In serious company

I attended the 'Ponniyin Selvan' yahoogroups meeting at Ramakrishna mutt school on the 4th of June 2006. It was a revealing experience for me to know how involved the group was with history and preservation of the chola era artifacts.

Sweating my way through Ranganathan street - its like trying to swim in a barrell of tar nowadays. Maybe the government should think of a overpass to cross-over from one end of the street to another - I reached Ramakrishna school, where the groups members welcomed me warmly.

It was a fascinating to know that founder of the group - Ramachandran, was all of my age. He could even read the historical tamil used in the 'cholar kalvettukkal' (now, I wonder if the english word culvert originated from the word tamil word kalvettu.)

Some of the scholars present were, Dr. Sathyamurthy - Retd. Suppt, Archeological Survey of India,
Thiru. T. N. Ramachandran - epigraphist, Dr. Dasarathan - Palm leaf inscription specialist, Dr. Sathyanarayanan - Dty. Registrar of Sankara University, and other tamil 'arvalars' like Swaminathan of thinnai.com and Thiru. Ganesa Nadar

I was particulary fascinated by Mr. T. N. Ramachandran's speech on why phonetical scripts are more advanced than the hieroglyphs of the indus valley civilization.

I was also interested in a fact mentioned by Mr. Sathyamurthy - that oral passage of knowledge didnt exist in south india. This could mean that the tamil/brahmi based civilizations had already developed more advanced forms of writing, he said.

I laughed heartily when Dr. Dasarathan mentioned the pains of looking for historical artifacts with a comical event. He mentioned that himself and his colleague had gone in search of some 'kallvettukal' in the deeper parts of Tamil Nadu. The first week, they found some significant artifacts. After studying that, and enthused by the success of the first finding, they went back the next week to the same place. This week, they couldnt find anything of significance, but found that the place had some really huge brinjals. The friends ended up bringing some brinjals home. Not only that, they even wrote about it in "Kalvettum katthirikayum" - "Stone carvings and brinjals".

I was speechless, as the speeches by the scholors ranged from vanavarayan vandhiyathevan to hieroglyphs, with utmost ease.

What do I say? My, oh my! I was in serious company.