Cisco to localize its router software

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In an interview with Digit magazine, Eskild Hansen, Head of the European Design Centre at Cisco told them what the latter thought of the Indian market in terms of Internet and Wi-Fi usage, as well as what Cisco's plans were for customised content. "India has close to one billion people, so there are a huge number of people who can use the Internet," Hansen said. "Currently, there is no support for Hindi (in our router software), but we are trying to localise it as much as possible."

Lawyers campaign to argue cases in Hindi

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A group of lawyers have started a signature campaign in Delhi High Court and the five district courts of the capital, requesting that they be allowed to argue their cases in Hindi also apart from the English language now used. "We have received a huge response from the lawyers and collected over 3,000 signatures so far to support our campaign," said Ashok Aggarwal, president of the Delhi unit of the lawyers’ association.

"When lawyers argue in Hindi, judges do not pay attention to them and English has become a status symbol," Aggarwal said. Moreover, Article 348 of the constitution provides for arguing court cases in English as well as regional languages, Aggarwal pointed out.

Hindi is being used in the high courts of Rajasthan, Allahabad and Madhya Pradesh, but not in the national capital, according to the lawyers’ union. (Source: IANS)

Indic language script usage growing on Orkut

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Medianama interviewed Rahul Kulkarni, a Product Manager at Google India about the newly launched Orkut Zeitgeist. Following were his comments about the growth of use of Indian language scripts on Orkut:

"...we are seeing combination of Hindi-English, Malayalam-English or Kannada-English, Marathi-English. Its difficult to mine or understand this data because in India it is varied - we are talking 26 languages in combination with English...The vast majority (of users) is still in English script, though Indic language is growing, after transliteration was introduced. We see more communities using it. One such is the Hindi poetry community. (Source: Medianama)"

The growth is a welcome change, especially given the fact that Orkut is predominantly student driven in India. As for the "Poetry community" we would rather keep mum ;) Haven't Hindi bloggers tolerated them enough already?