Did you hear this?

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>it's not a major problem. We have it on Vidyasankar's
>authority that they all end up in the US. There's

:-)) It feels nice to be called an authority, but my
view seems to be different from most others. Nowadays,
an increasing number of IIT students get diverted into
management courses, or find jobs in industry, without
applying to graduate school abroad.

The place of Sanskrit in Indian education elicits a
wide variety of responses. In my opinion, the key to
understanding the problem is that under Chacha Nehru
and Indira Didi, it was not Sanskrit vs. Tamil, it was
not Sanskrit vs. Urdu, and it was not Sanskrit vs. any
other modern Indian language. It always was Hindi vs.
everything else, with a never ending debate about
whether Urdu is Hindi or not, and whether Hindi is
Hindustani or not.

If good Sanskrit studies find a more congenial home
outside India, there is a clear historical reason for
it. Bringing up competing claims of Tamil and Urdu
does not begin to address the problem with language
education policy. It only reveals a mental block
against Sanskrit, as encoded in the schoolgoing child's
phalam phale phalAnI, sansk.rt kabhI nA AnI. On the
other hand, creating space for Sanskrit may be a good
precedent for Tamil and modern Indian languages. And
why not? A huge amount of information is available in
a wide variety of our languages. Every time a smart
biotech firm in the West patents things like neem and
turmeric, Indians lose by not paying good attention
to indigenous texts. There may be some financial
incentive after all.

Vidyasankar