A day in the life of LIFE

एषा तु भाषा देवभाषा सुरभाषा गीर्वाण वाणी च ।

सम्स्क्ऱ्त पठनम् यः करिष्यति तस्य जन्मम् पावनम् भविष्यति ॥

The purest of all languages, the language of the Gods and Mortals is Samskritham and those who have an opportunity to study the language are truly blessed...


For those of you who have not even remotely heard of Sanskrit, it is the language that has had its foundation in the roots of the human civilazation.

The language has found mention in all the ancient and revered religious texts and scriptures of Hinduism and many also opine that Sanskrit has had a considerable influence on other languages of the world including Latin and German.
In fact I had received a forward on e-mail talking about the root level similarity between words of the various languages and their origin traced to their Sanskrit counterparts.

The topic of Sanskrit is often associated with only religion and saffronization and this I believe has been a major stumbling block in it achieving popularity for the same among the masses. The tough tongue twisting pronounciations have further added to it's non-acceptability.

My stand about the perfection in the language is vindicated by the fact that I communicate on Orkut, with a gentleman by name Carlos Barbosa from Portugal,in Sanskrit. Mr. Carlos speaks immaculate Sanskrit and does not know fluent English and neither do I know "fluent Portuguese". Talk about people from distant lands according such high status to a language that has almost become extinct in the tongues of the natives.


The Government's effort has been laudable in offering Sanskrit as a language of study in Schools, despite strong predominance of Hindi as the primary language other than English and the regional language. The reason for which many of my friends in school took up the languge was because of the easy scoring pattern and nothing beyond that. In fact many struggle to remember the shabdas and sutras of Sanskrit grammar, and often don't enjoy memories of the same.

For me, sanskrit was much more than scoring marks. Thanks to the high quality knowledge transfer from my gurus who imparted Sanskrit as my first language from class six to twelve. i often found myself using self composed Sanskrit subhashitas as opening four liners for all my debates and to find the judges mesmerized just by simple words fitting the poetic metre was truly a sight to see. The force of declamation in the language makes even the simplest of statements sound big and feel nice.

Interesting trivia is that the 14 sutras of Sanskrit grammar originated from the sounds of Lord Shiva's "Damru" [musical instrument] and Panini the reknowned grammarian ably noted these to give the language the grammatical structure that has been followed through ages, and is even till date accpeted by experts as the most perfectly coded grammar.

Allow me to illustrate one such grammatical peculiarity of words in Sanskrit. This was passed onto me by my teacher in class IX. The word in contention is :

चतुरंगतग्यः!

the end syllable is not coded in the right way since i could not find it in the transliterator software, online.

The uniqueness of this word is that it retains a congruent meaning even after each preceding syllable is deleted

Let me explain.

the word itself chaturangatagnyaha means one who is an expert in playing the game of dice also known as pagade

when syllable 'cha' is removed, we are left with turangatagnyaha meaning one who is an expert in the matter of horses.

Let's go a little further. the word minus "tu" leaves rangatagnyaha meaning stage artist. removal of "ra" gives angatagnyaha meaning doctor. deleting "an" gives gatagnyaha describing a person who knows the past. Subtracting "ga" we get tagnyaha meaning an expert, in whichever field that might be.

Hold on...it's not over yet...we don't have hanging syllables here. Finally removing "ta" we get gnyaha [jaanati iti gnyaha]meaning one who is conscious of knowledge.

In fact the reverberations of the language are supposed to awaken the latent sub conscious mind and lead to spiritual improvement. Technology is chipping in with its bit to save the language. Tools like the one I used to convert English to Devanagari are gaining popularity and I can only hope this leads to preserving and enriching the language further.

It gives me pleasure to note the fact that only village in the whole world where spoken Sanskrit is widely predominant as a means of communication amidst people of various strata and vocations, is Mattur, a village near Shimoga in the state of Karnataka, which incidentally is also home to a sizeable Sankethipopulation [the community to which I belong]. Mattur was featured on the serial Surabhi and I still am making plans to visit the place with such intellectual and liguistic evolution.

I dedicate this post to my "Gurus" and "Gurunis" who have gifted me the opportunity to pursue this wonderful language and they include Shri Sri Harsha Sir (class 6 and 7), Shrimati T.G. Karuna ma'm(class 8,9,10, VVS Sardar Patel High School), Shri Venkatesh K.S. Sir (class 11 and 12, MES college) and Srimathi Shree Srivatsa ma'm(class 11 and 12, MES college)and of course Shri Ganapathy Mahodayaha from Akshara the body that conducts workshops in spoken Sanskrit.

Signing off on this post, let us all contribute to the development of the language that has given the world the most expressive medium of communication, i.e. SPEECH...

जयतु भारतम् । जयतु सम्स्क्ऱ्तम् । जयतु मनुकुलम् ।