Musings on a Saturday Morning

I have been taking part in a weeklong recitation of a section of an Indian epic. Today will be the last day of the recitation of this section. Here are some of my musings from participating in this pleasant activity. I thoroughly enjoyed this activity.

The section "kanda" is Sundara Kanda सुन्दरकांडा from Ramayana  रामायण by Valmiki वाल्मीकि . This is a mandatory scripture/ epic/ folktale/ great literary from India depending upon who you listen to. Some people are mesmerized/ thrilled/ relax the religious fervor associated with this work.

Literature

This was written in a meter that goes by the name Anushtup chanda अनुष्टुप  . Interesting, that most of the sacred / popular chants that I am aware - are in this meter. I have no idea why this is so.

Hardly any observed the lyrical prose of the sounds which roll through this work. Especially the sections where the author indulges liberally - when the monkeys destroy the madhuvan मधुवन in ecstasy when they learn that the lost female lead सीता of the story has been found.
The author is brilliant when he does not repeat a single description of the environment, when the secret agent narrates what he saw. The entire beauty of the forest where the female lead is imprisoned is described in section 15 सर्ग of this of kanda. It is narrated again - in a different way in two places and none of the words are repeated. After going through 55 sections, only one well worn phrase occurs - "Hanuman is the only one who accomplish his assigned task"  कार्यसिद्धिर्मति ससचीवा तस्मिन्वानरपुंगवा .
Sanskrit is so close to German sentence structure that it can start sentences with the word "Not" as in Nicht - as in न .

Text

Scripts - there were almost four different versions of this entire script amongst the 50 or 60 people in the audience. I was struggling at times to correlate with the main reciter/ priest and the words I found in telugu or devnagari scripted copies of this work.
Folks with different linguistic backgrounds, seem to articulate the Sanskrit words differently. Telugu and Kannada folks say it differently than Tamil folks, the sounds ळ , ल and ग .
These same folks would be scandalized if anyone brought out the words in their primary languages, the way they bring out the sounds from Hanuman Chalisa. This is again set in the Anushtup chanda or meter, but written in the vernacular Awadh by a 16th century poet/saint Tulsidas. I got hold of the devnagari scripted work and the words are written and spoken differently in south Indian scripts and songs.

Reciting Poetry

I realized that the way you recite the poetry can be done with a religious fervor, with a theatrical fervor or with a literary fervor. The priest who is leading this recitation has used a combination of both religious and literary slant.

Organization

When you meditate on the prime character in this episode, you realize that organizations today hate to be in a situation like this.

You don't want to have only ONE individual who could accomplish this extremely demanding task of going across a vast ocean (by those standards), and come back safe. 

You don't want your only performing individual to go berserk in enemy territory (or adversarial client).
You definitely don't want to have your team celebrate AND go on a rampage before they have given a report of successfully accomplishing the task (section 53).
You hardly come across an employee who is the only one who could accomplish a task, and yet does not  boast how great he is.

I will reserve the philosophical musings for another post, if you liked this so far.