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---
layout: post
title: Free Culture Book Club — Poles, part 2
date: 2023-08-26 07:01:12-0400
categories:
tags: [freeculture, bookclub]
summary: Discussing a novel written in Tamil
thumbnail: /blog/assets/dhuru-vangal-cover.png
teaser: This week (unfortunately) brings us tedious Linux tutorials.
update: [
2023-08-19-poles-1.md
]
spell: Ilexi i3wm Nakiran Madan Kartika Nakeeran Dhuruvangal Redmine Quand manigancent les gcc cd pwd powt lus mkdir maktir cp mv
proofed: true
---
This week, our [Free Culture Book Club]({% post_url 2020-05-02-freeculture %}) continues reading **Poles**, a Tamil novel, from *To Ilexi Met* (*முதல் ஐலக்சி மீட்டப்*) to *One of Us* (*ஒன் ஆப் அஸ்*).
![A pink chair sitting in front of a laptop saying "cinnamon(mint)" and a blue chair sitting in front of a workstation saying "i3wm(btw)" in an abstract office space with a visualized music score drifting through the background](/blog/assets/dhuru-vangal-cover.png "I have no idea what any of this means, but I now feel invested...")
To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
* Full Title: **Poles: A Technical Novel**
* Location: <https://freetamilebooks.com/ebooks/dhuruvangal-technical-novel/>
* Released: 2021
* License: CC-BY-SA
* Creator: Nakiran.N
* Medium: Novel
* Length: Approximately 58,000 words
* Content Advisories:
This should go without saying---even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment---but *Content Advisories* do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
## Poles
The website describes the novel as follows.
> Can a computer tell a love story? Nakiran has shown that it can be done. Madan and Kartika are the protagonist and heroine of this story. Linux connects them both. This is the summary of the story. After listening to the synopsis 'Oh! Don't think that's it!' Every page you turn in this story is full of unexpected twists and expected choices. Every young person who wants to fall in love will love this book. This book will bring love to every man who thinks that the time for love has passed. Anyone who loves poetic romance will love this book; This book will also appeal to the average person who is afraid to show love, 'Why am I postponing all the exams because I am afraid that I will lose?'
>
> I thought it was a book about Linux! You are giving up on love. You may ask, 'Is it me?' If you ask that, not only Linux, what is free software, how Unix was born, (Until how Unix became Unix), why Richard Stallman thought we should have free software, the operation of Linux from the Android phone in our hands to the Mars spacecraft sent by NASA to Mars, What are the basic Linux commands to learn? This book covers everything from the beginning to the end of Linux i.e. Ilexi and Linux Processes. "Linux is not just an OS, there is a history behind it," Madan says at one point in the story. Readers of this book will surely feel that. After reading the book, every reader's view and understanding of Linux will definitely change. That is the success of this book!
>
> Love, communalism, rationality, anti-caste, screenplay, Nakeeran has given us so much that we disappear in all the places where he has put his hand. The care he has shown in giving this much and releasing it under a Creative Commons License has revealed to us his life that promise and life must be one.
>
> It is said that even in the books of great writers who wrote technical books in Tamil, there is waste in the name of love. You will not see any waste like that in this book. Just as Linux speaks of freedom and rights, so do the storytellers of the book. Henceforth, those who write technical books in Tamil, Nakiran's 'Dhuruvangal 11=10\|01' will be a top-line rule for how to write a technical book. Nakeeran, who fed Linux by showing love to Madan-Kartika, should continue to give books like this. Such giving will be a great boon for the youth of Tamil.
As mentioned, Nakiran wrote this novel in Tamil. Since I don't believe that I've even *met* someone who speaks [Tamil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language)---I believe that my past Indian colleagues all came from the west coast, so more likely Kannada or Malayalam, or further north, though I deeply apologize to any colleagues who might read this in the future whose hometowns I didn't recognize---so I'll need to muddle through this with machine translation.
Therefore, as usual for foreign works, take what I say with the proverbial grain of salt, because I may have gotten a bad translation that either spoiled a metaphor or made it sound like the author meant something that they didn't.
Likewise, this work joins [**Redmine**]({% post_url 2022-11-19-redmine-1 %}) as one of the rare Free Culture works that we've seen that doesn't come from an Indo-European tradition, to the extent that the end of the line tends to stop where people stop speaking Hindi. While [loan words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_loanwords_in_Tamil) certainly exist, and the British occupation certainly influenced the direction of all local languages, I expect translators to have more problems with this than it had with, say, [**Quand manigancent les haricots**]({% post_url 2022-09-03-haricots %}), and I might not recognize unfamiliar storytelling forms.
## What Works Well?
If you like looking at example Linux output, well then do I have news for you...
## What Works...Less Well?
The musical number mystifies me, because the narrative sets it up as the horrible bureaucrats wasting Madan's time...even though he apparently doesn't have any actual work to do and can lecture Kartika about [`gcc`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection) trivia. But they also tell the story abstractly, with no stakes, tension, or surprises, as far as I can tell, and no indication of the nature of the song.
A lot of what I would say, though, I already said about [the first part]({% post_url 2023-08-19-poles-1 %}). The characters still strike me as obnoxious, and the educational content seems so biased towards trivia, or otherwise makes misguided choices, that I can't recommend it for learning the subject.
## Opportunities
You can leave a comment on the page, and I see a QR code to donate to the **Free Tamil E-Books** website, but I don't know how much contact they have with the author, unfortunately.
Not quite supporting the book or---as far as I can tell---the author, but this section of the book specifically calls out [Open Source Diversity](https://opensourcediversity.org/) as a valuable community.
## What's Adaptable?
Again, because I need to get lost in translation, I can't help but indicate the offbeat (at best) translations of standard Linux commands. It has nothing to do with the book as such, but they amuse me and might spark an idea for someone. Therefore, `cd` (change directory) has become `kit`, `pwd` (print working directory) has become the pretty spectacular `powt`, `ls` (list directory) becomes either `lus` or `lace`, `mkdir` (make directory) becomes `maktir`, `cp` (copy) becomes `chip`, `mv` (move) becomes `mauve`.
Otherwise, I don't see anything introduced in these chapters, other than maybe some minor characters. They mention song titles, but between crossing cultures and the language barrier, I have no idea if the titles map to real songs.
## Next
We'll continue with **Poles**, next week, reading from *Rainy Day Love* (*மழைலக் காதல்*) to *Clan* (*குலசாமி*). If you start reading *Is Sixteen* (*பதினாறும் ெபற்று*), then you've gone too far.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works---or want to create them---that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we've already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on [my {% emoji latte %} Buy Me a Coffee page](https://buymeacoffee.com/jcolag).
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the story so far?
* * *
**Credits**: The header image comes from the book's cover, under the same license as the rest of the book.