IT in India: A Homecoming Game Date:   Tuesday , July 04, 2006 In the inherent quest for identity establishment, humans constantly explore the aspects and features of their hereditary life that could bridge their generational and cultural gaps that in turn constitute their heritage. Desis lean on the vast panorama of India- ancient and present. They discourse the lives and times of icons from Buddha to Gandhi, rejoice and relax amidst sports such as chess and cricket, revel in the glitter of Bollywood, soak in the scriptures and immerse in the worship of Babas and exercise and excel in Yoga. Into this scenario of a neat calibrated heritage model, pops up the Information Technology (paradigm), an IT Avatar and lo and behold, life would not be the same again. Much has been written, dissected and analyzed about the phenomenology of IT. The par excellence of Indians in the IT filed has tied the resurgence of India to the IT anchor-pillar-post. IT Avatar and its India connection spawned fascinating sociological models like that of Tom Friedman’s Flatland and Daniel Pink’s beginning of the Conceptual Age. From the underdeveloped label, India has been promoted to a developing nation. Disguised between the lines of these many interpretations is the underlying theme that India shaped out to be the New Kid On the IT Block. The corollary is that IT could not provide heritage backbone to anyone due to its recent origin. Fortunately this is not true. A little uncovering of the ash over the burning coal reveals that this generation’s IT revolution is not just a mere consequence of the recent entrepreneurial spirit of Indians, monumental as it may be, but a result of a remarkable resurgence of the intellectual capital embodied by ancient Indian ancestors, Gurus, who understood the mechanisms of computation two millennia before the first computer was built! Embedded in the bones of Indians, from tech savvy city dwellers to rural farmers is the tradition of offering respects to the Guru. We convey our gratitude to that person or God without whom the very work we are embarking on would not have existed, so to speak. In this age of “high tech”, whom should the software/hardware industry recognize first? Taking this argument forward one more step: whom should the modern Computing World offer their respect as the Father of Computers? Who indeed? The individual, the Guru of all modern computers is a two millennium year’s old ancient Indian, Panini. Is this a mythological-superhuman-fantasy story? Far from it. Panini existed very well and produced an earth shattering innovation by formalizing the first concept of grammar rules, which are at the very heart of modern programming languages and computational processes. According to the distinguished linguist Frits Staal, we can now assert, with the power of hindsight that Indian linguists in the fifth century B.C. knew and understood more than Western linguists in the nineteenth century A.D. While the exact time of Panini’s existence seems to be uncertain, several hundred years BC, by all accounts he conceived about 4000 rules regulating Sanskrit grammar documented in a text Astadhyayi. Computer scientists recognized Panini, may be belatedly, as the forefather of programming language grammars. The grammar that is used to describe modern programming language with metarules is sometimes called the Panini-Backus form. John Backus is a U.S. computer scientist notable as the inventor of the first high-level programming language, called FORTRAN, expressed in grammar rules that bear a strong resemblance to Panini’s rules. The ancient roots of programming language grammars are attributed to Panini in his honor. According to Frits Staal and tested with Fowler’s automaton, his metarules had such a level of sophistication that the computing power is considered equivalent to a Turing machine, which is considered a precise computing model that lies at the heart of our modern computers. Equally fascinating is that the binary system was also rooted in ancient India. Pingala, again of uncertain age but estimated to be several hundred years BC, enunciated the secrets of the universal language of 0s and 1s in his Chhandahshastra, a Sanskrit treatise on the prosody considered one of the Vedanga. With respect to Pingala’s ancient work and the relationship to modern computers and the binary number system, the eminent physicist and mathematician, Stephen Wolfram states that Fibonacci numbers (each succeeding number is a sum of the preceding two numbers) appear to have first arisen in perhaps 200 BC in the work by Pingala on enumerating possible patterns of poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. This also led to the discovery by Pingala of binary numbers. Pingala described the binary number system in relationship to the listing of Vedic meters with short and long syllables. Fast-forward a couple of millennia: A mix of Boole, Turing, John Von Neumann and many others conjure up the computer world we exist in today. We just need to poke the earth for the roots and seeds and soon we could locate that these seeds were sown by Panini and Pingala about 2500 years or so ago. Literature search reveals that Panini and Pingala were not just aberrations but were regularly followed by other Indian philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians. The chronology spans from the Indus valley civilization and the Vedas to modern times, crowned by the genius Ramanujan in the early twentieth century. IT revolution, in its present form birthed primarily in U.S.; Indians, among others, participate in this revolution in droves and flourish and in turn IT flourishes. To use an adage, a funny thing happened on the way. Multinationals and Indian discover mutual affinity and outsourcing high technology development piece by piece to India became the norm of the day. India turns into the IT capital of the world. The irony, it seems, went through a full circle. As if people have scant gratitude, it is hard to find any mentioning of Panini or Pingala in modern programming language textbooks for either graduate or undergraduate Computer Science students. One can only hope that their work will be revisited, republished and be brought to the popular imagination. Meager or no recognition for such original work, so far, probably would be remedied by the world and especially Indian IT aficionados. They can then reclaim their heritage and rekindle the interest of newer generations into IT-related aspects such as mathematics, science, and engineering with roots in India, and thus paying respects to the ancient Gurus of the IT revolution. IT revolution stitches the 2500 plus year linear time-line from the beginning point to present time into a circle, maybe with a few hops in time and space on the way, but clearly without loose ends. The IT circle revolves around the earth with India as its axis and the ubiquitous Indian brogue as its hub. Information Technology became a Homecoming Game for India even as Globalization is born. Our heritage has been broadened; only we need to repossess the jewel.