Thursday, March 5, 2009

In Love with Sanskrit?

In love with Sanskrit
Jackie Pinto


Prof Byrski, former Polish Ambassador to India, is a Sanskrit scholar
I always had a yen for learning languages and my mother urged me to pick a language that was not so common. When the time came to choose, I scrolled down the list and zeroed in on Sanskrit because back there in Warsaw, it didn’t get more exotic and unconventional than that.

Therein began my journey and a tryst with Indian culture and tradition that I have since explored and promoted back in my country where I teach Polish students Sanskrit,” says Prof Byrski, former Polish Ambassador to India, who holds a PhD in Sanskrit studies.His conversation flows with the ease of a linguist and is liberally peppered with erudite phrases in Sanskrit or Hindi.

’’I received a scholarship to study at the Benares Hindu University and I plunged into the life and culture of my surroundings with a passion.” He has translated both the Kamasutra and the Manusmriti into Polish and is a fan of Bollywood films.

”Indian cinema is deeply rooted in ancient Sanskrit drama. Indian tastes and sensibilities haven’t really changed over the centuries. There must be a great deal of emotion and heightened melodrama, enough to make your veins burst and your hair stand on end. The old formula of boy meets girl, songs and dances, good and bad characters, all the masala must be there but it can be refined and packaged in a much more elegant fashion. There is no need to copy the Western style of movie-making but there is also no need to be crude and stereotypical,” he opines.

’’I don’t have a favourite film star but one of my favourite movies is Satyam Shivam Sundaram.’’Prof Byrski runs classes in Sanskrit and verse-chanting back home in Poland and one of his protegees came to India as a seven-year-old boy studied the language in Varanasi and is now a master of Sanskrit himself, teaching in Warsaw at Byrski’s School.

He sees himself as an Ambassador of India in Poland and visits as often as he can, although he lives and works in Warsaw.

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