In 2005, when IT consultant Roshan Pai visited the UK on work, he ended up in the sleepy town of Cheltenham. “I would finish work by 5 PM and suddenly had too much time to spare. I started thinking about how best to utilise it,” he recalls.

Born in Bengaluru, Pai spoke a dialect of Konkani which he felt was dying a slow death due to the lack of documentation and official government patronage. “Outside of Goa, the spoken language hasn’t been scientifically documented. There was no standardised dictionary.”