CCA

I don't know if "CCA" stands for anything for you, but to me it invariably sounds like one of those things I would write about in my other blog.

Well, I suppose the next time I use the term, I'll be reminded of something greener.

"... inspite of the difficulties involved in conservation of natural resources for a varied number of reasons, CCAs still remain in the hundreds of thousands countrywide," says Ashish Kothari, founder-member of environmental NGO Kalpavriksh... Kalpavriksh is now in the process of publishing a directory of such [community-conserved areas].

Gender-neutrality and L337speak in Malayalam!

A couple of Malayalam musings.

Call me Anglicized, but one thing that I often find jarring in Malayalam is the paucity of gender neutral terms in common usage. One of these days I'll sit down and collect some examples and come up with outrageous suggestions to "fix" them. Or, hopefully, someone will point out that a process of fixing is already underway.

[Update: if India gets a woman president, would she be called "rashtrapati"? (For the record, and for what it's worth, I won't say it translates to "the husband of the notion", but rather to "the Master/Lord of the nation.")]

Now for the Malayalam l33tspeak. I'm not too keen on it myself, but I'm afraid I've already seen this being used quite a bit in the Malayalam digitalscape (though mostly unintentionally). If you can read Malayalam, you'd agree that the digits one through nine (൧൨൩൪൫൬൭൮൯) bear an uncanny resemblance to certain characters (e.g. ഫ വ മ്പ ര്‌ ദ്ര ന്ന െ വൃ ന്‌). Of course there's a little more you could do using English characters and digits. (*shudder*)

Back to Yoga

I'm expecting some body ache in the next few days, having rejoined a yoga class after more than a year's break.

Googling the library

I barely ever go to the library now. And it seems more people can stop going to libraries.

This partnership between our 12 member universities and Google is unprecedented. What makes this work so exciting is that we will literally open the pages of millions of books that have been assembled on our library shelves over more than a century.

This came by e-mail today.