Many of my friends are baby-boomers a few of them are in the family way. The last time, I did something of this sort was my, " Dhinam Oru Kural" (A couplet a day) e-mail service that I started during my days at University of Florida between 1997-1999, through a simple Unix e-mailing PINE program. You need to have Unicode support in your browsers and Operating Systems to view Tamil content. A relevant or random quote for the day.Rumination or discussion on the maxim itself.Translation of the Tamil maxim in my own English.Original maxim in Tamil (transliteration in parenthesis).Therefore, I will blog each entry with four portions. I will present one maxim a day for the next 108 days. Therefore, I want to present content in a way that would be more appealing to parents so that they can present it in a way pleasing to their kids. However, my audience for this blog is not kids rather it is their parents. These maxims are still being taught for the kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade kids in India. Her many other works appear in the great epic of Tamils' bravery, namely புறநானூறு ('puruh-nAAn-OOru'), roughly translated as the "Four Hundred Great Anthologies of Tamils' Bravery." Through ஆத்திச்சூடி (AA-thi-chOO-di) maxims (which were part of her 'Ethical Books' collection) she wanted to captivate and inculcate moral and ethical thoughts in the younger minds. Her devotion to Lord Vinayaka (Elephant God) and Lord Muruga (Tamil God) is well known. It was composed by the great old Tamil Poetess Auvaiyaar, who belonged to the last Sangam era. Please do jot down your own thoughts and critiques so that it will truly be a learning experience for me. Therefore, should you observe any errors in either my translations or ruminations, kindly do let me know and I will make suitable modifications. I may be consulting informally with my parents, books, or friends, if I have problems in deciphering the meanings for these maxims. I am a mere Tamil aficionado and do not have any scholarly exposure to Tamil. Therefore, I decided to start learning at least one maxim a day to understand and share the same with my friends, thereby critically expounding some of these great puranic works of Classical Tamil. Most of those words are seldom used in the contemporary Tamil dialects. Scholarly Tamil, especially those works that date back to several centuries, always need some probing to understand.
After a long time, I felt so good at the level of an intellectual debate we had on a seemingly fleeting and trivial issue. Anyway, while we debated and arrived at a consensus on what it means, my brilliant and intelligent friend countered me as to how that maxim contradicts another one in a different place.
The ethical treatise that my friend was referring to was ஆத்திச்சூடி, which is pronounced as 'AA-thi-chOO-di.' It means, "A garland of 'aththi' flowers," probably alluding to the Saivite God of Creation - Lord Shiva, who use to be caparisoned with this floral garland. In this, what does ஏற்பது ('yEr-padhu') mean?" For example, I do have a confusion as to what ஏற்பது இகழ்ச்சி ('yEr-padhu igazh-chEE') means. However, I don't understand all those maxims as they are composed and rendered in scholarly Tamil. However, on Sunday, January 9th, 2005, while I was at Publix, shopping for my groceries, I got a call from my dear friend Velraja, who with all his inquisitiveness asked me, "Rex, I was playing a Tamil cassette for kids that comprises the moral maxims of our great old Poetess Auvaiyaar, which are rendered as songs.
Due to hectic schedules at work-front, I had to play truant on this one for a long time now.
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