We* began learning the Krishna Yajurveda from our beloved guru Sh.Vishveshwara Shastri of Bellare, beginning the 19th May 2010. Sh.Vishveshvar Shastri a young man barely 32 years of age had kindly consented to initiate us in the learning of the Veda. The first two weeks were not very smooth going. We were then going to his house to learn. We advertised among our colleagues and pursuaded Sh.Shastri to conduct the classes at Sh.Manjunath’s residence. The strength of the group has risen to ten, at present. There is an expectation that this might go up to 15. After initial teething troubles of most of us trying to get a hang of the swaras, just as we were trying step up our rate of learning, the new additions who had a backlog of about 10-12 days had to be brought up to the level of understanding of the rest.
In this process we have seen people slipping out of synchronism, mismatch of pitch and tone and the like. There was quite a bit of unlearning to do from our past partly erroneous, and partly ill-conceived learning, our present teacher being schooled in some of the finest traditions, not only retained his learning, but made it a point to make us stick to the same exacting standards in respect of our rendering the same.
He had sufficiently elaborated on the recitation standards, codes and the discipline to be followed. There had to be several repetitions of these fundamentals on several days, to cover the new entrants who joined on different days. We hope this group membership will now close. Sh. Shastri chose the Taittiriya Upanishad to begin our instruction. The reason for this was that this contained smaller sentences and simpler swara distribution. He even made us go through a formal “learning” of what is known as the Mantrapushpam. This is supposed to be a well known piece of Vedic prayer, virtually known to every Brahmin, because of its wide spread use. Often people pick this up from popular temple or home recitations, rather than through formal instruction. Shastriji used this as a spring board to “fix” people on the swara system in the Vedas. With all these efforts it was a disappointment for him from us today; that we – at least half a dozen of us to have woefully goofed up on the swaras! His disappointment with the group was palpable in the beginning, but it grew with repeated failure of the group to come up to his expectations! He had to resort to wordy substitutes of the bastinado. Exasperated as he was with our discomfiture, we could see his displaced anger, in the form of admonitions to himself on a future date. Instructing the elderly is also a pain.We are able to see that he had already begun using a kiddo in the group as a stooge to convey his acerbic corrections!
Finally the imbroglio was resolved by some of the successful students among us taking up the responsibility of coaching the laggards so that we come up to the Guruji’s expectations. We hope to cross over to the set of right rendering group in a couple of practice sessions.
We# = S/Shri. VS Manjunath, Jagannatha Shastri,Venugopal and myself.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
A VISIT TO MYSORE AND TIRUVANNAMALAI
We had bought a new Honda Civic on the 18th March 2010, and wanted to have the pleasure of some real long distance travel. We had never had a new car in a long time and I remember having made about one or two visits to Mysore in my old Maruti Van. Now, here was a car that must make driving a pleasure and what with all the road blocks in the city(Bangalore), I had desisted form using the car in the city especially for short rides. Thus it sort of became an imperative that we seize every opportunity to do some long distance travel to justify the buying and possession of an expensive car- by our standards- I mean the standards of salary earners like me.
In fact we want to and do keep inventing reasons to do such travel. We drove to Mysore on the morn of 25th May reaching Mysore by about 1100 hrs. That driving was a pleasure. Notable in this visit of Mysore, was the visit to the Mysore palace, esp., the Jaganmohan Art Gallery where I found, the existence of a game of dice that goes by the name of Pachis . What was interesting in this was each of the squares had a picture associating one with a particular life and the progression through the board was to be treated as an enactment of the Hindu belief in rebirth and succession of lifetimes! Generally, this sort of a Karma and Rebirth inspired board game that is well known to native Hindus is what is called Snakes and Ladders in the west which goes by the name paramapada sopaana patam(psp). I had seen for the first time the game of Pachis being made a lifetimes-progression game. As a natural enthusiast of the Theory of Karma and Rebirth, which I find as one of the most satisfactory explanations of the inequities and indeterminacies in human life, I took an instant liking to it and wanted to sit and duplicate the same!
The striking commonality between psp and pachis is that both are games of chance. The artists’ equating the birth of a person in a particular socio-cultural milieu, to “chance” speaks volumes about the people’s belief in Karma staying close to atheism!
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that taking chance and randomness as the reason for the occurrence in a peculiar combination of events, circumstances, or connections is atheistic and incidentally the scientifically accepted view.
The one other thing that impressed me in the gallery was Raja Ravi Varma’s art. I was particularly impressed by Raja Harischandra selling his wife and son on the streets of Varanasi, Damayanti looking expectantly at the Swan flying away to Nala, and a Brahmin woman giving alms, on the footsteps of a temple. Raja Harishchandra brought tears into my eyes. In general all the art on the Palace walls took me out of this world into the world of the spectators in those works, and I felt like R.K. Lakshman’s Common Man taking part in the happenings.
The return journey to Bangalore was quite uneventful except for the delay caused by an accident en route between a truck and a car, an i10 to be precise. Of course this prompted my wife to command my son to move away from the wheel and ask me to take the driver’s position istead.
We landed in Bangalore by about 1715 hrs and after taking a break of about 45 minutes we started off again to Tiruvannamalai. The journey to get out of Bangalore city took up to 2030 hrs, a clear two and a half hours! That is how the city traffic is worsening! The travel after that was uneventful except for a goof-up by me in taking the appropriate left turn to hit the road to Chennai. We reached Tiruvannamalai by 0130 hrs early in the morning. We had reserved accommodation in Hotel Arpana, hence we could hit the sack by about 0200hrs. Since I had planned the circumambulation of the Annamalai Mountain believed to the abode of several Siddhas, I got up urgently by 0400 hrs and after due preparation went to the Ishanya Linga temple to begin my girivalam. To begin with this was a pleasant experience. But as the Sun rose higher on the horizon, I started feeling the heat on my feet. By the time I reached a point just 100m from the IL point whence I had begun, I was exhausted – surprisingly the distance is just 14 KM, not a very great distance to reckon, but I was almost fainting from the Sun beating hard. With some fervent prayers to Lord Shiva and with a last dash to the IL point, I somehow completed the girivalam. The only happy thing was that I had kept up the chanting of the mR^ityu~njaya mantra straddled by the pa~nchaakSharI mantra. This really kept up my spirits. We were there on the morn of a Full Moon, instead of being there for the night! I learnt the hard way that the right time to be there is on the night of a Full Moon Day!
The return journey I must say was uneventful in that my speed up to the point of reaching the NH 7 was around 70-80 Kmph, and on the highway I would frequently touch 135-140Kmph. Only on the well maintained toll based Highways of India can one find sufficient space to touch such speeds? This was a thrilling experience for me.
I wasn’t feeling tired at all even after reaching home at about 2330 hrs on 27/5/10. I couldn’t go the Veda Class the following morning. I resumed it only from the 29th Morn.
In fact we want to and do keep inventing reasons to do such travel. We drove to Mysore on the morn of 25th May reaching Mysore by about 1100 hrs. That driving was a pleasure. Notable in this visit of Mysore, was the visit to the Mysore palace, esp., the Jaganmohan Art Gallery where I found, the existence of a game of dice that goes by the name of Pachis . What was interesting in this was each of the squares had a picture associating one with a particular life and the progression through the board was to be treated as an enactment of the Hindu belief in rebirth and succession of lifetimes! Generally, this sort of a Karma and Rebirth inspired board game that is well known to native Hindus is what is called Snakes and Ladders in the west which goes by the name paramapada sopaana patam(psp). I had seen for the first time the game of Pachis being made a lifetimes-progression game. As a natural enthusiast of the Theory of Karma and Rebirth, which I find as one of the most satisfactory explanations of the inequities and indeterminacies in human life, I took an instant liking to it and wanted to sit and duplicate the same!
The striking commonality between psp and pachis is that both are games of chance. The artists’ equating the birth of a person in a particular socio-cultural milieu, to “chance” speaks volumes about the people’s belief in Karma staying close to atheism!
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that taking chance and randomness as the reason for the occurrence in a peculiar combination of events, circumstances, or connections is atheistic and incidentally the scientifically accepted view.
The one other thing that impressed me in the gallery was Raja Ravi Varma’s art. I was particularly impressed by Raja Harischandra selling his wife and son on the streets of Varanasi, Damayanti looking expectantly at the Swan flying away to Nala, and a Brahmin woman giving alms, on the footsteps of a temple. Raja Harishchandra brought tears into my eyes. In general all the art on the Palace walls took me out of this world into the world of the spectators in those works, and I felt like R.K. Lakshman’s Common Man taking part in the happenings.
The return journey to Bangalore was quite uneventful except for the delay caused by an accident en route between a truck and a car, an i10 to be precise. Of course this prompted my wife to command my son to move away from the wheel and ask me to take the driver’s position istead.
We landed in Bangalore by about 1715 hrs and after taking a break of about 45 minutes we started off again to Tiruvannamalai. The journey to get out of Bangalore city took up to 2030 hrs, a clear two and a half hours! That is how the city traffic is worsening! The travel after that was uneventful except for a goof-up by me in taking the appropriate left turn to hit the road to Chennai. We reached Tiruvannamalai by 0130 hrs early in the morning. We had reserved accommodation in Hotel Arpana, hence we could hit the sack by about 0200hrs. Since I had planned the circumambulation of the Annamalai Mountain believed to the abode of several Siddhas, I got up urgently by 0400 hrs and after due preparation went to the Ishanya Linga temple to begin my girivalam. To begin with this was a pleasant experience. But as the Sun rose higher on the horizon, I started feeling the heat on my feet. By the time I reached a point just 100m from the IL point whence I had begun, I was exhausted – surprisingly the distance is just 14 KM, not a very great distance to reckon, but I was almost fainting from the Sun beating hard. With some fervent prayers to Lord Shiva and with a last dash to the IL point, I somehow completed the girivalam. The only happy thing was that I had kept up the chanting of the mR^ityu~njaya mantra straddled by the pa~nchaakSharI mantra. This really kept up my spirits. We were there on the morn of a Full Moon, instead of being there for the night! I learnt the hard way that the right time to be there is on the night of a Full Moon Day!
The return journey I must say was uneventful in that my speed up to the point of reaching the NH 7 was around 70-80 Kmph, and on the highway I would frequently touch 135-140Kmph. Only on the well maintained toll based Highways of India can one find sufficient space to touch such speeds? This was a thrilling experience for me.
I wasn’t feeling tired at all even after reaching home at about 2330 hrs on 27/5/10. I couldn’t go the Veda Class the following morning. I resumed it only from the 29th Morn.
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