The year was 1290 . A crowd had gathered around a clearing, where broken down pillars marked the presence of an ancient temple, now long gone. A young boy, just 14 years old, leaned against one of those pillars, deep in thought. Then, he began speaking, and the crowd fell silent, listening to his every word. He spoke without any notes, translating the Bhagavat Gita, from Sanskrit, which only the pundits knew, to the language everyone in the village knew and spoke – a variety of Prakrit which developed into the Marathi language. Even as he spoke, one of the men in the audience realized how momentous this event was, and how important this composition would be. He began writing down the words the young boy spoke, and this composition was named by its author and composer, the Bhavartha Deepika – the enlightening meaning (of the Bhagavat Gita). Now, the ancient, holy text, was no longer restricted to the pundits, but accessible to all, understood easily by them, composed as it was, in their...
Last week when I returned from Delhi, the foremost thing on my mind was to update my blog. There are reams of things I want to write, but I found myself unable to write anything at all. The only thing I wanted to share was about the function I attended at Delhi, but then again, it wasn’t easy, since I haven’t really written much about my family. So, after a lot of thinking, here I go…. To give you people a brief background, I grew up with my mom’s side of the family, since my dad passed on when I was five. I have 3 mamas (maternal uncles) and one chitti (maternal aunt). The use of the traditional Tamil names is simply because each one of them has an important place in my heart, and to call them by the universally used name of uncle/aunt somehow doesn’t ever fit.