Mangalore : The 19th edition of the two-day Dakshina Kannada Kannada Sahitya Sammelan began on Saturday Aug 2 at Polali Sri Rajarajeshwari Temple premises. 

Jayashree K A. zilla panchayat member was inaugurated the grand procession of Kannada Bhuvaneshwari. Chera Surya Narayana Rao was garlanded the Bhuvaneshwari.

Kariangala gram panchayat president D Chandrashekar Bhandari hoisted the national flag. S Pradeep Kumar Kalkura, district Kannada sahitya parishad president hoisted the parishad flag.

B Ramanath Rai, district in-charge minister of Dakshina Kannada district, inaugurated the conference.

After inaugurating the conference B. Ramanath Rai, said that conferences such as these would expose the younger generation to the intricacies of the language.

Apart from the customary exhibition of books and display of traditional artefacts, the sammelan also featured, for the first time, an exhibition cataloguing the evolution of Kannada in the digital age. This set the theme for the event, which discussed the survival of Kannada in the era of globalisation.

“Technology has now seeped into every aspect of daily life and brought in great benefits. The question now we have to ask is if it is being used optimally to propagate language,” said sammelan president K.P. Rao, who pioneered software in Kannada in the 1980s for desktop publishing.

He recounted the challenges in adopting Indic languages to computer software using the existing models of keyboards. “There are only 26 (English) letters [of the alphabet] on the keyboard. We had to use these to reproduce up to 700 different letters and combinations present in Kannada. This was a great challenge to surmount,” he said. Having tackled it, the Kannada software industry subsequently flourished, he said. Kannada literature had now been “democratised” with access to books, novels and research available at a click of the mouse, said Mr. Rao.

“The challenge now lies in adapting Tulu and the multi-script Konkani to software, circumventing to incorporate the subtle differences in pronunciations of words which spell out the same in English,” he said.

The future, he said, was to see that regional languages could be taken to a global audience. “Imagine a computer that can read and translate scripts of multiple languages, allowing for a reader to read and understand any script. This sort of language exchange will break through literary barriers,” said Mr. Rao.

Nalin Kumar Kateel, MP, said they would arrest the “decline” of Kannada in schools and cities.

Senior scholar Kodimajalu Anantha Upadyaya, senior law scholar Nuyi Srinivasa Rao, senior dramatist Sadananda Suvarna, Yakshagana scholar Dr M Prabhakar Joshi, senior Bhagavatha Agari Raghuram Bhagavatha, senior researcher professor A V Navada, senior Janapada scholar Dr Palthadi Ramakrishna Achar and Madhav Bhat were felicitated by P Jayarama, managing director of Karnataka Bank.

Ramakrishna Tapovana, president Swami Viveka Chaitanyananda, senior author Arya Laxmi Narana Alva, Ulipadi Guthu Taranatha Alva, Ulipadi Guthu Rajesh Naik, businessman Sesappa Kotian, zilla panchayat president Asha Thimmappa Gowda, Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy president Janaki Brahmavara, Konkani Sahitya Academy president Roy Castelino, Dakshina Kannada deputy commissioner A B Ibrahim, Udupi district Kannada sahitya parishad president Nilavara Surendra Adiga, district deputy director of instruction Jayashekar Moses, Kannada and culture department deputy director Chandrahas Rai, Bantwal education official Sheshashayana Karinja, Bantwal taluk panchayat executive officer Cyprian Miranda, Kariagala grama panchayat president Chandrashekar Bhandari, Puttur Kannada sahitya parishad president Varadaraja Chandragiri and others were present.