warm shower, shopping for clothes, ice cream after dinner, planned holidays, Diwali get-togethers, movies and wedding gifts. A comfortable life, relationships, spouse, food, health, wealth, style. I have always lived in hovel-like conditions, dreaming about the perfection in my products and plans. A person whose own life was absolutely unsystematic in the real world, was quite capable of thinking in the most systematic ways for an imaginary world. I had the barest minimum needs, and could innovate to the greatest extent. I cook my own simplest food, with an eye for nutrition, and I dont waste anything at all. You should see how I peel my onions. My own life was completely abstracted out by my own nature. I dont even have a gas connection, so I go with a small cylinder to get it filled from a private guy in a slum, whenever it runs out. I couldnt find the time or the priority to set it right. I dont get very many calls from people on a Sunday, checking on how I am. So its dysfunctional. Not the life of the man of 43 you thought you knew. Objectively, I could join you in looking at all of this as a great tragedy. And not even my father would give a better certification of it. Its not a tragedy of my circumstances, which were great, so it must be a tragedy of my own choices. Again its the circumstances that gave me the freedom of those choices. Almost anyone I know, psycho or not, strives and manages to live a better life. But not for me. I live just like Diogenes, who I sort of understand, and he has made me like him. And again, it is I myself who thinks that I have lived a most privileged life, of great freedom to do whatever I willed, and was willing to pay the price for it. Epicurus suggested that life for happiness. In my service life, it was hard to get me excited about or working hard on something mundane. So I practically never worked in my life, and took the kicks for it, and only did my own thing. Getting by, mostly marginally, by showing up at the right place, in the right dress, at the right time, or not even at the right time usually. My friends and I were complete non-entities at NDA and IMA. We barely scraped through. We were the chatterboxes, we could never finish

with our talking, and couldnt care less about anything else. We would be on the list of every kind of punishment, which we quite enjoyed, sportingly and with humour, as well deserved excursions from our pastimes. It was only during the camps, which were adventure trips in the mountains, that we would be somewhat dependable, and of some use to society. I could carry heavy loads and walk like a mule, because I could block pain. During my engineering course, I barely scraped through. Whenever there was symbolic mathematics, I would not follow it and telecommunication is full of it. Integrations and what not. It was only the digital things that I understood, like clockwork. I feared the analog world. In the Army, I dont think my superiors thought a great deal about me, or entrusted me with much. They had thought much of me at first, for I had the right pedigree, but gave up after some time. I dont think I was the one they would count on to get the party organized well, or win the basketball match. They were right of course. I had the least motivation to please my superiors. The only things that I could do really well, was when I had taken an interest in a task, and put in my best, and occasionally they would be most surprised at the results, of something done well. And then they discovered the pattern. It was something to do with computers, or system design, given to do with complete independence. Even the troops who worked with me knew, that if I had taken up a difficult thing saying that it could be accomplished, then it would get done by us, before time. Nothing would stop us. We would have innovated our way through what may have looked impossible. Even when I was a kid I wasnt at all good in the inter-personal games between friends. Who is saying what to do what? Paying attention to what was going on. I wouldnt creatively ally with one against the other. I couldnt play any game well, and I wouldnt get the joke or tell one well, although I could sing very well, and was good in studies. You may have known someone like me in your classroom sometime, the absent-minded simpleton loner, talented but not much fun. Lost in his own world. Dreamer. When my former friends came to town, they werent really dying to meet me, because there was so little fun I would have had with them. I was hardly party to any mischief.

That is why when I first heard of a boring man named David Thoreau, I was so fascinated. Listeners of a distant drummer, as he called it. It is the combination of such strengths and weaknesses that make up real people. Here is a type that I enjoyed telling you about. I wanted to express myself and it has given me immense happiness that you have cared to hear me out. But I am at peace with myself, and live quite happily. I suffer from no misery, and strangely, no infection or malaise has visited me in all these years, despite my lifestyle. I dont know whether I have got more or less from life, whether its been fair or unfair. But I look forward to living my tenure, and I marvel more at what is here, now. I have a few true friends in this world, one of which is my awesome father. These are the jewels in my life. Beliefindestiny As a child, whenever I met with a disappointment, my mother assured me that Whatever happens, always happens for the good. It was something I found easy to believe. I really believe in it till today. There have been far too many incidents in my life that, by connecting the dots, I now know were all for my own good. So it is for this enterprise. If it is taking too long to succeed, it is in the design, and for my own good. This needs to be done in a particular way for the maximum effect, and I have to endure this without losing hope. What if destiny has a way to keep you away from falling into honey traps, making you endure hardships to infuse the essential training and experience for another greater day? From my own experience of life, this appears to be so. Your experience could be different and you could be correct. You can only do what you can do. Your job is to keep trying to do your best, everyday. Take actions to move in a forward direction after applying your best mind. That is all you can do, the rest is in the hands of destiny. That is what the Bhagavad Gita, said to be the most important spiritual guideline for Indians, also tries to teach us. There is far too much that happens in the world, for reasons beyond our present comprehension. In ways and for purposes that we have no understanding of.

Satyameva Jayate Truth alone Triumphs The national motto of India