Spoken Sanskrit Workshop Organized by Samskrita Bharati USA in Greater Houston Area

Clockwise from top left: Priyadarshini Subramanian, Priyanka Pramod, Pramod Bharadwaj, Raghu Chakravarthy, Karthik Kiran, Ganesh Ramanna, Sameer Kalaghatagi, Muralidhar Rao, Parameswaran, Harinarayanan, Gururaj Naik and Raghuram Manikkara.

Clockwise from top left: Priyadarshini Subramanian, Priyanka Pramod, Pramod Bharadwaj, Raghu Chakravarthy, Karthik Kiran, Ganesh Ramanna, Sameer Kalaghatagi, Muralidhar Rao, Parameswaran, Harinarayanan, Gururaj Naik and Raghuram Manikkara.

SUGAR LAND: The weekend of March 3, was special for spoken Sanskrit enthusiasts in the greater Houston area. Samskrita Bharati USA organized a two-day spoken Sanskrit workshop at Shri Krishna Vrindavana, Sugar Land, Texas.

The air was reverberating with the sound of the classical language as the language of communication was Sanskrit only during the entire workshop duration. Participants speaking different languages at home came together to revive a classical Indian language and make it their common Indian language.

Harinarayanan, a senior member of Samskrita Bharati with a teaching experience of over 14 years at Samskrita Bharati, San Francisco bay area flew to Houston to lead the workshop. While a wide range of topics ranging from speaking simple sentences to the details of grammar kept the brains busy, the songs in Sanskrit penned by famous contemporary poets in India moved the hearts.

The workshop was part of the on-going zero-fee spoken Sanskrit classes held every weekend at Shri Krishna Vrindavana. More than fifteen participants have been attending these classes since last September on every Sunday between 4 pm and 5:30 pm and have been picking up speaking in Sanskrit. Apart from the day-to-day conversation topics, short stories, poems and songs have made up an interesting curriculum.

The workshop was designed to draw attention of these new Sanskrit speakers to the technical aspects of the language that would refine their communication skills and help them read and write well in Sanskrit.

Cases, tenses, nouns and pronouns were the primary topics of discussion. The workshop is being followed by free weekend classes spanning over the rest of the year to teach those topics covered in workshop in greater detail.

The immense support from Shri Krishna Virndavana – teaching space, resources, and delicious Indian food served to all the participants – made the workshop possible.

For more information, contact Gururaj Naik (gururaj.v.naik@gmail.com), Samskrita Bharati, Houston Kendram.