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Re: Sri Kottamangalam Varadacharya

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sampath kumar • March 7, 2000 


--- Krishna Kalale  wrote:
> I personally feel that the single most significant
> failure of our community > to date is :  "that we
have some how not doing> enough to protect the 
> knowledge offered by our acharyas and obviously our
> own children will lose > all that knowledge". the >
most important duty for all of us is protection of
> vedas, mantras, > shastras, bhasyas, vyakhyanams and
translating them> to a language and 
> medium ( books in different languages, cassettes, 
> CDs, video cassettes > etc.).  With so much
technology available I dont> want to even think of the

> idea that 3 generations after us,  one young person
> might say aloud " my > ancestors screwed up reall
bad!  they were so stupid> that with all the 
> technology available to them they did not protect
> and preserve the eternal > knowledge offered to them
by acharyas".
> 
While I am writing this, 
>  I feel devastated by that thought that as time
> passes we may never recover 
> such divine thoughts of our older pundits.
> 
Tranmission of knowledge is
> the key for survival of 
> our system of thought.  

Dear Sri.Krishna Kalale,
Adiyen fully shares your thoughts. You have said it
all with so much genuine emotion that nobody can fail
to see you are very sincere. What you have said is
absolutely true. One is not at all sure if our
religious tradition will ever survive and flourish in
the 3rd millennium.

Adiyen too, like you, is often struck by how scant is
our present-day work to popularize and disseminate the
ancient literature and works of our religion and
'sampradAyam'. Whatever feeble efforts are there in
India or abroad, though admirable in purpose and
sincerity, unfortunately are of no great interest to
the large mass of our younger brethren today.

To tell you the truth nothing any of us in our
generation is doing, or trying to do in any which way,
really appeals to our children and youthful brothers
and sisters. This may sound very pessimistic but it is
the raw truth. 

We keep glorifying our past. But that's about all we
are able to do. We are accomplishing next to nothing
in the present which is capable of really enthusing
the present and next generations. And for their part
they do not hesitate to severely tell us, "Look here,
you can say and do what you want, but a tradition or
system of thought whose past is always being portrayed
to be much more interesting than its present simply
has no future."

The most important question in adiyen's veiw is to
first ask:
 
How can we vividly show to the next generation that
our past and present religious tradition is really a
very precious thing and it is worth preserving for the
future? How can we get the large mass of our young
generation (and not just a few thousands) to really
believe that they have a big, big stake in their
religious legacy? 

If one were not convinced that one's 'family jewels'
bequeathed by a great-great-grandmother will not fetch
10 times its present value in the year 2015, would one
ever bother to husband it carefully in a safe-vault
today? 

So how to invest our religious past and present with 
"future-value"? How do we accomplish that?
  
dAsan,
Sampathkumaran 


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