This restaurant just named best restaurant in New York City. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/dining/restaurant-review-semma-south-indian-food.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU8.1ZCL.g5e5kam4mZxW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Unapologetic Indian!

Super-proud of our Servants of Knowledge co-founder, Lawrence Liang, who was a guest of the Museum of Modern Art for a killer session on cinema and art. https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10580 ht @omshivaprakash @sushantsinha Sold out session, 350 people on the waiting list. Big time!

India's Banu Mushtaq wins the Booker prize for her short story collection "Heart Lamp." https://www.thestatesman.com/india/indias-banu-mushtaq-wins-the-booker-prize-for-heart-lamp-1503435292.html

Here's the original "Heart Lamp" story published in Kannada, digitized by Servants of Knowledge and available on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/bhaavanaapril2000000unse/page/116/mode/2up ht @omshivaprakash

Today, the English translation of her short stories has received the prestigious Booker Prize, a proud moment for Kannada literature and all of us who’ve cherished her voice for decades.

You can read the original story from Bhavana — now digitized as part of our #ServantsOfKnowledge initiative — right here: https://archive.org/details/bhaavanaapril2000000unse/page/116/mode/2up

📚 Bhavana Magazine, under the legendary editorship of Jayanth Kaikini, remains a beacon of literary excellence.
🔗 Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayanth_Kaikini

Congratulations to Banu Mushtaq & Deepa Bhasthi on the Booker Prize!

We are proud to share that Bhavana Magazine (April 2000) had featured Banu Mushtaq’s powerful short story “Edeya Hanate” –meaning “Heart Lamp”. This story later became the title of her acclaimed collection published in 2004.
#BanuMushtaq #DeepaBhasthi #BookerPrize #KannadaLiterature #BhavanaMagazine #JayanthKaikini #EdeyaHanate #Heartslamp #ShortStories #LiteratureMatters #IndianWriting #TranslationMatters #KannadaLiterature

INTACH Conservation team trains #ServantsOfKnowledge team on plamleaf preservation! These are two Kannada manuscripts we are preserving. We would soon have an answer on what they contain. #Plamleaf #preservation #digitization

There's a transcript (with some links out to the sources we discuss). https://archive.org/download/SOK.Bangalore.Club.20250219/Bangalore.Club.Transcript.pdf

A talk I gave with Lawrence Liang at the Bangalore Club on "The Future of Libraries." IA: https://archive.org/details/SOK.Bangalore.Club.20250219 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKa5_5M4yVc Filming is not allowed, but one of the members went rogue.

Air raid drills tomorrow throughout India. For my friends over there, here's a classic film from the U.S. government on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyOXMIZ7MpY

@carlmalamud You have very interesting Indian idols for all energy you need!

@carlmalamud Wow! this looks fabulous...

It took ten years, but here's the 2020 statement from the Smithsonian Institution announcing an amicable settlement of the case and the resulting release of 28 million images. https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/smithsonian-releases-28-million-free-images-broader-public-use (The Smithsonian graciously invited me to the announcement event, but we all got benched because of COVID, and I would have been in India anyway.)

Gandhi Bhavan, Bengaluru started Gandhi Cinema club. It was inaugurated by well known Kannada movie director Shri. Girish Kasaravalli. #GandhiMovieClub #GandhiBhavan #Bengaluru

Today’s edition of The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/servants-of-knowledge-digitises-over-33000-books-in-nlsiu-library/article69247239.ece# Jai Gyan!

@carlmalamud Thank you Carl for blessing us at the event.

Lawrence Liang and I will be speaking at the Bangalore Club tomorrow night on "The Future of Libraries." If you are a member and obey the dress code, we would be pleased to see you there!

I leave for India on Saturday. This is my luggage so far. 40 SSDs with 0.5 petabytes gross capacity. 7 pounds deadweight, so it fits in a small suitcase. 1,503,193 objects (e.g., "books"). 309 tbytes of actual data. Will take me 28 hours to fly to India which means 24.52 gbps throughput. I will be flying Emirates so there will be tasty snacks and drinks.

Our optical music recognition project is moving along. We take sheet music, scan it, use omr to turn it into musicxml, then midi, then wav files. Here's some recent work on silent movie soundtracks. https://soundcloud.com/publicresource/sets/photoplay-soundtracks Silent movie theaters had pit orchestras, and this is sheet music they used to accompany the "photo plays."

They really issued a statement saying "In the interests of our respective members, IEC and ISO have taken measures to protect international standards from unauthorized disclosure."

In my line of work, you always hope the other side in a decades-long stare-down will jump the shark and say something so very quotable. :)