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Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj arrives in Thailand for World Sanskrit Conference

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Swaraj arrives in Thailand for World Sanskrit Conference
Bangkok, Jun 27, 2015 (PTI)
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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today arrived here for the 16th World Sanskrit Conference beginning tomorrow in which over 600 scholars from 60 countries will participate.

She will also co-chair India-Thailand joint commission meeting during which the countries will sign a double taxation avoidance treaty and exchange instruments of ratification on the extradition treaty signed between them in 2013.


While Swaraj will be the guest of honour during the inaugural ceremony of 16th world conference tomorrow, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani will attend its concluding ceremony on July 2.

Swaraj, the guest of honour at the event, will deliver her speech in Sanskrit. The two countries will also sign an MoU on establishment of Nalanda University.

A significant development during Swaraj's two-day visit here will be the signing of an MoU on the establishment of an Ayurveda Chair in one of the Thai Universities.

During the visit, Swaraj will also meet Indian business leaders and hold interaction with academicians.

She will have an audience with Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, a scholar of Sanskrit and Royal Patron of the World Sanskrit Conference.

On Monday, Swaraj will call on the Thai political leadership. She will meet Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thai government Gen Tanasak Patimapragorn.

On her arrival here, Swaraj was received by Chalit Manityakul, Ambassador of Thailand, and senior officials from Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand.

Coinciding with the Conference, Doordarshan will launch a weekly news programme in Sanskrit in India.

Promotion of Sanskrit has been a focus area of the NDA government ever since it came to power in 2014.
 
Sanskrit is ok, it is a pretty ugly sounding language though... and so are Sanskrit based languages.
 
Sanskrit need to be revive on national level. Government should introduce sanskrit subject in schools.

national level , exclude Tamilnadu or be prepared for Tamil backlash in the form of separation from Hindu nationalism ..
 
NASA scientists hail Sanskrit as the only perfect language

The following article published in AI (Artificial Intelligence) Magazine of 1985 written by NASA researcher, Rick Briggs,

In the past twenty years, much time, effort and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor.

But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old.
 
You live in 1960s.

hey newbie - last I checked this news was Jun 2014 , June 2015 coming to an end , why no Sanskrit week ?

"Tamil Nadu has a rich cultural heritage based on the ancient Tamil language. There has also been a strong social justice and language movement in the state. Hence, any official celebration of ‘Sanskrit week’ in Tamil Nadu is highly inappropriate”, she in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“It would have been much more appropriate to have organised a Classical Language Week in each state based on the linguistic heritage” she said and requested Mr. Modi to advise officials to suitably modify the letter to enable each state, including the CBSE schools, to organise celebrations in tune with the language and culture of the state.

“This would be in keeping with the cultural and linguistic sensitivities in a diverse country like ours”, she said.

Jayalalithaa opposes Sanskrit week celebrations in schools - The Hindu

 
Last edited:
NASA scientists hail Sanskrit as the only perfect language

The following article published in AI (Artificial Intelligence) Magazine of 1985 written by NASA researcher, Rick Briggs,

In the past twenty years, much time, effort and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor.

But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old.


Rubbish. Keep on believing the BS peddled by Hindu nationalists.

Pretty strange how English, a language founded on a little island in Europe dominates the world, including techonology.
 
national level , exclude Tamilnadu or be prepared for Tamil backlash in the form of separation from Hindu nationalism ..

Sanskrit is being teached in Tamil Nadu schools.



hey newbie - last I checked this news was Jun 2014 , June 2015 coming to an end , why no Sanskrit week ?

"Tamil Nadu has a rich cultural heritage based on the ancient Tamil language. There has also been a strong social justice and language movement in the state. Hence, any official celebration of ‘Sanskrit week’ in Tamil Nadu is highly inappropriate”, she in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“It would have been much more appropriate to have organised a Classical Language Week in each state based on the linguistic heritage” she said and requested Mr. Modi to advise officials to suitably modify the letter to enable each state, including the CBSE schools, to organise celebrations in tune with the language and culture of the state.

“This would be in keeping with the cultural and linguistic sensitivities in a diverse country like ours”, she said.

Jayalalithaa opposes Sanskrit week celebrations in schools - The Hindu


Celebrating or opposing Sanskrit week means sanskrit is already is being teached in Schools.

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Sanskrit should be propagated to purify minds of people: Swaraj | Zee News
Last Updated: Sunday, June 28, 2015 - 15:52
Bangkok: Sanskrit scholars from 60 countries began a five-day conference here today with an inaugural speech by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who suggested that Sanskrit should be propagated so that "it purifies the minds of the people and thus sanctifies the whole world."

Speaking entirely in Sanskrit to over 600 Sanskrit experts, Swaraj called it a "modern and universal" language and said its tradition is comparable to the river Ganga.

"The Ganga remains sacred from Gomukh, its source, to Ganga sagar where it enters the ocean. It sanctifies the tributaries, which attain the very nature of Ganga. Similar is Sanskrit; sacred by itself, it sanctifies all that come into its contact.

"Therefore, Sanskrit should be propagated so that it purifies the minds of the people and thus sanctifies the whole world. You Sanskritists do bathe in the sacred Sanskrit Ganga and are blessed," she told the gathering.

Addressing the inaugural session of 16th World Sanskrit Conference here as the Chief Guest, Swaraj also announced that a post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit has been created in the Ministry of External Affairs.

"In the present days you are aware that scientists hold the view that Sanskrit can play an important role in developing software for language recognition, translations, cyber security and other fields of artificial intelligence," Swaraj said.

"Knowledge in Sanskrit will go a long way in finding solutions to the contemporary problems like global warming, unsustainable consumption, civilisational clash, poverty, terrorism etc," she said, adding a new direction and vision is needed in the field of research in Sanskrit to accomplish this task.

Citing a Sanskrit shloka, she said that narrow minded people discriminate among people considering some as theirs and some as alien, while the broad minded consider the whole universe as theirs.

Noting that today's need is a healthy amalgamation of the ancient and modern, a meeting of the best in orient and occident, she said, "our efforts are to be directed towards narrowing the gap between the study of Shastras and Science."

This is for the time that a Union Minister of her seniority has attended the World Sanskrit conference outside the country and hence it indicates the importance that the NDA government attaches to the promotion of the ancient language.

HRD Minister Smriti Irani, whose ministry is partly funding the event, will attend its closing ceremony on July 2.

The World Sanskrit Conference, which was organised first in Delhi in 1972, has been held in different countries since then. It is held once after every three years.

Of the 250 Sanskrit scholars participating from India, around 30 were from the RSS affiliate body Sanskrit Bharati this time.

PTI
 
Ancient language, modern execution: Punyakoti, a Sanskrit animation film - The Hindu
Updated: June 28, 2015 18:08 IST

It is as global as today’s cinema will get. Crowdsourced and crowdfunded, Punyakoti is being touted as India’s first Sanskrit animation feature film in the making, based on a Kannada folktale.
It’s the coming together of the old and new at many levels — a man in IT hub Bengaluru harnesses technology to create a India’s first contemporary animation feature film in Sanskrit, based on a Kannada folktale, crowdsourced and crowdfunded by animators and people from the world over.

Noted Tamil film music director, Ilayaraja, will be composing the music for this film. The story of Punyakoti has taken a life of its own, after Ravi Shankar, who heads HR at Infosys’ BPO in Bengaluru put up his project on Facebook. Over 30 animators from Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, and parts of Kerala have contributed to this crowd-sourced animated film. “About 24 scenes have been storyboarded and 11 scenes are in a stage of animatics,” explains Ravi.

And it all started on a work commute — a colleague of Ravi’s told him the story of Punyakoti, the legend of the cow who confronted a tiger so her calf could live. The story, I can bet, hasn’t left anyone dry-eyed ever. It didn’t spare Ravi either, when he first heard the song, “The honesty strikes a chord.” The story has been part of textbooks, films, and is popularly called “Govina haadu” and the opening lines “Dharani mandala madhyadolage…” rings a familiar bell for many. The film is based on a book on the same story that Ravi wrote for children, and goes further to explore it as a growing issue of man-animal conflict — “Why did the tiger come out of the forest…there must have been some ecological disaster in Karunaadu,” he reasons. “The message of living a life of honesty and living in harmony with nature is universal. It needs to be collectively owned and told by all of us.”

The film has 31 scenes and each scene will be created by a different animator, says Ravi. “It is an open project model — we have thumbnails of the whole movie. An animator gets these thumbnails, the script, shot breaks, characters and a 3D environment for reference. There is a video briefing, a Skype call, we even do a dummy dubbing. There are constant updates so that each can see the progress of the project. I’m taking advantage of digital technology and all credit goes to the ‘connected world’,” says Ravi. “The advantage is no one is coming to an office to do ‘work’. This is a passion for every one.”

He also offers an honorarium of Rs. 5,000 per scene, he says. He says this film was a passion since India has always been seen as the back office of world famous animation. “We need to do something in our original style.”

Ravi says he had worked on the first ever interactive animated CD Rom for children way back in 1995, and had developed a “frugal” style of animation based on puppetry; he started his career as an ad copywriter. Having worked for a BPO, he also learnt to “processise” everything, he says, which came to the film’s advantage. It was all this that came together for the film, which he started with his friend Girish A.V (who is creative director of the film). “Together we went to Ilayaraja sir, who is my mentor, who has seen my earlier book. He reassured us that ‘This will work; do it’. But you will never find a producer for a Sanskrit animation film!” Ilayaraja is doing the music for free.

So they turned to crowdfunding, and on Wishberry, they have raised eight of the Rs. 40 lakh they have set as a target; people from as far as the Netherlands, Brazil, and Atlanta have contributed.

Why a film in Sanskrit? “It’s a wonderful language. At a time and age where the current generation is leaving Sanskrit behind, I felt it was time to make Sanskrit more accessible, young and relevant. Imagine! It is 5,000 years of knowledge eliminated by 200 years of English! I discovered Sanskrit after I turned 40. It’s such an easy language. It improves cognitive aspects in children. The algorithm of the language is perfect. It’s a context-free language; today in computing we struggle to create such a language. No one writes books in Sanskrit any more for children,” he aggressively concludes. Samskrita Bharati has come on board to simplify the language in the film.

Rakesh P. Nair, designer of 2014 National Games mascot, Anvar Ali, renowned children’s writer and poet from Kerala and Manoj Kannoth, the National Award-winning editor of Veettilekkulla Vazhi, are also on board this ambitious project. Ravi says the 90-minute film should be ready by August 2016.

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A still from the film. Photo: Bhagya Prakash K

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Ravi Shankar

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