I am new to the group (just one week old membership) and slightly
aprehensive of the volume of email I am getting each day. Probably this
is unusual as the topic of traditional vs modern poetry seems to be
close to the hearts of many of us whose frozen memories of a distance
home include mom or dad or uncle reciting Mahabharata or Ramayana.
<sotto..>
I remember my dad gustily singing "Kuppinchi egasina kundalammula kanti
gagana bhagam bella gappi konaga"...(sorry, I still did not get the hang
of your richtext format)
</sotto..>
My ideas on poetry:
1. A rich colorful word painting with words rhythmically strung together
as in a necklace to an easily memorisable meter.
2. When the traditional poetry became popular, "Sruti and Smruti" are
the only means of enjoying these writings as the instruments of writings
were not that easily accessible.
<sotto..>
I make it a point to be there at 6:00 PM when and if I visit the Balajee
temple on any day, as all the priests sit together and do the
sahasranama and those reverberating slokas (pre and post sahasranama),
whether I understand them or not (sometimes I follow the notes but
mostly listen), bring out an inner peace.
</sotto..>
3. Now with the TV blaring in the living room and the stereo in the
teenagers den, it definitely takes an effort to follow the meter and
understand the long forgotten words. This traditional poetry is a dying
art (not dead) and there are some isolated pockets around the world
where this art is still alive and there are people who enjoy Telugu
traditional poetry.
<sotto..>
I joined a local society called "white dot" who advocate living without
TV! Its wonderful to see how much leisure time one can have after work
to pursue things like a book of poems!
</sotto..>
Anyone seriously tried to email in real Telugu aksharalu ? I am
experimenting with MS Exchange and the tools you need at the other end
are Desikachary's Pothana fonts installed and running on Windows 3.11 or
95 and ofcourse the same MSexchange capability. Please let me know if
interested in experimenting.
Regards,
Krishna
(Srirama Krishna Dronamraju
krishna@lucent.com)
PS: The sottovoce above can be interpreted in Telugu as so.da. aka sonta
dabba. I thought it would make it easy to skip while reading if marked
>clearly:-)
>
>
>
>
>