Sanskrit

15 November 2014 at 07:55 · 
Despite my own criticism of BJP and RSS, I am getting rather tired of the lack of intellectual integrity and creativity in criticizing each and every statement that comes from them - unthinkingly and reactively.

Sanskrit is a language with vast heritage - in a medical system which in my own personal observation and experience has a capacity far vaster than allopathy, in a grammer which structures the thinking like nothing else does, and with a literature which embeds the life and beliefs of the people across the leangth and bredth of the country. Why are we so dismissive and even apologetic about giving that as the heritage of each student in school. English, we are introducing in each school ... also have Sanskrit. Yes, German can wait for its turn!

Vidyashankar Sunderesan says, "Sorry, Mr. Pramod Kumar. Teaching Sanskrit in Indian elementary and high schools is not necessarily a "Hindutva" agenda. You want your kids to learn bad German for six years from Indian teachers who don't speak that language at all? Why not teach them Sanskrit properly first, along with English, which we teach in our schools already? You will find that with this background, the kids will pick up German so einfach, in a matter of two or three months, once they get to college age. And they will be better valued when they go to Germany, a land where people respect Sanskrit more than you do." Agree totally.

(Via

Kriti Bhardwaj

)

The Indian Government, so worried about it's rich heritage and culture that it is willing to rewrite school history books and mandate Bhagvad Gita study in schools, has done little to actually save, promote or encourage Sanskrit. Au contraire, it has promoted and awarded inaccurate foreign translators over the likes of accurate Indian ones like the Gitapress.

Looks like the point of chest thumping is not so much as love for one's roots as much as it is hate for another.

Sthanunathan Ramakrishnan

Aparna Krishnan

, you expect magic in a day. All these problems with Western indologists etc has gained centre stage only with Rajiv Malhotra's works who himself is not a sanskrit scholar. The process of our scholars looking upto the western ones is a long one and it will take a long time for the entire scholarly fraternity to come out of it even in sanskrit. I infact saw a paper published in some such indology conference in 1910 or so which makes me cringe now. But the sanskrit scholar who is the author of that paper seems to have internalised western ideas and writes with the same biases. It's not like Modi is a sanskrit scholar or that everyone is like Nityananda misra able to find errors in translations.