Hello viewers! My name is Sudarshan Madabushi and at the outset I want say to you “a big thank you” for visiting this site about my book, “Unusual Essays of an Unknown Sri Vaishnava”.
Over the following five or six minutes, I am going to briefly introduce myself as author first and then talk a bit about the book I published in 2016-17. Hopefully, the book will arouse your curiosity about its rather unusual title and subject-matter and then, who knows, perhaps make you feel you want to buy a copy too, read and enjoy it!
A few quick words about myself! I hail from the city of Chennai, India. By education and professional pursuit, let me say I graduated from the University of Madras in 1977 and then went on to qualify myself as Chartered Accountant in 1982. Thereafter, for 12 years I pursued an exciting career in the world of corporate finance in India in some of the bluest of blue-chip companies and multinationals in India. Then in 1993 I left the shores of India to abroad and pursue my higher professional ambitions. In the ensuing 25 years, my career took me to all parts of the world to work in transnational, multi-cultural and cross-disciplinary environments in parts of the world stretching from East Asia, the Arabic Gulf countries, the MENA, Europe and USA.
My corporate career has been long, hectic and utterly cosmopolitan. But then it has never come in the come in the way of my pursuing a few of my lifelong personal passions and interests in life. One has been my deep-seated curiosity about the profundities I have found in the vast literature belonging to the ancient Vedantic traditions of Indian philosophy, theology and culture in India. The other interests have been the history of age-old temples of my country as well as life-histories of generations of great saints and savants of India of past severalcenturies.
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Not many people in the world know that the oldest known languages of the world were spoken in India. Tamil and Sanskrit, both at least 5000-6000 years are much older than Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Arabic.
While Sanskrit was for many centuries the common language of higher learning and cultural intercourse amongst vast populations across ancient sub-continental northern India, deep down inside the southern-most province known as Tamil country, a very ancient people with a unique culture of their own spoke, wrote, thought and communicated in both Tamil and Sanskrit with equal ease and felicity. They were known as the Sri Vaishnavas of India.
The two oldest languages, Tamil and Sanskrit, have both inherited a vast and rich legacy of literature in philosophy, pure and applied sciences, in theology, drama, poetry, myth, legend, scripture and hagiography. One can say that the collective memories of ancient India are all stored and preserved in the literature of these two great languages.
Several generations of Sri Vaishnavas in the past have lived in South India as communities dedicating entire lives to scholastic pursuits in Tamil and Sanskrit literature. For over 5000 years they have lived and contributed towards preserving the cultural treasures bequeathed by these two oldest languages of the world.Sri Vaishnavas lived and worked mostly as sages, bards, philosophers, poets, mystics, saints, savants, chroniclers and intellectuals.
The Sri Vaishnavas today however are a pale ghost of their former historical selves. They are now a very small population – less than half a million worldwide. Their communities are found mostly within parts of India and a much smaller proportion lives in the global diaspora spread across USA, UK, Australia and the Arabic Gulf. Due to the pressures and pulls of modern living and livelihoods, Sri Vaishnavas have for long — at least in the last 50 years — gradually all but given up their traditional pursuits and professions as preservers of ancient cultural values and thought. Young Sri Vaishnavas today, educated as they are in English and secular institutions and vocations — as engineers, doctors, administrators and corporate managers — find themselves today utterly unable to relate to their own ancient cultural roots simply because they no longer even are familiar with the language of their ancestors — Tamil and Sanskrit.
Sri Vaishnavas of the present generation — in my book I describe them as “unknown Sri Vaishnavas” — cannot even read or write Tamil or Sanskrit with any degree of ease or proficiency. This crippling disability of these young Sir Vaishnavas thus has cut them off totally from connecting in any meaningful way with the vastness and richness of their ancestral and cultural literature, its idioms, mannerisms and contexts. Young Sri Vaishnavas today do not even know how to appreciate their scriptural classics such as the Valmiki Ramayana, the Bhagavath-Gita, the Vishu-Sahasranama or the Tiruppaavai. Cut off from language, young Sri Vaishnavas today are cut off from their very own self-identity. It makes them aliens within their own community and homeland.