is engaged in a hopeless taskaccording to the national mission for manuscripts there are around 30 million manuscripts in archives around the country of these around 70000 around 94 lakh pages have been digitized what thathachar wants to do or see done is to have every manuscript studied for content annotated and catalogued not all of those manuscripts are of equal value some of them may just be trash but others may have insights that may still be relevant or shed light on their timesthere are manuscripts on astronomy and chemistry on physics and mathematics and metallurgy and engineering they need to be studied by people who know these areas and not just blindly translated then the information needs to be stored along with the manuscript scans he says he pauses for a moment theres a twinkle in his eye as he says maybe sundar pichai can helpthathachar himself learnt sanskrit the traditional way his father was reluctant to send him to the local school preferring to teach his son in the oral tradition you have to remember that one of the earliest written versions of the rig veda dates back only to the 6th century ad the vedas themselves go back to the 15th century bc but were not written down for nearly two millennia there was a belief that writing the vedas was a sinwhen you put something down in writing the attention you pay to the preservation of that knowledge in your mind becomes lesser he says its an argument that was made by socrates and plato as well a thousand years after the vedas that the written word is an incomplete representation of knowledge and that words are to knowledge as pictures are to their subjects it would make for an interesting neurolinguistic study should the mind be exposed to both the orthographic representation of the text and the teachers voice or should it be exposed to the sounds only thathachar has his own little collection of manuscripts as wellhe shows one its in pretty good condition but then its only about three centuries old its quite a work of art the rounded rectangles look machine made and the blueblack letters look like printthe leaves are held between two rosewood blocks the dark wood bound by thin cotton cord in an intricate series of x shapes i got this from a family in bengaluru they couldnt maintain it any longer so they gave it to me he says the knots have to be tied in a specific way the leaves are treated with lemongrass to keep the insects away and traditionally covered in red cloth he handles the manuscripts gently it makes you wonder how the other millions of manuscripts around the country are faring are they rotting away uncared for in damp rooms in government depositories are they being cared for its probably the former in march this year an rti enquiry revealed that the odisha state museum home to one of the largest