It all started when the founder's mother refused to join in a family game of Scrabble.
Growing up in the 80s, Scrabble was our go-to board game. My sister and I played with cousins, friends and kept getting better. By age 15, I was playing tournament-level, able to beat experienced, middle-aged players. Many years later, we sat down to wage war over words. At the time, I was based in the US and visiting India. I called my mother to the game, 'అమ్మ నువ్వు కూడా రా'. She declined, "లేదు రా, మీరు చాలా high levelలో ఆడుతారు…నా వల్ల కాదు." She was very good at telugu, and had limited skills in english. I couldn't help think, 'but it's such a nice game. It's fun, social and educational. అమ్మ ఆడలేకపోతోంది. మరి ప్రచంచంలో 32 భాషలలో ఉంది కదా? తెలుగులో ఎందుకు లేదు? Why is it not there in hindi?'
My talks with a few retailers in Hyderabad and Lucknow validated my feeling about the commercial viability of such a product. I decided to spend time and effort on creating an equivalent product in telugu and hindi (the two Indian languages that I knew pretty well).
For the tile values and headcounts, I did what the inventor of Scrabble (Alfred Butts) did back in 1932, except use दैनिक जागरण newspaper instead of The New York Times. And yes, there was the unenviable task of doing statistical analysis of not just vowels and consonants, but also vowel diacritics and consonantal diacritics (and consonant clusters that were part of the वर्णमाला in hindi). The statistical part was relatively easy. I ran into a wall with the geometries and maintaining the sanctity of the alphabetic-syllabic structure of the देवनागरी script...until a Eureka moment resulted in inventive steps that enabled a comprehensive Scrabble-like crossword building game in Indian languages for the very first time.
An unplanned journey into the unknown begins. (This is the link to the Ph.D. thesis-like patent application that resulted in a patent grant for the inventive steps).
2008: First attempt with software versions. Our first funding was actual revenue from by a corporate customer. Market forces and "socio-technical" issues threw a big spanner in the works.
2009: HYSEA Award for the “Best product idea in the Startup category”!
2012-2014: Went through a series of evolutions and discoveries, including the development of faster, more exciting gameplays without a game board.
2014: Conducted first-of-their-kind word game tournaments in telugu & hindi, for schools in Hyderabad and Vishakhapatnam. Kids, teachers and parents were excited. Officials from ఈనాడు, the largest telugu media house saw the action and were surprised that such a thing was even possible in telugu.
2017-18: Took a swing at software, again. Nazara, a popular mobile game publisher (and now a public company) got excited and backed the idea. But this time too, a socio-technical issue derailed very promising plans.
2020-2023: Took a break and did other things. I got my 2.5 year old to tinker with the tiles and enabled her journey into words and languages. I also conducted a experiment: Can she recognize telugu script characters and read telugu before she can recognize Roman letters and read English? She didn't start with అ ఆ ఇ ఈ, etc. Instead, she went through the Ultra Rapid sequence and played with our tiles. Living in Singapore at that time, signage outside the home was in Roman letters (English and Malay languages), Chinese characters and Tamil letters. Despite this, the experiment was fairly successful. Around the time when she turned 3, she was able to make logical sense of a few vowel diacritics and consonantal diacritics, and was able to read/spell words such as నాది, దాని, కాదు, బాతు, దగ్గు, వద్దు, and her name లాస్య.
2024: A new beginning. A trip to kunaura village in rural Uttar Pradesh triggered a series of thoughts and events (read about it here). Decided to revive all that good work done, but in a new avatar. One of the first things we did was increase the size of the tiles and make them color-coded (in an organized and intuitive way, that reflects the logical, scientific sequence of sounds in any Indic writing system). Here is a photograph of the old avatar and new avatar tiles:
2026: Here we are, having gone through many highs and lows, happy moments and heartbreaks, but richer in experience and domain knowledge, and in a position to actually “Make Indian language learning fun, logical and rewarding” for kids and parents in India and of Indian origin. And we have a bigger purpose now and are painting on a much larger canvas than before.
