Urban Young Are Diving Into Sanskrit

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--- Arun Mehta schrieb am Fr, 10.7.2009:

From HPI:

Urban Young Are Diving Into Sanskrit

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Source: www.outlookindia.com

 

INDIA, July 2, 2009: Especially in urban areas, India's young are rediscovering

the lure of the Sanskrit language. As many as 30,000 people have enrolled for

countrywide Sanskrit classes that are starting this July under the aegis of the

Gita Shiksha Kendra; 60 per cent of these are in the 18-28 age group. At the

Delhi Samvadshala, students from 37 countries come down in winters to learn

spoken Sanskrit. And in 2008, 2,000 Delhiites, mostly in their 20s, enrolled for

spoken Sanskrit crash courses that were held across the city

 

These students include young techies, MBAs, civil servants, students of history

and philosophy, as well as those interested in ayurveda or yoga. They are

attracted by Sanskrit's highly logical grammatical structure; the access it

gives them to classics and texts on ayurveda, yoga; and the guidance on ethics,

leadership and strategy in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Arthashastra.

The fact that Sanskrit is a scoring subject in CBSE, UPSC exams has also fueled

interest. Recently, according to this report , an orthodox Muslim girl called

Rahmath, 21, won the first rank in the Sanskrit Vedanta degree course conducted

by the University of Kerala.

 

But for Hindus, it's all about claiming one's heritage. " We're going back to our

roots, " smiles Krishna Shastry, who helped to initiate the Sanskrita

Sambhashanam (Speak Sanskrit) movement in 1981.