Full Speed Ahead!!

28 Feb 2026

Summary

I have so much to say here! I have also made an update to the About page with some non-samskritam changes. Long story short, over the last five months, I have learnt and improved my samskritam A LOT, and I’ve even started teaching a few people on my own! My approach with books, classes by Raghuvarma mahodaya, Vyoma Samskrita Pathashala and other ad hoc avenues has contributed immensely.

Progress

I have finished working through around 40% of Gita Sopanam 1 and 25% of Gita Sopanam 2, and I am attending weekend classes (for both) with Raghuvarma mahodaya. We have made steady and significant progress. The biggest learning for me has been embracing विभक्ति tables and लकार tables for various words and actually internalizing them. I am able to identify words beyond रामः, सीता, नदी, फलम् and I am able to see the forms in usage everywhere and make sense of them internally. We are also learning to use धातुरूपमञ्जरी and शब्दमञ्जरी, and I’ve printed some of these out for personal usage. I even created a practice web-app here, and I hope to share more on it in a separate post. I still need to memorize more forms, but things have been moving slow and steady on this front after an initial surge in September and a catch-up surge late December.

On a different front, I have been listening to Sowmya Krishnapur’s क्रिदन्ताः course. I have found her explanations to be fantastic, and it’s helping me imbibe more samskritam in an easy manner. For now, I am not doing all exercises diligently, but it’s more of an exposure course, but I will get through them eventually. It’s incredible how many resources are available free of charge through Vyoma, I think there’s a lot of untapped potential here which will help in the long run.

In a recent turn of events, I have been attending समासवर्गः conducted by my first samskritam guru, Govinda mahodaya, where around five of us have been meeting every week to learn पदच्छेदः and understanding समस्तपदानि in common श्लोकाः. I started gaining confidence in this when I was trying to learn to chant भगवद् गीता, and I realized I am able to understand a lot of the words even if I don’t know the exact meanings. It’s given me immense motivation that the journey is going well and I am heading in exactly the right direction. As a bonus, I know 30+ श्लोकाः from प्रथमोध्यायः by heart, and I am excited to learn more.

Teaching

My teacher told us “If you know five things, teach them. Then learn five more things and then continue to teach.” So, as a gift to myself after my PhD, I have started teaching what I know to my family and friends online. Classes happen online every Saturday, and it’s a casual no-homework and highly interactive journey which around 8 people are attending regularly. We are working through अभ्यासपुस्तकम् and I’m very happy with everyone’s progress. The important thing is showing up and trying, and they seem to be doing that, so there’s nothing more to ask for.

Volunteering

I am now a proud member of संस्कृतभारती USA युवविभागः and I have made a core group of like-minded friends in the process. They all know so much more than me, and that’s super inspiring. We are working on organizing activities for युवा and in particular, I am an organizer for SNYP - Samskritam Network for Young Working Professionals. We even had our first ever वार्षिकमेलनम् and it was phenomenal! We have had four meet-ups for SNYP so far, and we plan to continue to organize them every 6 weeks. On January 1 of 2026, I conducted a आदित्यहृदयम् event where I essentially “MC-ed” the whole event in samskritam. I even wrote a couple of “mini-news” updates for संभाषणसन्देशः (which I now have a subscription for). I am learning a lot through this experience. We have so many plans for the future, and I will share them as relevant.

Plan

My plan is to continue to make steady progress, I will also try and prioritize shorter but more regular updates. Although these summary posts are efficient, I think my aim with this “blog” was to record the full journey as it happens gradually. I am now more hopeful that within a year or so, I should be all set to read इतिहासौ and more. I also plan to write the DLP exams by SBUSA just so that I can learn things a bit more formally. There is something about exams that makes you learn things seriously! I know that s2s has been helpful for others, but I don’t appreciate the randomness associated with teachers there, I would like to choose them (especially when it’s possible).

Future Projects

I started a कथासङ्ग्रहः (linked here) based on the बालमोदिनी reading I was doing for a while, but it needs some work and I need to get better at staying consistent. I would like to use this unicode corpus along with Sanskrit grammar aware tools to generate exercises for विभक्ति or लकार practice. I also started a श्लोकसङ्ग्रहः where I gather पदच्छेदः that I have learnt to do so far (along with audio recordings using forced alignment tools like the one listed below), but it’s still a WIP. I have also started trying out audio recordings for पञ्चतन्त्रकथाः book stories so that they can join the repository on archive.org or YouTube for the balamodini ones. Especially with AI and other tools, these kinds of activities are becoming easier for me, but there’s still a lot to learn.

Resources

• A collection of resources for reading samskrita stories according to a reasonably recent Reddit thread.
• Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT Bombay has done a lot of work in computational samskritam. There are similar activities from IIT Madras, and other institutions thanks to IKS. Looking forward to seeing this grow.
• A useful devanagari pronunciation learning tool that was released recently, which may be helpful for beginners, can be found here.
• Audio alignment of some samskrita texts and audio recitations can be found here.

Fun Fact

I thought “discovered” Dr. Sowmya Krishnapur as a fantastic teacher recently during a discussin at the Yuvavibhaga melanam, but turns out that I already “knew” of her through my professor at IIT Madras! It was bizarre to me that I completely ignored that advice and now after three years, I’ve re-discovered it and am now obsessed with it!