New year greetings from "a civilized human being"

This is poetry month, and it is the Tamil New Year.

So, here is a classic from quite a few years ago.  The lyrics are by the poet Bharatidasan,



This poem is a sincere and touching homage to the language, Tamil.  And, of course, set to delightful music by the old masterful team of Viswanathan-Ramamurthy.

Tamil is one of the oldest living languages of the world--if not the oldest--with a vast body of literature.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the immense richness in which I grew up, but failed to systematically study.  I am all the happier that I came across the fantastic biography of Tamil that David Shulman authored.  As he so wonderfully put it, "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

But, of course, the old Tamil is even more difficult to understand than Shakespeare's English can be to a teenager of today.  We needed experts to interpret that old Tamil to us, but the teachers we had in school fell far short of conveying the beauty and lush gold in the historical past.  Come to think of it, those teachers murdered the language.

The song in the video below is a poem by Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai.  It later became the official state song of Tamil Nadu.

Happy new year, dear reader!