The moment people see this topic I can see frowns such as "who is this moron wanting to revive Sanskrit". It is really a bad situation that the mother of all Indian languages "Sanskrit" is on its verge of extinction as a spoken language.

Yes, hardly the numbers are in thousands, who can read, write and speak Sanskrit fluently. So what? What is the importance of Sanskrit? What is its use? In fact some years back a state government denied permission to open a Sanskrit university stating it as a dead language.

This is the state of a language that is unquestionably the oldest and most perfected language. Sanskrit has more literary works than any language in this world even though no major literary work has been done in Sanskrit recently.

We need to understand India to understand the importance of Sanskrit. India is a country that is diverse to the extreme. You may not see even two neighbouring cities having the same customs.

Customs and culture differ from place to place, that is India’s power and her astonishing image. But under so much diversity, one thread is common across the length and breadth of this country. They are the Sanskrit recitals all across the country in the temples, marriages and any functions.

A Sanskrit prayer forms part of a marriage whether it takes place in Kamakhya or Kanyakumari, though marriage customs may differ. Yes, Sanskrit clubbed with Hinduism is the bottom line of this country.

India is connected from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Guwahati to Gandhinagar only because of Hinduism and Sanskrit. Hinduism, as a way of life has stood its test of time and has not really crashed to any invading culture.

For that matter, Hinduism assimilated other religions into its fold. An Indian Muslim is not same as a Saudi Muslim, an Indian Christian is very much different from the Vatican preaching. It again encompasses the theory of assimilation and acceptance.

I can see questions raised "What about Hindi?" Hindi, though declared as a national language does not have any emotional acceptance on people other than Hindi- heartland. The Hindi enforcers think they can integrate this country more by preaching Hindi to people who do not know it. Unfortunately they are thoroughly mistaken.

They think India is one country only after August 15, 1947. But India has been emotionally, spiritually and culturally one country for thousands and thousands of years even before a language named Hindi existed.

Let me take myself as an example, I’m from Southern tip of India, Tamil Nadu. For no reason I need to know Hindi be it economic, religious or literary. So it will never give me any pleasure in studying Hindi as a language. Just by knowing Hindi I will not be able to know more about India or Vedas or Upnishads or Puranas or even science. By the way, I don’t have anything against Hindi, it is a good language and even today I watch Hindi music in cable television and hum the DDLJ songs. But I’m accepting it as national language only for the sake of Constitution and for nothing else.

Now let us take Sanskrit’s merits. By making Sanskrit as national language we will allow lot of people to study our Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and make way for people to come out with findings.

It will open up a new avenue for learning "Indology", which has become studies only in European and American universities. Most importantly, majority of the people will not feel a language is being pushed on them, because Sanskrit slokas (prayers) form the crux for many peoples' daily rituals.

For other religious people it is just a question of time before Sanskrit has their religious texts. Sanskrit is the best language for phonetic usage even in computers because its characters have to be spelt the same way wherever it occurs. In fact Sanskrit is the only language where the sound of individual character will not change be it beginning or ending or in the middle.

For instance in English you have to sound word "often" as "ofen", the word "island" as "iland". These issues are prevalent in lot of languages apart from Sanskrit. In fact Sanskrit means "perfected" in Sanskrit.

The preservation of the original system of wordings, simple root-sounds, and a clear, highly elaborated derivative system, grammar, makes Sanskrit a powerful and steady instrument for the expression of the widest and deepest possible ranges of man's consciousness and existence.

We, in our 56th year of tryst with destiny, need to change our destiny and make sure we go back to our Vedas and Upanishads. They form India and its medium is Sanskrit and nothing else. By making Sanskrit as national language we will be starting a new era in the Indian history. I hope it happens and happens soon!