Summary: (http://kamlashow.com/podcast/wp-content/uploads/Brij.thumbnail.JPG)Using Bollywood songs to promote literacy is an innovative and powerful idea, and is the brainchild of Brij Kothari. The hallmark of every Hindi or Bollywood film are the popular song and dance sequences, which most people can either recognize, sing or hum regardless of their level of education. Brij hit upon this novel idea of using music to learn a new language while studying at Cornell University, New York. He devised this new musical method to improve his Spanish language skills he us It turned out that this way of learning a new language was very. Through this experience he recognized the potential of extending this method to help spread literacy in India. Brij founded PlanetRead , a non-profit organization that used Bollywood songs to spread literacy in India. Using Same Language Subtitling (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/same-language-subtitling.html)(SLS) their first successful impregnation of the project was in Gujarat, India. The target audience were people with low reading skills and the goal was to help improve their reading skills and bring them up to speed to read newspaper headlines. They used Indian film and folk songs for their SLS project. This simple and innovative technique proved to be a success. This was in 1996, and since then Brij and his team members have slowly expanded their work and helped fight illiteracy in India. PlanetRead became one of the first NGOs to be funded by Google philanthropy. (http://www.google.org) Brij was an Ashoka fellow (http://www.ashoka.org/)and was an Associate professor at IIM, Ahmedabad. This interview was first recorded in 2006.
