Samskrita Shibiram

Last weekend was one of the best weekends I ever had. I went to learn a new language - a language that is my heritage, a language that my mother mastered, a language that gave roots to many languages that I speak today. The language is - "Samskritam". Or "Sanskrit", as most people know it.

All my life, I grew up among people that spoke Samskritam quite often. My mother teaches Samskritam. So does my aunt. My father kind of speaks it ever so often to make fun of my mother! Even then, I never thought of studying it. And as any kid growing up in India, my pursuit was mostly after Math and Science. My mother took me to a Samskritam Summer Camp (Samskrita Shibiram) when I was little, but I hated sitting through those day-long class sessions.

Quite frankly, when I heard about this two day Samskritam Camp, I thought this will be as boring as the one that I attended when I was five. It turned out to be one of the best weekends that I had ever spent! In two days, we learned to speak the basics, wrote a story entirely in Samskritam, performed a skit (video coming soon), and shared many jokes and stories.

The crowd was quite enthusiastic all through out and we are even thinking of starting a weekend study/discussion group. I am quite interested in learning Samskritam. Especially, I am thrilled to see how close this language is to Russian in many ways. This should be quite interesting!