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M D Madhusudan

17 Jan, 8 tweets, 3 min read

The unlikely, inspiring and heartwarming story of an online Kannada-English dictionary, Alar/ಅಲರ್, alar.ink:

Every so often, an unfamiliar or difficult Kannada word catches me without a dictionary at hand. Earlier, I visited a website called KannadaKasthuri, with a decent Kannada-English (& KN-KN) dictionary. Its now gone & I’ve disliked the alternatives. Then, I stumbled upon Alar…

Alar/ಅಲರ್, alar.ink, is a brilliant site: exhaustive, simple, fast and ad-free. That’s not all. Its word corpus is completely open. The algorithm that does its phonetic indexing is open source. So is the software that drives it. But its story only gets better…

Seeking the kind souls behind this amazing, public-spirited effort, I found (following links at alar.ink/pages/about ) that this now-open word corpus owes its existence to 4 decades of loving and painstaking efforts by Mr V Krishna, a resident of Bangalore.

But it was only when Krishna’s tireless exertions met the skills & indeed, the ideals, of a Malayalam-speaking, Kannada-loving Bangalore techie, who maintained olam.in, a popular online English-Malayalam (and ML-ML) dictionary, that things began to roll forward…

With an inspired team of developers, and the staunch support of a very unlikely ally, a brokerage firm where they worked, the techie, Kailash Nadh and his team strived with Krishna to bring the corpus out of a Word file into the super-useful site alar.ink is today.

@zerodhaonline

Today, Krishna, Kailash and their team (names in linked page), with continuing support from the brokerage firm, @zerodhaonline, are building an open-source English-Kannada dictionary.

Read more here: zerodha.tech/blog/alar-the-…

All power to the passion, perseverance & selflessness of hidden gems like Krishna, to the deeply-held public-spirited ideals of skilled professionals like Kailash and his team, and to the values and sensibilities of Zerodha… that make projects like Alar possible. Thank you all!

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