In 2006, when Mira Road resident Michael Fernandes dropped by at Jack of All Stalls, a Byculla bookstore, to pick up a Konkani dictionary, he was surprised to learn that none existed.

"That a language, which has survived a crippling ban by the Portuguese in the 17th century, and even managed to make it to the Eight Schedule of the Indian Constitution in 1992, did not have a dictionary baffled me," he recalls. At that moment, he decided he would take on the job. It did not matter that he was neither a grammarian nor an academician, but a bakery chef at a Juhu hotel. He then went about picking up whatever Konkani periodicals and books he could lay his hands on. "I went home and began the process of digitising it," he says.