bharti

A couple of days ago, I came across a few news reports that a professor from IIT Madras (Professor V Srinivas Chakravarthy) has developed a script (called Bharati) to “unify 22 Indian languages”. As a script-enthusiast, I was of course slightly interested. There is a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric in India about how Indian scripts are very ‘scientific’. On the contrary, the English script (which, in most cases, is the only other kind of script most Indians know) is criticized for being arbitrary, ambiguous, unscientific, what have you.