VEDIC, SANSKRIT SPEAKING, VILLAGE'S TRYST WITH IT *** Jai Maharaj posts
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
By Govind Krishnan V
Expressbuzz
The Indian Express
Saturday, January 2, 2010
A quarter century ago, AI magazine carried an article that evoked
much curiosity among its readers -- regular or casual. The 1985
spring issue of the California-based quarterly featured a write-up by
an American called Rick Briggs on artificial intelligence (AI) and
Sanskrit. Briggs, who compared its grammar with that of the computer,
came to a startling conclusion: Sanskrit, which ceased to be a living
tongue millennia ago, had such a logical meaning-structure that it
could be a rich mining field for AI.
The following year, Briggs and several academicians flew down to
India to pick the brains of India's Sanskrit pundits who had gathered
at Bangalore for a conference inspired by his research.
Had their trip happened today, those experts would have taken
Bangalore as nothing more than a stopover. From the Garden City, they
would've taken a bus and travelled seven hours north to meet the
residents of Mattur. In this village, Sanskrit isn't dead. The
language leads an existence -- perhaps beleaguered, but tenacious --
among its 2,000-odd people. Critically, Briggs and company would have
also have witnessed the beginnings of this near-Vedic village's
strange tryst with Hindustan's nascent IT revolution: the village has
produced around 150 software engineers!
It is a link Briggs would have found exciting. Mattur and its twin
village Hosanahalli, a few kilometres north of Shimoga town, sandwich
a thin strip of the Tungabhadra. Enter Mattur, and your senses are
assailed by a host of sights that is eccentric in its fusion of the
picturesque and the quixotic. While a set of Smartha Brahmins recite
Vedic hymns by the riverside in the morning cold, a couple of young
men with tufts zoom past on a black Pulsar -- the unstitched folds of
their white uparivasthras flapping in the breeze. When I enter the
home of Gopal Avadhani, a retired engineer, a boy named Shantarama
introduces himself in Sanskrit, "Mama naama Shantarama."
Sanskrit dominates the life of Mattur, and not just because half the
populace speak the language -- with varying degrees of fluency. Right
about the time Briggs and his crew were discovering the semantic
potential of Sanskrit for computer applications, Mattur was
rediscovering Sanskrit for itself.
The journey back to its Vedic roots started for the village in 1981
when Sanskrita Bharati, an organisation that promotes the classical
language, conducted a Sanskrit workshop in Mattur. It was attended,
among others, by the pontiff of the Pejawar Mutt in nearby Udupi.
Inspired by this village where Sanskrit survived as a spoken
language, the seer reportedly exclaimed, "A place where individuals
speak Sanskrit, where whole houses talk in Sanskrit! What next? A
Sanskrit village!" It's a call Mattur took to heart.
Sanskrit is reputedly a tough nut to crack, but is it that different
from picking up any other language? In some rather important ways, it
seems it is. When Shantarama leaves for school and says "Aham
vidyalayam gachhami" (I am going to school), he will know that
gachhami is very much like gamanam -- which means movement. Both
words come from the root class gam, from which a fluent Sanskrit
speaker can dig up words for all kinds of movements and for things
that move. Like gau for cows and khagah for birds. But khagah is not
merely something that moves. It is that which it moves in khagam
(sky). From a few basic classes (root words), Sanskrit creates an
endless chain of words -- all linked to each other.
"The objects, events and actions are all labelled depending on the
root," says Srivatsa S, who is doing his research in linguistics at
the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Dhruv Kumar, who is scholar Gopal Avadhani's nephew, is one of
Mattur's success stories. He heads a software development company in
Bangalore. The IT professional is a stranger to linguistics concepts,
but he is very familiar with the idea that one can link together a
vast set of seemingly random things by boiling them down to basic
classes that will split the objects between them. He would be doing
it every day. In his office at Mahalakshmi Layout when Dhruv works on
Java or C ++, he is using Object Oriented Programming (OOP), a
programming technique that thinks on lines similar to Panini's
Sanskrit grammar.
OOP allows the programmer to define classes and clump together
objects belonging to the same class. Each object within the class can
be a further class, and can give more objects, just like one word
leads on to another in Sanskrit.
Dhruv, however, is not interested in whether Java shares semantic
genes with Sanskrit. His obsession at the moment is Shridam -- a
rural BPO that set up operations in Mattur three months back. Shridam
is Dhruv's way of giving back to the village that raised him and
which he longs to go back to. The BPO, the brainchild of Mattur's
affluent techie migrants, employs 50 villagers at the moment. "It
gives us from Rs 3,000 to 5,000 a month," says Pattabhiraman, an
employee. "We might get double that in Bangalore, but the cost of
living there makes Shridam much more attractive. Besides we can stay
at home."
The beehive of air-conditioned cubicles that outsource business
operations from foreign shores is something we only associate with a
city. But Dhruv thinks this has not only limited our business
imagination but held our villages back. "If I can service the USA
sitting here in Bangalore, why can't I do the same from Shimoga? From
Mattur?" The words of a dreamer? Dhruv does not agree. After all, the
line between dreaming and innovation is a thin one. "When I can get
better support, better connectivity and better power in Shimoga, why
can't I deliver the same product to my customers at a lower cost?"
Sridham is only the tip of the iceberg for Dhruv and his various
associates. For them setting up a rural BPO is merely the first step
in stemming the flood of urban migration that is eroding the very
fabric of villages like Muttur. They have much bigger plans for their
village. The profits from the BPO shall go into a special fund with
which they hope to launch much bigger technological projects in
Mattur. And these projects will be not only be run but conceived and
conceptualised by the youth of Mattur. "We want to educate our young
people and take up their ideas," Dhruv explains. "Let them come up
with their own projects and execute them. We will give them the
support."
What kind of projects does he have in mind? "Well, for example, wind
and water energy from the Tunga can be harnessed to generate power
indigenously. The channels of the Badhra flow into the Tunga and the
water force can be a valuable resource for our village," he says.
Other plans of a similar kind are being chalked; the thrust is to
make the Muttur a self-sufficient unit.
If Dhruv's dreams come true, Mattur would be a bizarre candidate for
that holy grail of liberal economists -- the global village. It would
be bizarre not merely because the denizens of this global village
will speak Sanskrit and wear unstitched clothes while running
software companies and techno-heavy development projects.
How to keep a language alive
If one man can be said to be responsible for Mattur's Sanskrit
revolution, it would be Srinidhi, a stocky, bullet-headed man with an
enthusiasm that belies his forties. Srinidhi heads Sanskritha Bhavan,
a Sanskrit-teaching institute that has taken upon itself a job that
to many would seem quixotic, the task of taking the language out of
textbooks and literature and bringing it back to life on the streets
of Mattur. Among the many things the institute does, the primary one
is the language support it gives to the local school. Sanskrit is the
first language in the Sharada Vidyapeeth, a private school managed by
the villagers that educates the village's children at little more
than Rs 80 a month. Sanskrita Bharati organises spoken Sanskrit
courses every few months to make sure that nothing is learnt by rote
and forgotten. These Sanskrita Shibirams (Sanskrit camps), where
learners brush up on their speaking skills see all kinds -- men,
women, Brahmins, Harijans, college students, middle-aged farmers. And
the discussions, Srinidhi says, are very lively. The enthusiast,
however, admits that the occasional old-timer who grumbles "Sanskrit?
At my age?" is not uncommon.
The technological edge
Fifty to sixty software professionals from Mattur are placed in the
different IT firms that have made Bangalore the Silicon valley of
India. "People from my native place are working for companies such as
Wipro, Infosys, HP, IBM and several others in Bangalore," says
Shashank who is the chief technological officer of Samartha, a
software development company in Bangalore floated by another
Matturite. Samartha which offers IT services to IT giants in India
and abroad, and have HP, IBM and Wipro among its clients. The
organisation employs 100 software engineers, of whom 25 are from
Mattur. Another venture with a Mattur entrepreneur at its helm,
combines software development functions with that of a training
institute. The company provides training to graduates in languages
like Java and PLSQL (Procedural Language/Structured Query Language).
Mattur has not just spawned techies. It has made its mark in the
scientific community also. "Two scientists from Mattur have won the
Bhatnagar award for original research," said Dhruv Kumar, the owner
of Samartha.
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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Since newsgroup posts are being removed
by forgery by one or more net terrorists,
this post may be reposted several times.
hari....@indero.com
with me. He does it not directly but by posting articles of others to
make points he is not able to provide.
In a recent post I asked jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc. to accept a call
from a real indian to confirm his claim of having several languages of
india in addition to english. In particular he wuld display his command
of conversational sanskrit as he claims to have been raised in a family
who spoke it on a domestic basis.
Now we have a post about a tiny villiage where it is used to various
degrees. This is the best jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc. can do? He
wants us to accept his claim undemonstrated because a mere spec on the
s. asian area uses some sanskrit?
Will jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc. now accept a call from a real indian?