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SriRangaSri List Archive: Message 00017 May 2004

 
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              (continuing from Part 2)
-------------------------------------------------------

Dear friends,

On a bright, sunny day in spring (March 20th '04),
just as the beautiful winter snow was beginning to
gradually melt across the expanse of the University of
Connecticut, two good friends from a distant, 30-year
past of mine -- my two old school-mates from Chennai,
India, Syed Nawaz Ahmed and Prof. Narasimhan
Srinivasan -- they took me around on my first ever
tour of the inside of a famous university in America,
a country which by then I was convinced surely
deserved to be acknowledged foremost as "vidyA-bhUmi"
(land devoted to learning) rather than as
"bhOga-bhUmi" (land of pleasurable
self-gratification).

My first impression upon entering U-Conn was a certain
sense of hallowed 'gravitas'. It was a Saturday, a
weekend, and the campus precincts remained largely
unpeopled and quiet. There were only a few score
students and faculty cheerily going about their
business but otherwise everyplace I looked appeared
wintry and serene. Strangely, to me it felt a bit like
entering into the wide and sacred spaces of the outer
concourse or "prAkAra" of some giant temple back home
in India. It was the sort of feeling I've often felt
creeping upon me on rare occasions (when there are no
raucous crowds of pilgrims that usually throng) inside
the massive front-yard of the Varadaraja Temple in the
great "divya-dEsa" of Kanchi...   

The sky cleared and the air became crisp as we quickly
took the tour of U-Conn strolling down the paved,
tree-lined pathways and past sprawling blocks of
buildings, one following another, each housing a
faculty, a separate academic discipline. There were so
many of them I soon lost count of the numerous
branches of learning and research to which I later
learnt U-conn was host. The buildings all looked so
stately with architecture so typically New England --
quaint but very imposing. 

For a good part of the next hour, a virtual parade
passed me by -- libraries, stadiums, labs, 
auditoriums, tennis and basket-ball courts, dorms, 
cafeterias, lecture-halls... As I witnessed the slow
stream of grand academic sights I could'nt help
falling momentarily into a private reverie: "So here
it is, the great American university!" I thought to
myself, "Here is one among America's many great
temples of learning... (America's own version of
"divya-dEsam-s)! Here is a fabled American
knowledge-centre! Here is one of those
knowledge-nurseries from where some of the world's
greatest ever ideas in modern science and technology
have sprouted. Here is where some of the loftiest
discoveries and  advancements in contemporary history
have been born! Here is where the largest number of
Nobel Prize heroes and laureates have come from! Here
is where the best of mankind's minds from all over the
world seek to come, to live, to dream, to dare, to
work and to achieve...".   

As I took in all of the campus, for the first time
perhaps in life, and in a moment of reflective
clarity, I understood truly what is really meant when
it is said there is rare Joy, a certain indefinable
air of romance and adventure surrounding all academia.
I at once understood why poets and the wisest men of
this world all speak of the university as a sacred
institution, as the 'Arcadia of Academe', as a
veritable spring-board, indeed, from where the human
spirit, through abstract thought, can hope to soar
skyward and reach the celestial spheres even... 

Quite instantly, the grand opening lines of the famous
Sanskrit "stOtra" of Swami Vedanta Desikan (which he
had composed in praise of the God of Gnosis,
"lakshmi-hayagreeva", the Supreme Deity of Knowledge),
came to my mind:

   "gnyAna ananda mayam nirmala sphatika kritim
     aadhAram sarva vidyAnAm hayagreeva upAsmahE"   

Where there is true "gnyAna", as Swami's lines clearly
suggest, there is always unbounded "ananda" too. True
Knowledge is true Joy. They are merely two sides of
the same coin -- the coin of human spiritual
experience that God mints as legal tender in his own
divine treasury, His eternal Kingdom. 

In a place of learning, such as a great university, 
where highest human effort is expended in trying to
advance the frontiers of Knowledge, there is indeed a
nameless but real Joy, "Ananda". It is impalpable but
it is certainly there in the air.. it verily envelops 
the atmosphere. To use the AchArya's apt choice of
expression, it is "gnyAna ananda mayam"...

                  *************
                (to be continued)

Rgds,
dAsan,
Sudarshan











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