What is Bharat and why should you care?
In accordance with KM best practices, this knowledge is collected, organized, and curated in a rapidly expanding knowledge repository. All of it links back to Bharat’s vast treasure trove of ancient wisdom. For example, through the Division’s Bharatiya Khel (https://bharatiyakhel.in) program, the modern discipline of kinesthetics is enriched through prize-winning competitions involving 75 of Bharat’s ancient, mostly forgotten, sports. Imagine being one of the first in your country to win a gold medal in Vritt kho-kho or Nau kati kata.
In addition to the early Vedic civilization, present-day Bharat exhibits a strong Islamic influence from Afghanistan, Turkey, and Persia, which began around the 11th century. This was followed by the Mughal rule of the 14th through 19th centuries, and the British Raj from the 19th century up to its independence. Let’s take a look at how Bharat is building upon the accumulation of more than 10,000 years of culturally diverse knowledge to help co-create a better future for everyone.
Bharat future
Markaz Knowledge City (markazknowledgecity.com) reflects Bharat’s Islamic influence. Several decades in the making, it officially opened its doors in 2023, welcoming people of all faiths and cultures. A “smart city” focused on climate, sustainability, and other global challenges, it consists of six zones: Education, Commerce, Culture, Agriculture, Health, and Living. All are closely aligned with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and sit atop a green energy-based and sustainable infrastructure.
In fact, Markaz’s officials emphatically state that it is not just a city, but rather a complete ecosystem aimed at making Bharat a world leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Now the largest country in the world, with more than 1.4 billion minds (almost 18% of the world’s population), the possibilities are essentially limitless. IKS and Markaz City are only two of many such centers located throughout the subcontinent. Unfortunately, cross-collaboration remains minimal. Imagine the flood of innovation that would be unleashed if a “mega-knowledge” system of sorts were formed. That's where AI/machine learning, ontology, and knowledge graphs come into play.
AI developers have always struggled with finding the best way to capture, represent, process, and deliver knowledge in an “intelligent” system. One of Bharat’s nearly lost treasures, Sanskrit, can encapsulate complex and abstract concepts with completeness and precision and support inference better than most approaches to processing symbolic logic. It makes sense that a language that was formulated as a means of expressing deep knowledge, and that has survived these many thousands of years, would be a strong candidate for use in knowledge preservation systems. This idea is not new, having been formally introduced 4 decades ago in 1985 by Rick Briggs in an AI Magazine article (Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence) https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466). It just needed Moore’s Law to catch up and bring the idea closer to reality.
Looking beyond Bharat
Despite being the largest country on the planet, Bharat is only one of many regions across the globe where knowledge is being generated and rediscovered. Check out UNESCO’s vast Global Network of Learning Cities (uil.unesco.org/en/learning-cities), with 356 such cities and counting.
Don’t be left out. We KM’ers should not only be tapping into this immense pool of knowledge, but also taking an active role in helping to connect and maximize sharing across these and other resources. Look across the globe, perhaps even going back to your own ancestral roots. See what the other 8.1 billion minds are up to, what you can learn from them, and of course, what you can contribute. And don’t let any potentially valuable insights you come up with fade away over time. Be sure to capture them in ways that can be passed on to current and future generations.