One of the students in my elementary Sanskrit class at Michigan wrote me a note saying the following: "I am terrified in your class that you will ask me to formulate a sentence. I cannot sleep for three nights before the class and three nights after the class. It is a dead language any way. Why should we care?" I have kept this note in some file.

Madhav M. Deshpande

Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 12:33 PM Will Sweetman via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

While I'm loving these examples of the uselessness of Sanskrit (and see the first chapter of Fred Hardy's The Religious Culture of India: Love, Power and Wisdom for another example from Canetti's Die Blendung), I'd also like to note something Mark Allon told me some years ago, when we introduced Sanskrit at Otago. Apparently in one or other of the various international university rankings, teaching Sanskrit was one of the things which elevated a university's rank. Perhaps it was a sign the university was wealthy enough to expend resources on something useless? A sort of costly signalling. The peacock's tail of academia, as it were.

Best wishes to all

Will

On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 06:51, James Hartzell via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
As Sanskrit students at Harvard back when Ingalls was chair, the word around campus was that the Harvard Business School used Sanskrit as the example of the completely useless subject

> On 25 Mar 2020, at 18:39, Jayandra Soni via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
>
> When in the 1980s I bought, second hand, Lanman's A Sanskrit Reader, the previous owner wrote this in clear writing on p. xv below Lanman's Introductory Suggestions:
> Quit now before it's too late!
>
> Scanned and attached the first paragraph.
> I didn't follow the advice to quit.
> Jay Soni
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> <Written below Lanman's Introductory Suggestions.pdf>
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