Brij Kothari | |
|---|---|
 Brij Kothari (left) speaks to a group of children | |
| Born | 9 June 1964 |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Alma mater | IIT Kanpur and Cornell |
| Occupation(s) | Academic and Social Entrepreneur |
Brij Kothari (born 9 June 1964) is an Indian academic and a social entrepreneur. He invented Same Language Subtitling on TV for mass literacy in India.
Brij Kothari was born to a business entrepreneur. His parents were particular about education and sent him to Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE) in Pondicherry. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, [1] and did his PhD from Cornell University. He is a Schwab Social Entrepreneur and an Ashoka Fellow. [2] He was a fellow at Stanford University's Reuters Digital Vision Program and completed the "Leadership for System Change: Delivering Social Impact at Scale" program at Harvard University.
After completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India. In 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. While continuing to teach communication to MBA students, he started work on SLS at IIM. He has been on the Faculty of IIM Ahmedabad, as Associate and Adjunct Professor, since 1996.
In 1999, in an effort to improve functional literacy rates in India, he experimented with subtitles on Chitrageet, a Gujarati television program. In 2002, the Doordarshan network subtitled their national program Chitrahaar. Since 2006, SLS has been implemented on one weekly program each in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Marathi. The main goal is to persuade broadcasting policy in India to implement SLS on all songs on TV, in all languages. [3]
Kothari is the president of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in furthering Same Language Subtitling throughout the world. He is also the founder of BookBox, [4] [5] a social venture funded by First Light Ventures that produces animated, read-along stories for children in languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, and over 21 others.
His work was also selected by the Google.org as one of the projects for funding. [6]
Kothari is married. He has two sons and a daughter.
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 2017 | iF Social Impact Prize [7] |
| 2013 | Library of Congress, International Literacy Prize [8] |
| 2012 | USAID, Winner, All Children Reading Grand Challenge [9] |
| 2011 | NASSCOM, Social Innovation Honour [10] |
| 2009 | Indian Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Schwab Foundation and UNDP [11] |
| 2009 2011 | Clinton Global Initiative, Feature [12] |
| 2004 | Ashoka Fellow [13] |
| 2003 | Tech Laureate (Education), The Tech Awards [14] |
| 2002 | Winner, Development Marketplace, Global innovation competition – World Bank [15] |
The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are Centrally Funded Business Schools for management offering undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and executive programmes along with some additional courses in the field of business administration. The establishment of IIMs was initiated by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, based on the recommendation of the Planning Commission of India.
Mallika Sarabhai is an activist and Indian classical dancer and actress from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Daughter of a classical dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai and space scientist Vikram Sarabhai, Mallika is an accomplished Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dancer and performer who has specialized in using the arts for social change and transformation.
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, is an Indian business school, located in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. As one of India's premier Indian Institutes of Management, the school has been accorded the status of an Institute of National Importance by the Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India in 2017. It is widely regarded as the leading business school in India and one of the most prestigious business schools in the world.
Chitrahaar is a television program on DD National featuring song clips from Bollywood films. It was widely watched in the 1980s and 1990s. The word literally means 'a garland of pictures', or more liberally, 'a story of pictures'.
Abhijat Joshi is an Indian screenwriter, film director, producer and editor who works in Hindi cinema. His is known for collaboration with Vinod Chopra Productions and director Rajkumar Hirani, as the screenwriter for Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), 3 Idiots (2009), PK (2014) and Sanju (2018). He is a professor of English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, since 2003.
Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, captions are subtitles that include written descriptions of other elements of the audio, like music or sound effects. Captions are thus especially helpful to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Subtitles may also add information that is not present in the audio. Localizing subtitles provide cultural context to viewers. For example, a subtitle could be used to explain to an audience unfamiliar with sake that it is a type of Japanese wine. Lastly, subtitles are sometimes used for humor, as in Annie Hall, where subtitles show the characters' inner thoughts, which contradict what they were saying in the audio.
Vijay Mahajan is the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies.
Same language subtitling (SLS) refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. Initially introduced in the early 1970s as a means to make services available to the hard of hearing, closed captioning as it became known was standardized for Latin alphabets in the 1976 World System Teletext agreement. Non-Latin character set services have subsequently been introduced, and are used in India, and in China to also aid literacy.
Chetna Gala Sinha is an Indian social entrepreneur working to empower women in areas of rural India by teaching entrepreneurial skills, access to land and means of production.
Sanjeev Bikhchandani is an Indian businessman, who is the founder and executive vice chairman of Info Edge which owns Naukri.com, a job portal, as well as the co-founder of Ashoka University. He was honored with the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian award, in January 2020.
Saraswatichandra is a Gujarati novel by Govardhanram Madhavaram Tripathi, an author of early twentieth century from Gujarat, India. Set in 19th-century India, It is acclaimed as one of the masterpiece of Gujarati literature. Though the novel was published in four parts, each part has a distinct thematic content, its own cast of characters and independent beginnings and ends. It was adapted into several plays, radio plays, films and TV series. It was well received by the number of critics, and was translated into several Indian languages, along with English. However, Suresh Joshi, a strong proponent of formalism theory, criticized the novel for its structural failure.
David Green is an American social entrepreneur. His work has focused on making technology and health care services more accessible and sustainable.
PlanetRead is a non-profit founded by Ashoka Fellow, Brij Kothari, to provide Same Language Subtitling on Bollywood music videos in the same language that they are sung in to promote functional literacy. There are an estimated 650 million literate people in India. In reality, half the so-called ‘literates,’ more than 300 million people, can best be called ‘early-literate.’ They cannot read, for example, newspaper headlines.
The Media in Gujarati language started with publication of Bombay Samachar in 1822. Initially the newspapers published business news and they were owned by Parsi people based in Bombay. Later Gujarati newspapers started published from other parts of Gujarat. Several periodicals devoted to social reforms were published in the second half of the 19th century. After arrival of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian independence movement peaked and it resulted in proliferation of Gujarati media. Following independence, the media was chiefly focused on political news. After bifurcation of Bombay state, the area of service changed. Later there was an increase in readership due to growth of literacy and the media houses expanded its readership by publishing more editions. Later these media houses ventured into digital media also. The radio and television media expanded after 1990.
Anshu Gupta is an Indian entrepreneur. He founded the non-governmental organization Goonj. Goonj works on bridging urban and rural inequality. It does this by channelizing the urban surplus to initiate rural upliftment, disaster relief, and rehabilitation. Through Goonj, Anshu is building a parallel trash-based economy by creating barter between rural communities and urban surplus material. Anshu has been recognized by the Ramon Magsaysay foundation for his "creative vision in transforming the culture of giving in India".
BookBox, a social enterprise located in Pondicherry, India has created ‘AniBooks’, animated stories for children with the narration appearing on-screen as Same Language Subtitles (SLS). Every word is highlighted at the exact timing with the audio narration, thus strengthening reading skills, automatically and subconsciously. BookBox has their videos on their YouTube channel, with over 45 stories in 40 languages. The business was born in 2004 from a student-driven competition, Social e-Challenge, at Stanford University.
Rita Kothari is an Indian author and translator from Gujarat, India. In an attempt to preserve her memories and her identity as a member of the Sindhi people, Kothari wrote several books on partition and its effects on people. She has translated several Gujarati works into English.
Jayant Sukhlal Kothari was a Gujarati literary critic from India.
Hasmukh Jamnadas Baradi was a distinguished Gujarati playwright, theater artist, theater critic, and a Russian language expert from India. Over his career, Baradi authored more than two dozen plays, with six premiering at prestigious venues such as the Central Sangeet Natak Academy and the National School of Drama Festivals. He also penned the "History of Gujarati Theatre" which was published by the National Book Trust in New Delhi in 1996, and later translated into English by Vinod Meghani in 2003.
Abhimanyu Acharya is an Indian short story writer and playwright from Gujarat, India. He received the 2020 Yuva Puraskar for his short story collection Padchhayao Vacche.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
