Instant Inspiration

For the love of language!

For quite some time now, I have been hooked on to the language bug, it being one of the many passions I had no clue about until a few months ago( to be honest I get hooked on to the weirdest of things for no reason whatsoever quite often!) I don't know how this one started but of many things, I think the reason could be my fascination for the varied forms of beauty in literature that's akin to each language which cannot be tapped from the other.

I discovered this when I actually started to make an effort to learn the meanings of the many verses and songs that I used to/still sing in varied languages. Being a Tamil by birth whose mother was born and brought up in Kerala and being brought up in Andhra myself, I grew up learning songs in Telugu,Tamil, Malayalam and Sanskrit but I never cared much to know what they meant until I attended one of Prema Pandurang's Narayaneeyam discourses conducted by Kshetropasana and discovered the immense poetic prowess of the 1034 verses condensed from the Bhagavata. My belief until then, which was that English was the one and only language capable of rendering every form of literature most rapturously, was challenged.Never had I come across such beauty in literature , never in the hundreds of books I had ever read(all in English..thats the only language i am completely comfortable reading!) That's when I decided to discover the beauty in the literature of every language I was even faintly familiar with.Although it's too late for me to go deep down and absorb everything, I have begun to understand the beauty of Tamil through the compositions of Ootukadu Venkata Subbaier and Papanasam Sivam, thanks to the help from family and friends.

Telugu and Malayalam are derived from Sanskrit and follow it quite closely.My only exposure to Telugu was from compositions of Tyagaraja, a few lessons from my Telugu classes( which did manage to create a sort of "mania" for a very brief span of time) and a few random Telugu movie songs.My mother swears by the beauty of Malayalam literature but nothing attracted me more about Malayalam than the outrageously funny array of movies of the nineties which had incomparably original themes in comedy which used to tickle me to death!

I do not think my latest fad to learn French has been spurred by a similar interest though. More probably because of the 'jour -ish posh accent in the language that makes it sound....gorgeous! A mere effort to speak in French magically transports me to the delightful city of Paris I wish to see someday!

But probably, I feel, deep down literature boils down to just one thing- the beauty of the mind.I never have been able to assess the practical value my current fad and where its taking me but as long as its not costing me something better, i think I'll enjoy it for as long as it lasts!

posted by Supraja @ 12:56 PM