Skip to main content

Reason Behind IT Success Story of India

By
I often used to wonder how Indians with little prior access to computers became a global player in IT industry within a short span. There were multiple forces – the combined effect of which led to the explosion of IT market in India. Here I approach this from a different perspective based on my understanding of Indian culture.

Artificial Language

Computers run on artificial (i.e. fully man-made) languages developed from scratch. There is a mathematical certainty about them – they’re supposed to be used in particular ways though there’s scope of creativity within the framework.

One may notice that beyond the root terminologies, there is nothing arbitrary in the grammar of artificial languages. On the contrary, in English we’re given to understand many arbitrary assumptions which shouldn’t be probed further. Pronunciation often varies widely with written word.

So in the history of mankind, we always had natural languages that evolved over a period of time with certain arbitrations included randomly without any logic or reason. Most languages that I know belong to this category….except – Sanskrit.

Now seriously? Sanskrit !

What has Sanskrit to do with the discussion? If you ever had learnt Sanskrit, you may not have failed to realize that there is an excellent methodology in the language.

Naming the numbers in any Indian language follow a pattern: 1-10, 11-20, 20-30 etc. Some aberrations may exist here & there. But with Sanskrit the naming of numbers follows a standard pattern. If one follows the rule, one can derive how a random number is named without ever having known it before in Sanskrit. The decimal system that is followed worldwide is India’s contribution. Hence, there is a systematic approach in this area even in Western world.

But coming to the more important aspect, Sanskrit is an artificial language. It was perfected with mathematical rigour (remember the rama ramah raman etc. 3 X 8 tables) and one needs to use the right word for each occasion. The arbitrary factor is very minimal. Sentences can be constructed in many ways as long as the mathematical formula is intact. Pronunciation doesn’t have any exceptional cases. The word needs to be pronounced exactly the way it’s written. Even a new word would be read correctly by a Sanskrit literate person without ever having prior information on same. (unlike English where prior knowledge is mandatory for many words).

Sanskrit’s grammar was improvised in stages and reached its pinnacle with Sage Panini who fine-tuned the grammar with such clarity that it was akin to machine language with no arbitrary usage or random rules.

Now, it’s true that most Indian today do not know Sanskrit. But most languages (excepting Tamil), owe their origin to Sanskrit (with Telugu being the most heavily Sanskritized language) and use similar linguistic structures.

From Sanskrit to the computer languages there were no artificial languages in the history of world.

Hence Indians could quite easily grasp computer languages better than many and without prior access to computers, owing to their psychological understanding of artificial language.

Note: I do not imply that the reason I propose is the sole/major one. Many other factors were responsible for IT growth, I have just offered a different perspective here.

Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 17, 2012 at 11:01 AM

    Nice perspective

    ReplyDelete
  2. MOHANNovember 23, 2018 at 4:28 AM

    Interesting ..it is a different thought .. Sanskrit is loosely typed language in programming world ..English is object oriented ..iironically loosely typeed languages Sanskrit , perl python Ruby gaining thier adoption past few years and 2 decade old strong dominance of object oriented language like Java c# strongly challenged ...may be one day English might challenged by whole world who knows ?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All-time Hits

The Controversial Caste System of Hinduism

By
Imagine concepts like feudal system, slavery, capitalistic exploitation and anti-Semitism being used to define the core of Christianity! Christians will be outraged at this inappropriate mixing of the core universal values of Christians and societal & historical aspects which merely existed in a Christian world. Now this raises the question – why is caste system defined as the core of Hinduism? Especially as “caste” itself is a western construct. Sounds irrelevant? Okay. Now imagine concepts like slave-trade, war on infidels, brutal subjugation of masses, temple destruction, and forceful conversions marking the core of Islam. It is considered sensible to first understand what the core scriptures speak about the religion and its universal values. The ills of the community & its societal aspects are differentiated from its core philosophy. Now, this brings us to the most interesting question – why is Caste System (caste based on birth) propagated to be the def...
3 comments
Read more

Chetan Bhagat : His Literary Style and Criticism

By
Chetan Bhagat’s (CB) recent column created a furore, chiefly because of his audacity to speak for Muslim community and what many people conflate with his support for Narendra Modi’s Prime Ministerial ambitions.   But what interested me most - and what this post would focus on - is questioning of his literary merit (or lack of it). Many journalists ridicule CB’s style of writing and his oversimplistic portrayals of characters sans nuance or sophistication. But I suspect this has more to do with the fact that his readers alone far outnumber the combined readers of many journalists - a point that many don’t appear capable of digesting. No takers for layman’s language! When Tulsidas rewrote Ramayana in Avadhi (a local contemporary dialect then), many conservative sections of society came down heavily upon him for defiling the sanctity of a much revered epic (originally written in Sanskrit). When Quran was first translated in Urdu (by Shah Abdul Qadir in 1798), it faced...
3 comments
Read more

The concept of Dharma in Ramayana

By
The concept of Dharma is not adequately understood by Hindus themselves, not to mention others. Dharma is not a set of do’s and don’t’s or a simplistic evaluation of good and bad. It requires considerable intellectual exertion to even begin understanding Dharma, let alone mastering its use. Is Dharma Translatable? Few words of a language cannot be faithfully translated into another without injuring its meaning, context & spirit. English translations of Dharma are blurred and yield words like religion, sense of righteousness, discrimination between good and bad, morals and ethics or that which is lawful. All these fall short of fully grasping the essence of Dharma. Every language has an ecosystem of words, categories and grammar which allow a user to stitch words together to maximum effect such that meaning permeates the text without necessarily being explicitly explained at each point. Sanskrit words such dharma, karma, sloka, mantra, guru etc., now incorporated in Eng...
6 comments
Read more