Yamunotrii-2019 (May 31st to June 2nd, 2019, held in Houston)

YAMUNOTRI SHIBIRAM 2019 – A PERSONAL ACCOUNT by Mrs. Sahana Singh

“You must not miss the Yamunotri camp coming up this summer in Houston,” said my Sanskrit teacher Chandra Raghu who has been teaching Sanskrit to me and a few others over Skype from the past few months. “It can be a life-changing experience,” he said.

I’ve had an on-off relationship with Sanskrit classes. There have been several false starts followed by a starting-from-scratch all over again because I couldn’t remember a single thing of what I learned the previous time. Such is the glory of human memory in the Internet era.

I took the step of not only enrolling myself in Yamunotri Shibir 2019 but paid for my husband too with some trepidation, knowing that he would complain for days if he didn’t find it organized professionally. “Will there be Indian food?” he asked. Yes, I assured him. At 95$ per person, the camp fees seemed unbelievably low considering a stay of two nights and six meals plus whatever it might have cost the organizers for getting halls and teaching rooms. Clearly, the teachers were working on a voluntary basis.

On May 31, the husband and I drove for an hour to a hotel where the camp was held. Daughter said she would use our time away to finish writing her book. Upon arrival at Red Lion Hotel near the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, we found a registration desk right in the reception area. Indian faces were everywhere. I spoke in English with some trepidation as I heard people at the desk conversing in Sanskrit amongst themselves. Husband and I registered, checked into our room, which was nice and spacious in Texan style, and walked back to join other camp attendees for dinner. Food was catered by the familiar Udipi Restaurant which most Houston folks seem to prefer. I could spot at least two families I knew well. While eating, I informed friends at the table that previous camps have been life-changing experiences for some. Husband attempted a wisecrack with “I am looking for a wife-changing experience,” before quickly covering it up with weak explanations.

Dinner was followed by an opening ceremony, some chanting and speeches. Every speech was in Sanskrit! What astonished me was that I could follow some 70% of all of them because they spoke slowly and with a bit of miming. The husband reported only 30% comprehension. We were all placed in different classes under different teachers and asked to proceed to our classrooms. Children were placed in separate classes under the guidance of expert teachers. My section was called Bhaskara which was for slightly more advanced learners than the Aryabhata section in which the husband was placed. “Oh it must be because Aryabhata invented the concept of zero and we are all zeroes,” quipped the husband. That was of course not true because there was were other sections named after Panini and Patanjali in which younger children were grouped.

My class teacher turned out to be one Srikanth Mahodaya. He was full of wit, amazing energy and a melodious voice. After asking our names, he repeated them all without a single mistake just in the manner of other Sanskrit-enabled people with giant memories that I know. He made us sing several songs before starting the class. Much later, I discovered that just like in kindergarten, teachers were making students sing songs in every class. I found myself trying to compose sentences in Sanskrit and each success of mine was received by Srikanth Mahodaya as if I had hit a sixer out of the park which perked me up to try another, and yet another. We were given some 40 verbs like pathati, kreedati, likhati, milati, nindati, dhaavati, aanayati, ichhati and smarati. It’s interesting how I could easily squeeze words out of my Hindi, Kannada and Bengali vocabulary to craft into sentences which were certified as grammatically correct Sanskrit sentences! The teacher often used well-known shlokas and prarthanas to remind us of the usage of specific words. I decided not to note down anything because I knew the notebooks would languish in the same drawer where their predecessors had gone. Best to absorb and remember as much as possible. The class was full of humorous moments and loud laughter as people innovatively created sentences while our teacher reacted dramatically with exaggerated delight or despair. Soon it was time for some curd-rice before we all retired for the night.

The next morning started with yoga at 6:30 am. It was fun to do it along with so many others in a big hall. This was followed by breakfast and networking. The classes commenced with songs and more conversational Sanskrit.

In the breaks I compared notes with my husband who was absolutely enjoying every moment. “You don’t know how humorous our class teacher is,” he gushed. “Bhoga Mahodaya regales us with jokes. I’m sure your teacher is not half as funny. He looks so serious!” And I found myself hotly defending my teacher like some 10-year old.

As the day progressed, in the post-lunch session I began to feel sleepy and wondered how to stay awake. Suddenly, a new teacher burst on the scene and hey Bhagwan, he was some kind of internal combustion engine who shook me out of stupor and got the turbine blades of my mind running as he leaped around the class. This teacher, who was introduced as Srirama took a simple sentence “Ramaha gachhati” and elongated it until it included all the vibhaktis and became almost like an endless straight-chain molecule. To top it, he turned it into a musical drama. “It seemed to me that all the teachers were accomplished abhinetas and abhinetris.

We were told that before the close of the camp, each class would be divided into groups which were required to present short five-minute skits. Just about 45 minutes was given to each group to write the skit after a whole day of classes. My group was the smallest with just five members. Unlike the other groups, we made the cardinal error of choosing a Panchatantra fable instead of coming up with our own story. As we labored over the dialogues under the pressure of a ticking clock we realized that the story was just too long and we did not have the bandwidth to compose such intricacies.

It was time to join in some “kreeda” and the teachers forced us to pause our dialogue writing in order to participate. When we trooped to the big hall, there was one teacher giving us rapid fire instructions in Sanskrit and soon we found ourselves jogging, jumping, passing a ball around and what not. Fun!

Meanwhile, the husband was having more epiphanies. “Do you know that in Sanskrit they say saardhachaturvaadanam for saade-chaar baje and sapaadachaturvaadanam for sava-chaar baje and padonapanchavaadanam for paune-paanch baje? I always wondered where this saade, sava and paune had come from!” It became increasingly evident that the more one knows Sanskrit, the more one bonds with one's own mother-tongue.

Next came Satsang with singing and a highly motivational Sanskrit speech by Shri Padma Kumar. This time, armed with a knowledge of many more Sanskrit verbs and combined with my pre-existing knowledge of Hindi, Kannada and Bengali, I found that I could comprehend more than 90% of the speech! “You do not need to learn the rules of grammar in order to speak,” he said. “Look at a small child. Do you think he knows the rules of grammar? He just starts speaking, makes mistakes and by speaking, speaking, speaking, one day he speaks correctly. Go ahead and make mistakes but speak in Sanskrit. We are like the young mother who is filled with joy at the very fact that her child is attempting to speak. It is not at all a difficult language as it is made out to be! It is extremely easy! Try and speak Sanskrit at home!”

It was such a brilliant speech that I wish I could get the entire transcript to examine the similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. Later, I found that his 2017 speech had been uploaded on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giiLkvYjJJs) Hope the latest 2019 speech will also be uploaded soon.

After dinner, it was time for the skits to be presented by various classes. The one I enjoyed most had an enactment of the powerful Bahubali lifting a heavy Shivalinga in the midst of Sanskrit chanting. In the very next scene he was shown washing dishes while his wife ordered him to finish quickly and fetch a gas cylinder, which he did. Good man. Yet another skit had Donald Trump, Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Barkha Dutt all speaking some lines in Sanskrit!

In my group, we decided to truncate our story and end in five minutes with “Atitho devo bhava” declared by a rather tame Simhaha (lion) played by me while the jackal, crow and camel had their parts cut mercilessly too. “Do not worry, we just want you all to make an effort to compose and act,” assure our teachers.

On the next morning, husband and I decided to skip the yoga session and sleep a little more. However, as predicted by teachers, my dreams were in or about Sanskrit too! I distinctly remember singing the Ramaha gachhati song in a dreamy musical.

The first session of Day Three was addressed by none other than Bhoga Mahodaya, the teacher my husband was raving about. He requested everyone to contribute to Samskrita Bharati which relied entirely on the bhiksha (not donations!) by generous people. People could contribute by way of volunteering for camps, preparing communication materials and of course by giving dollars. “Please come forward to help organize the next shibir and weekly classes,” he said and reminded that in giving we were getting.

One of the highlights for me was that a number of people in the camp including the teachers and even the visiting dignitary from India had seen my talk on the educational heritage of ancient India which had been organized by Srijan Foundation Trust and uploaded on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vviYeA4fIPM) I had carried six copies of my book to the camp and when I presented them to the teachers, four of them insisted on paying me which touched me deeply.

At the closing programme, there was yet another beautiful speech in store, which was delivered by Shri Srinivasa Vadikhedi, the Vice-Chancellor of Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University. He pointed out that all the beautiful gifts of the Indic civilization that we hold so dear whether Yoga, Ayurveda, Dhyana (Meditation), Mathematics or Sciences – are all bound together by the same thread – Sanskrit. He alluded to the same simile that Shri Padmakumar had used – of the Sanskrit agni that burned within each one of us but which had got covered with bhasma (ash) on account of disuse. “Blow the ash away and let the flames rise again,” he said. He repeated another important message for Sanskrit learners that other teachers had delivered too. “Do not think in English and then try to translate into Sanskrit and tie yourself into knots. Think in your mother tongue whether Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi or any other and then translate that into Sanskrit. It will greatly simplify things.” That made so much sense. Instead of belaboring over translating “I cannot do it,” to Sanskrit, one could just take “Nahi kar sakti” and transform into “Na shaknomi”. Why use middlemen?

It is my love for history that has sent me fumbling and tumbling into the path of Sanskrit. The realization that Bharatavarsha’s story is not to be found in conventional school textbooks. The colonial narrative pervades. Manjul Bhargava, the mathematician once made a profound statement linking Sanskrit, history, mathematics and in fact, the entire body of Indic knowledge systems. "By going back to the original you can bypass the way of thinking that history has somehow decided to take, and by forgetting about that you can then take your own path," he said in an interview. "Sometimes you get too influenced by the way people have thought about something for 200 years, that if you learn it that way, that's the only way you know how to think. If you go back to the beginning, forget all that new stuff that happened... you think about it in a totally new way and develop your own path." His words stuck. I wanted to go back to the beginning of it all.

Many times during the camp, I remembered my grandfather, great-grandfather and their forefathers who were all Sanskrit grammarians as well as outstanding teachers. I never got a chance to learn from them but surely, they would appreciate the Speak Sanskrit movement that is gathering momentum. About my grandfather’s teaching methods, I have heard that he used a lot of theatrical tools too. (http://indiafacts.org/a-teacher-who-reigned-in-students-he…/)

As the camp came to an end, I am sure there was hardly a heart not beating with gratitude for the wonderful teachers and organizers who had joyfully devoted themselves to the cause of Sanskrit. As Shrinivasa Mahodaya said in his speech, the next Avatara of Vishnu may not be one single individual. He reflected that it might be a sangha with each one of us contributing collectively with Shraddha and Bhakti for Dharma. I do not know the names of all the teachers and kaaryakartas but surely they would have earned great punya for their tapasya.

Back home, I made some tea and offered it to the husband saying “Chaayam Sveekarotu”. Perhaps, it has been a “wife-changing” experience after all! As I am typing this, I hear the Patideva singing “Lokahitam mama karaneeyam”, so clearly it is not just the wife who changed.

NOTE: 

1) If you are in the US and would like to learn Sanskrit by Skype, a good starting point would be Shri Chandra Raghuhttps://sites.google.com/site/avbtexas/classes

2) If you are in the US and would like to volunteer at or contribute to a Sanskrit Shibiram please visit https://www.samskritabharatiusa.org/

3) If you would live in India and would like to open up your home for the community to learn Sanskrit for 2 hours everyday for 7 days or 15 days, Samskrita Bharati, India helps to arrange for teachers.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************************

For upcoming events, please click here.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Dr Rajan Narayanan (Executive Director, Life in Yoga Institute & Foundation) conducted a day long workshop and officially launched "Life in Yoga" efforts in Houston.

AVB "Baala Jyoti" kids singing the invocation prayers -- GeetA DhyAnam and Guru Stotram -- at the start of the Hindus of Greater Houston program.