Hello all, Mandal Hembrom passed away at TMC, Mumbai, today in the early morning. He was under-going treatment at TMC. I don't yet have the details of the exact cause of death, but so far it is known that his condition detoriarated after he underwent Chemotheraphy and lapsed into a severe cardiac arrest.
Mandal-da was the lead linguist (as also being a native speaker) in our Santhali CASTLE Project [1]. His death is not just a great loss to our project, but a loss to all the Santhals struggling to establish their identity in a globalised world that dictates a lop-sided homogeneity at the cost of losing unique cultural traits, language and social structures. Mandal-da's illness was detected at an advanced stage. He wanted to use the time he had to complete the work on the translation of the strings. Unfortunately, he was taken away from us before that could happen! Perhaps, its a strange co-incidence that today happens to be the International Mother Language Day [2] (21st Feb) that Mandal-da breathed his last. We need to reaffirm our commitment to the work on bridging the ICT divide. As I wrote in my "A walk across the Digital Divide" experience [3], its not as un-bridgable as it often sounds. Its only by ensuring the continuance of the Santhali L10N project that we can truly pay our respect to the dreams and efforts of Mandal Hembrom. -Indranil Das Gupta. References: [1] "Santhali L10N" - http://blogs.randomink.org/node/view/68 [2] http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/language/ [3] "A Walk Across the Digital Divide" - http://blogs.randomink.org/node/view/106 ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
