An evening with Thathachar

Sri.Lakshmi Thathachar is a legendary figure in the field of Sanskrit shastras, linguistics and computation. ISAC is fortunate to have him as a consultant in its Sanskrit Business Unit. I recently had an opportunity to spend an evening with him, and it turned out to be a very enriching experience. Sharing bits of the evening with you all…

After more than six months of work, the end of Baalaamodini is almost in sight. So near, and yet, so far… The last major bit of work left is the audio part, and we got the words recorded by Sri. Thathachar last Friday. The recording had been planned for long, and postponed twice, so I was a bit apprehensive about whether it would work out that day.

I reached his house by 3.15 PM, slightly ahead of time. He let me in, and continued a conversation on his mobile. From what I heard, he was guiding somebody about a research project. He was quoting easily from some ancient text, focussing on how those principles remain true to this day. I looked around, and found a book dealing with the growth of philosophical reasoning in the West. Also on the table were some hand-written notes on education systems and ideas to improve them, and something on comparative study of scientific and traditional knowledge systems. I was just wondering on the range of his thinking, when he finished the conversation and turned to me.

“Let’s not waste time till the car arrives”, he said, and turned to a review of our product. As always, I was impressed with the clarity of his thoughts, and his attention to detail. It was like having sight of both the forest as a whole, and the trees individually. In ten minutes, I had a page full of suggestions, and I began to dread Anandan’s reaction to this  In between this, he kept throwing in ideas for further projects – speech generation, kosha project, mapping of sounds, language analysis…. My head was buzzing. True that I had doubts about some of them - I am one of those people in a trishanku-sthiti – neither here nor there. I can neither believe all our traditions without questioning, nor can I reject them wholly. I always get a wistful feeling when I am with people who have so much faith about what they do. Of course, I can always defend myself saying that I’m a very sensible person, and will think objectively.. But somehow, that fails to convince myself...

The car arrived by then, and took us to the recording studio in Hebbal. It went off very smoothly, thankfully. The people at the studio were very helpful. The recording went on for two hours, with just a 5-minute break in between. I was amazed. At his age, to talk for so long, without even having a glass of water in between… The contrast was apparent the very next day, when I was hoarse with less than an hour of chanting something..

We then went to the Le Meridian for a meeting with a guru from the Tibetian monastery at Bailukuppe, the principal of a school in Bangalore, and a wandering foreigner from Singapore. Most of the conversation revolved around natural farming, and holistic education. Such a strange setting for a conversation of that kind, I thought, and such a strange assortment of people... Sri Thathachar once again revealed his encyclopaedic knowledge of the traditions and systems going back as far as the Vedic period. Not just that, he also has vast knowledge of the people who are practising such things today. I enjoyed the discussion immensely. As we walked out into the night, I was thinking of his motto – Bridging the gulf between the past and the present for the future, he said… The evening had given me lots of food for thought – about the past, the present, and the future.

Sowmya K R

Project Intern, ISACGlobal