THE VEDA CLASS OF 15TH JUNE MORNING

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.