A five-day World Samskrit Fair is being held at the National College Grounds in Bangalore.
Samskritay bhashanam, Samskritay lekhanam, Samskritay jeevanam, Samskritay Arpanam (Speak, write, live and offer yourself to Sanskrit): that is the verse that thousands of those visiting the five-day World Samskrit Fair being held at the National College Grounds will swear by. It is not such a surprise to see saree-clad women and men in kurtas at the fair. They appear to quite belong here. There are also youngsters here, and it is a pleasant surprise to overhear conversation in the ancient language.
“Those who do not know Sanskrit cannot understand its importance. Those who know the language understand its purity and richness,” said Gopal Upadhyay. Dressed in ethnic attire, Upadhyay insists on speaking in Sanskrit. And he does that even if his listener protests that he cannot understand. “One of the many beauties of Sanskrit is that even if you do not know the language, there is a good chance that you will understand it if you speak any Indian language at all,” he said. The enthusiastic Upadhyay, 26, is a teacher of Sanskrit.
More and more young people seem to be able to appreciate the richness of this ancient tongue. A group of schoolchildren which visited the Sanskrit Vidyalay (school) at the fair was excited. The teacher, Jagannath Sastry, said he would tell them a story, in Sanskrit. As the story telling began, the students found that they had no problem comprehending the plot—they nodded, laughed and answered questions.
Jagannath Sastry, an employee of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, teaches Sanskrit in his spare time. “Sanskrit is not hard to teach or learn, provided it is done right,” he says. There are four steps to learning Sanskrit: shravana (listening), manana (understanding), vadana (speaking) and lekhana (writing). “This is how any language is learnt by a child; the children understand and ask me to speak in Sanskrit, and learning happens over time, even though the learner may not even be fully conscious that he is learning,” said Sastry.
To Sastry, Sanskrit is no ordinary language. “The purity of Sanskrit is such that it can turn the speaker to goodness. Words are believed to activate nearly 72,000 nerves; the language is not ordinary, it affects the very soul,” he says.
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