Now, let me be blunt. A good deal of singing in Sanskrit sounds very stuffy. I’m talking about work which is technically flawless but sounds like it has been recorded 2000 years ago. It is fine but it does not sound very engaging. And this is a best case scenario because additionally there are the atrocious recordings of Westerners who took one Sanskrit class one day and then styled themselves Sanskrit signers. Their heavy Western accent sucks all the elegance out of Sanskrit.

Suchita Parte has broken out of the old stuffy molds. Her singing is grounded in tradition but not confined by it. Her rendition of Vedasārashivastotram is the most beautiful I’ve heard. You can listen to it and to her entire album on Magnatune.

This is not a jab at my teachers. I do think however that Western pedagogical theory too strongly devalues the role of memorization in learning. It does seem that at some point there was too much emphasis on rote memorization. Judging by the way my parents and grandparents describe how they learned various subjects at school, such overemphasis seems clear to me. An history class for instance would just consist in memorizing lists of facts without also engaging in reflection upon the meaning of those facts. A readjustment towards more reflection and less rote memorization was certainly desirable. However, it seems that the pendulum has swung too far away from memorization.

This is particularly problematic in language classes in general and especially so in Sanskrit classes. Memorization of texts is an integral part of traditional Sanskritic learning. If we are aiming at understanding the people who were raised in such environment, then we must also engage in memorization. If nothing else, memorizing verses forces my intellect to process the language, to integrate the structures of the language to my thought structures. I am convinced that it is making me better at understanding not only the verses I am memorizing but also unfamiliar texts.

It was an instructional book about Mormonism. It’s been my experience that recognizing English words transliterated in Hindi is pretty hard. Unfortunately, I don’t have to read such transliterated words very often. Here, I had a big fat clue in the ardhacandra but I’m reading much more Sanskrit than Hindi these days and even in the Hindi I read from time to time, the ardhacandra is not very frequent. So it initially slipped my mind. In general, Hindi transliteration of English words is done to represent how the English word sounds to the ears of native Hindi speakers. Hence, it requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics for a reader thinking in English to totally flip perspectives. The reader must no longer be an English language speaker looking at Hindi as a foreign language but must become a Hindi speaker looking at English as a foreign language. Arguably, the same gymnastics sometimes has to be performed with French for instance but because English and French “grew up” together, so to speak, and use the same script, the mental gymnastics involved are usually trivial.