Humour Sanskrit, Dad, & Mom And School Last Bench

Parents are those mystic planners who trump up unfounded theories on why something is good for us (and our future) against our own better judgement. What? Why this for me? Years later, the fancy either grows on us or we adapt ourselves to grow on it. Whichever way, every coming of age tale has one such seemingly villainous dad who drags us into something that would have baffled and rattled us back then.

My dad wanted all his kids to learn classical dance. No fashionable swim and sing but dance, that too classical dance. Can you imagine ME in a classical dance?

I used to heave myself to the classical dance classes. I abandoned soon enough! But that induction pushed me into folk and disco, every form of wriggle but not classical. Here come's the flash-point. I chalked up a preference to consort only with lively characters thereafter. And when I examined my preference, I noticed that all the friends I consorted with in school and adulthood had a predilection in common: we bore an affinity for charleston-type energetic music.

No one swings to downing and melancholic music so we used to sift for only frisky music and heard very less of sad music. I don't know if there is any study conducted on kids growing up with bright music over doleful music. If there had been one, then probably it might uncover why casually dancing kids turn into euphoric tripsters.

I don't know if my dad envisioned too much into the rumored benefits of dance and put his tapping foot down to ensure (and paid for) our classes. But, today, in retrospection, I concede to that (cussed) performing art which has been of greater relevance in my life than any other form of bias.

 

However, my siblings persisted and went on to perform shows under special light effects and won awards in the locality/city. I abandoned! Classical dance didn't suit my visceral urge to monkey jump ho ho as in disco and lambada. My parents preserved those childhood costumes for a long time ..meticulously dry cleaning and storing. Strangely, the next generation in my family has taken to dance naturally with no coercion or even hint: learnt, trained and again performing now in their own interest and passion. We siblings are surprised! The recent addition, an infant, already jumps like Jitendra.

Hehe! You are giving me ideas to round up the old and new in the family clan and come up with a flash dance sans classical embellishments.

 

Dear Sri Thiagarajan:

Thank you for this wonderful snippet. So you are one of the lucky children who learned Sanskrit in the school formally. My wife was lucky enough to learn Sanskrit as the second language throughout her school and that gives her a great strength to learn any new recitations she wants to learn in Sanskrit. Even saying a sentence or two as a quote in my talks in Sanskrit is a struggle for me.

When I worked as the Chief Financial Officer of Center for Development of Advanced Computing during the years 1988-1992, there was a group formed to develop scientific and engineering applications in a natural language (Sanskrit). Already the Engineers were designing and developing high performance MIMD machine under parallel processing architecture for the first time. Several engineers were learning how to parallelize programs written for Seismic Data Processing, Molecular Modeling, Weather Forecasting, etc, another uphill tasks in India at that time. Eventually, the group developed a simple application and parallelized the code into the high performance computer. It was more of a proof of concept than a real effort to have one full massive scale application developed using Sanskrit. But the simple application did work in the MIMD machine.

When a group developed Graphic-based Intelligence Script Technology (GIST), they included multiple languages including Sanskrit to transliterate from one Indian language to another. But Sanskrit wasn't used to develop the underlying application to transliterate languages in the attachable chord to the computer.

Viswa

 

I liked your way of memorising! Innovative! But if the teacher picks up at random and asks to recite then you are in trouble.
Sanskrit....I love a lot. Though I do not understand it has a beauty and sanctity.
Syamala

 

I too was Sanskrit student....

 

Dear Sri Thyagarajan,

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, "In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and elevating as that of Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life and it will be solace of my death"

German Orientalist Max Mueller said, "If philosophy or religion is meant to be preparation for the after-life, a happy life and happy death, I know of no better preparation for it than Vedanta"

Professor Paul Deussen of Kiel, Germany said, "Vedanta in its unfalsified form, is the strongest support of pure morality, is the greatest consolation on the sufferings of life and death"

Germans had a specific affinity towards Sanskrit for many years and in fact, their language has close resemblance of Sanskrit in many ways. With the exception of Germany, other Europeans may not have understood Sanskrit.

Even today 14 of the top German Universities teach Sanskrit and they are not able to cope up with the demand of the students and are forced to expand classes.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb when the first explosion took place near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he Quoted from Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds". Here is the You Tube Video:

Regarding NASA researching Sanskrit as a programming language, I agree with @kkrish. Machine Learning and AI requires not only computational mathematics but also natural language processing capabilities. Sanskrit has not been researched enough to find these capabilities.

Viswa