Dear Friends,
Vanakkam.
I am
an ardent admirer of Thirukkural. During
2003-2008, I had the opportunity to make an in-depth study of Thirukkural along
with my friends in the Greater Washington D.C area. I also had the unique opportunity to serve as
the Coordinator for the International Thirukkural Conference held in the Washington
D.C. area in 2005.
We
all know that Thirukkural has been translated into almost all the major
languages of the word. In English alone,
there are more than 35 translations. In
spite of all these translations, we have failed to promote Thirukkural outside
of Tamil Nadu. Most of the educated
people in the world, would know that Confucius was a Chinese philosopher,
Socrates was a Greek philosopher, Shakespeare was an English playwright and so
on. But, very few people outside of
Tamil Nadu have heard of Thiruvalluvar. On many occasions, I have quoted and explained
some of the kurals to my American friends. Once they understand the depth of the
wisdom in the kural they admire it and invariably ask for a translation of
Thirukkural. In all honesty, I must say
that I have not found an English translation of Thirukkural that would be
helpful to understand its meaning and significance. Thirukkural is so succinct that translating
each kural into two lines in English (or any other language) fails to convey
the content of the kural and its significance. In my
humble opinion, translations do not help to understand Thirukkural.
The fact that we don’t have book that non-Tamil people (including
our children who are not proficient in Tamil) can read and appreciate Thirukkural
has been a concern to me. So, I have taken it upon myself to write a
series of articles on Thirukkural. The
target readers for these articles are people who have no knowledge of Tamil. In these articles, I plan to describe
Thiruvallvar’s ideas on topics like personal development, management,
leadership, friendship, love, Kingship, ethics, reincarnation, liberation of
the soul, humanism, rationalism etc. I
plan to stick to Thiruvalluvar’s ideas as closely as possible.
These articles will be posted
in my blog for which the link is listed below:
http://amazingkural.blogspot.com
At present, two articles have been
posted. One is a Preface and the other is an introduction
to Thiruvalluvar and Thirukkural. Additional
articles will be posted in course of time.
If
you have the time and interest in Thirukkural, please read the article and also
pass on the link to your friends who may be interested in reading it. I would
greatly appreciate your feedback. I am
sure your feedback will be very helpful to improve the quality of the articles.
anbudan,
Prabhakaran
