Guru Parampara - 2

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And then I retired and settled down in Hyderabad.

And I was satiated with learning. Did not seek any more gurus of any kind...or shishyas for that matter. Left physics happily...it was always a necessary evil :)

And as a recreation and avocation I started blogging in English. Soon enough I found that there were readers for my fun-blogs; most of them my ex-students of IIT KGP spread all over the world. While googling idly for other things, they discovered my blogs accidentally and found them nostalgic. And responded. That was how I started blogging daily in English on all sorts of fun topics without rule or rhyme...all of 2700 blogs over a period of 6 years.

And suddenly one day I got fed up with English in 2015.

And was at a loss what to do.

Then I recalled that I used to love verses in Telugu from Vemana Shatakam in my school years. But I was out of touch with Telugu for most of my life and was never good at it. Not having read Puraanaas, Prabandhaas, Kaavyaas, Telugu was almost a foreign language to me,

Yet I wanted to learn the prosody of the simplest verse called: "Aata Veladi" (ఆట వెలది) in order to indulge in writing fun-verses in Telugu.

My sambandhi was working then as a Telugu Pundit at Nellore and used to visit Hyderabad once in a while. I learned the two kinds of Ganas called Soorya Ganas and Indra Ganas from him.  But not the intricacies of  Yati and Praasa.

Still I ventured to write a Shatakam (100 verses) in order to dedicate it to my fond B-i-L, Shri G Ranga Rao IAS.

Despite its faulty Chandas, that Shatakam happens to be my all-time-favorite in Telugu. It was a political satire of the most rabid kind...so profane that I never dared to blog it.

And then I came to be enamored with another kind of verse called Kanda Padyam. I had no living Guru to teach me its weird Chandas. So I picked it up from Google and was writing fairly passable but faulty political satires in that prosody and blogging them.

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Then a miracle happened. 

One fine morning, while googling for something else, I hit upon a Telugu blog titled: "Shankaraabharanam" (శంకరాభరణం).

There was in it given a "samasya" (a line in verse with an often atrocious meaning). The challenge to the participants was to do a "poorana"...filling in the three remaining lines in the given Chandas so that the entire verse of 4 lines read together removes the absurdity of the 4th line, and sounds nice with a tidy anvayam (syntax).

As that day's samasya happened to be in the Kanda Padya Chandas with which I had some familiarity, I posted my poorana in my fun-style impishly.

And thought that it would be either ignored or condemned.

But lo and behold! Within a couple of hours I found this comment from one Kandi Shankarayya (who I later learned was the admin of that blog):

"GP Sastry Garu: Shankaraabharanam Blog welcomes you. Your poorana is good"

I was astonished, delighted, amused, baffled; and turned into an instant fan of this unknown gentleman. 

I did a similar poorana next day for another Kanda Padya Samasya.

And found that Sri Kandi Shankaryya Garu left this comment:

"GP Sastry Garu: Your poorana is good. But there is a fault in your praasa. This is how it should be"

...Very very gentle correction.

Within the next two days, I learned all the yati and praasa that I failed to learn in two years...

And it went on day after day...

And soon Sri Kandi Shankarayya Garu became my online Guru of the most Positive kind.

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But pooranas require not only a knowledge of Chandas (and cleverness) but also Grammar (వ్యాకరణం).

Sensing that my knowledge of Telugu Grammar was primitive, Sri Kandi Shankarayya Garu e-mailed me pdf versions of the two standard grammar books, Baala Vyaakaranam (బాల వ్యాకరణం) and Praudha Vyaakaranam (ప్రౌఢ వ్యాకరణం).

I found them totally unreadable...the fault was entirely mine...I thirsted for a tumbler of grammar and they turned out to be vast salty oceans.

What to do?

I then found a way out. 

Getting to know that Sri Kandi Shankarayya Garu had been running his fond child: "Shankaraabharanam" for all of 8 years unremittingly day after day, I started browsing all the previous pages of this Holy Bible without leaving a single page. It took me a whole year 24/7. But it was pleasant. The hundreds of contributors to this blog were Telugu Pundits, Avadhanis, Poets, Grammarians, Stylists and Petulant Versifiers.

And I found that Sri Shankarayya Garu was handling this menagerie adroitly without hurting anyone, with infinite patience and kindness, correcting the various submissions and improving them constantly...a fantastic achievement.

And I learned the little Grammar I needed for my fun-poornas by reading his comments and corrections on other peoples' verses meticulously.

Thus, not only Shankarayya Garu, but also his child "Shankaraabharanam" became my Guru of the Positive kind.

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And as he was then living in Hyderabad, I had occasions to meet him in person for a few minutes once in a while. And glean more of his charming personality.

And on his 70th Birthday last year there was this bulky "Saptati Sanchika" (70th Birthday Souvenir) dedicated to him. And I contributed my little effort to it like that squirrel did to the Sri Raam Sethu;

https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2020/06/17-july-2020.html

https://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2020/06/17-july-2020_28.html

Those were my humble tributes to his saintly qualities as a person and as an ideal Guru (of the First Kind).

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But Shri Kandi Shankarayya Garu is also my Guru of the Third Kind:

He is a formidable poet, having composed "Shankara Shatakam" (శంకర శతకం) and "Varada Shatakam" (వరద శతకం) and many other booklets in Telugu, often overnight.

I admire his poetry (from a distance ;)

But I neither have the vocabulary nor the bhakti to read and understand and appreciate his poetic fervor.

I don't have a poetic heart...thank you!

I am an "inert gas" as a female acquaintances of my youth declared.

And I have nil desire to write poetry...I am a versifier...

All I want to do is to continue writing fun-pooranas in his blog.

Not only does he permit my irreverent (సరదా) pooranas to appear at the top of his celebrated blog every day; he had also taken the trouble to compile 116 of them; and published them as a Shankaraabharanam Prachurana entirely on his own initiative, doing its immaculate DTP work himself.

A truly unique Guru!!!

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