Sanskrit – not dead (yet!)…

You would all remember that I had posted here about hunting for a Sanskrit teacher for me to learn sanskrit..while I was searching I happened to hit on this – Samskrita Bharathi! A service organization that helps spread Sanskrit. Though they have various courses - correspondence and spoken or conversational, it’s their spoken course that’s more popular and not surprisingly I was attracted to it too. This unique 10 day spoken course (conducted at various places all thru the year across India) and since it was in my neighbourhood, I decided to attend (rather check out.). This 2 hour a day spoken class was taken by a young lady who said she has dedicated her life or atleast the next 5 years for service! A keralite (something about kerala pushes more of them for service like nurses, teachers etc across the globe. Amazing,eh?)who has left home and moves around taking classes! She would talk to us only in Sanskrit. Third day on she would narrate a story at the end of the class, that would comprise most of the words we learnt till then and believe me, we all could understand almost in full!
I more or less believe that this language is within us (may be in genes or DNA or at least in our deep memory – probably heard somewhere spoken by someone) and hence its so easy to pick up. By the end of 10 days course, its amazing that one gets to understand good enough and now the eagerness to learn is even more.

Meanwhile some of my friends did mention that it’s a dead language! Hey..NO! Its not a dead language.. There are many great people across the globe who have wondered how come this language was given a comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology and in so much detail as early as 500 BC by Panini! Panini's work is considered one of the greatest achievements of human intelligence! Ok that’s a digression..panini himself can help me filla pages, but that’s for another blog;-)

Thanks to organizations like samskrita Bharathi its spreading well enough. Today there are 10 million people speaking/learning Sanskrit. Its one of the easiest language to pick up. Its being taught in many countries across the globe and there are many universities. It definitely has lots of gems like vedic mathematics or treasures like ancient sciences of excellence like astronomy etc. may be some day we will unearth them..

Sanskrit is a beautiful ancient language. Learn it if u can..its worth it!!
Vadhathu Samskritham! Jayathu Samskritham!!