The hole-in-the-wall computer: an Indian physicist puts a PC in a wall in the slums of New Delhi and watches what happens

Whole Earth, Fall, 2002 by Thane Peterson

The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them from accessing it.

They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The god] Shiva holds an hourglass-shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a datum when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something.

TP: Of all the things the children did and learned, what did you find the most surprising?

SM: One day there was a document file on the desktop of the computer. It was called "untitled.doc" and it said in big colorful letters, "I Love India." I couldn't believe it for the simple reason that there was no keyboard on the computer [only a touch screen]. I asked my main assistant--a young boy, eight years old, the son of a local betel-nut seller--and I asked him, "How on Earth did you do this?" He showed me the character map inside [Microsoft] Word. So he had gotten into the character map inside Word, and dragged and dropped the letters onto the screen, then increased the point size and painted the letters. I was stunned because I didn't know that the character map existed--and I have a Ph.D.

TP: So what you're talking about is a different sort of literacy, a sort of functional literacy....

SM: Yes. There are two examples I'd like to give you. It's already happened in cable TV in India. There are 50 or 60 million cable TV connections in India at this point in time. The guys who set up the meters, splice the coaxial cables, make the connection to the house, etc., are very similar to these kids. They don't know what they're doing. They only know that if you do these things, you'll get the cable channel. And they've managed to [install] 60 million cable connections so far.

Example No. 2 is the bicycle. I think we have the biggest bicycle-manufacturing industry in the world. The bicycle is ubiquitous here, and it's much the same in Malaysia, China, Africa. But you don't ask how the population became bicycle-literate. They just use it. So what I'd like to see is an India in which a large part [of the population] treats the computer that way.

The other thing is [how the Internet will change when most Indians gain access to it]. We have the analogy of cable TV in India. Originally, it was all in English. It took exactly four years for all the programming to become Hindi. Star TV is now almost all in Hindi. If you go to Bangkok, they hate it.

TP: You're saying that a lot of Hindi content will appear as more Indians surf the Net?

SM: Exactly. Let me go on record as saying it's not a question of what the Internet will do to India. It's a question of what India will do to the Internet.... If rural India goes onto the Internet, there will be an absolute flood of Indian-language content from people trying to sell to them.