These techies will teach you

These techies will teach you

Are you an outsider to Bangalore craving to feel at home? Learn the local language and connect better with the city. Aviratha is helping, finds Shilpa CB

Shilpa CB



There are those who complain that the local language — Kannada — is fast disappearing from our tongues. Then there are those who stop complaining and start teaching. That's what a group of software engineers decided to do when conversations steered clear of the local tongue in their own companies. "Colleagues who were new to the city would ask us to teach them bits that would help while commuting or shopping. The number of those interested kept growing and so we decided to conduct classes formally," KT Sateesh Gowda, the frontman of Aviratha, says.
This group of young techies has been helping the uninitiated pick up a few lines of Kannada. In fact, that was the beginning of a much larger programme to spread usage of the language.
The concept clicked. Queries began pouring in for these free half-hour lessons. "We began holding structured classes with proper study material," he says. Gowda is referring to the network of volunteers who are now part of the registered Aviratha Trust. In the last few years, the 'teachers' have brushed up the vocabularies of 35 software engineers who were eager to learn the local tongue. Once word of their interest spread, others began asking for lessons. The structured 50-hour course, also designed by language experts, is spread over 25 days. For a nominal fee, students get a 50-hour course by one of the 15 volunteers who've been trained by a senior Kannada professor. However, the endeavour has hit some roadblocks. "We've been getting requests from different parts of the city. But we're still working out the logistics of conducting full-fledged classes in four locations of the city — Hebbal, Vijayanagar, Rajajinagar and BTM Layout," Gowda says.
The idea of the classes itself was first fielded in the Yahoo! Group initiated in 2003. Today, the group has close to 4,000 members, out of which 35 are actively engaged in programmes of Aviratha. "We train teachers in career counselling so they can guide their students. We also distribute books, computers to schools and conduct training sessions in rural areas," says Gowda. The volunteers get together often to take stock of projects and their progress. Along with staging plays and screening Kannada movies, Aviratha is fervently working to bring children into schools and keep them there. For now, it's distributing 4,000 notebooks and other stationery to students in schools in Channapatna. Elsewhere, they are filling up racks of storybooks for young readers. "Instead of frittering away time watching TV during weekend, we wanted to channelise our energy towards doing something meaningful," Gowda says simply of his motivation.