B16 From corporate class room to vedic padashala

Three months back my brother and a couple of other people from the neighborhood decided to start a Sunday Vedic class in the mutt (temple cum community hall) next to my property. I enthusiastically joined in as it was a long standing desire coming true. I should confess I had tried doing some self learning in the last few years with audio aids but wasn’t too successful. The accuracy of pronunciation eluded me and the length and complexity of words in some of the Sanskrit shlokas (verses) stood in the way. The only thing I managed with some degree of success thanks to the internet and the English translations so easily available now , was understanding the meaning of quiet a few of the shlokhas . For some one associated with learning in a corporate scenario in various contexts over the last 16 years it has been a different experience. As it is too early to come to any generalizations and conclusions I am just stating a few facts in this write up. There is a teacher who teaches the group of students numbering 18 every Sunday for 1 hr 15 minutes. The composition of the learner group is as follows: 10 children between the ages of 8-15, 6 adults in the age group of 35-40 and two elders above the age of 60. My son aged 10 is also part of this group , though he refuses to sit with me , instead sits with his friends . The teacher who is an independent financial consultant by profession , refuses to take any fee. In fact he has been encouraging the group to have more classes every week to speedup the learning process, and is ready to offer his time whenever the group wants. The premises are in the local community hall and anyone is free to join. The teacher chants a few words once aloud all the while focusing on the clarity of pronunciation and the intonations, and this is followed by the group chanting the words loudly twice, and this teachning-learning continues. The teacher repeats the earlier words again in case he feels people aren’t able to pronounce/intonate it perfectly. This is done even when he feels a couple of people are out of sync. He is able to follow the chants of each one in the group and able to identify when some one is out of sync. He stops to help the individual chant it right. Every session is broadly divided into 2 parts. The first part lasting around 30-35 minutes is spend on chanting what had been learned in the earlier sessions, and the second part focuses on new verses. The session ends with an exhortation by the teacher to continue individual practice during the week. I will write more on this learning adventure at an appropriate stage later.