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6:00 PM - 7:00 PM (UTC+5.5)
An Introduction to the Magnificent Indian Thesaurus AMARAKOŚA
SPEAKERS
INDICA’s Center for Bharatiya Languages presents a conversation with Dr Sivaja Nair on the 16th of December 2022 at IST 1800 hrs in which she will introduce the magnificent Indian thesaurus: the Amarakośa. Dr Nair earned her PhD with a thesis titled The Knowledge Structure in Amarakośa. The Amarakośa, according to Dr Nair, is the most celebrated and authoritative ancient thesaurus of Sanskrit and is a book that an Indian child, one who learns from a traditional education system, memorizes as early as the first year of formal learning. She highlights the fact that though it might appear as a linear list of words, upon closer inspection, it shows a rich organisation of words expressing various relations a word bears with other words, and therefore, when the student of the traditional system studies further, the linear list of words unfolds into a knowledge web. Join us in this conversation to dive deeper into this recitable thesaurus, composed by Amarasiṃha, which truly is a landmark in the history of the Sanskrit language.
Speakers
Dr. Sivaja Nair
Assistant Professor, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit
Dr Sivaja Nair is an Assistant Professor at the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, in Kalady, Kerala. She can read twelve scripts and is proficient in six languages. Her areas of interest include Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, Programming Languages, XML Tagging, Lexicology, Manuscriptology, Paleography, Sanskrit Vyākaraṇa, and Pali Vyākaraṇa. She has developed four e-learning tools (Amarakośajñānajālam, Sandhiḥ, Vaijayantīkośa Knowledge-Net, Āyussamskṛtam) and is the author of three books (the latest of them being the Āyuśśabdarūpikā, published in 2020). In addition to writing multiple research paper publications, she has also designed a part of a Sanskrit-based NLP Programs courseware for a post-graduate level course at Shree Somanath Sanskrit University, Veraval, Gujarat.
Megh Kalyanasundaram
Host, Director – Special Projects, INDICA
Megh Kalyanasundaram is an Indian citizen with close to nine years of lived experience in China, an alumnus of ISB and is currently Director Special Projects at INDICA. His post-graduate specialization in Strategy, Leadership and Marketing included a study of research methods. His professional experience includes stints as a Market Leader at a Global Fortune 50 firm, as Head of Business Development at a leading Indian talent development multinational and he has served a term on the Board of a Shanghai-based not-for-profit. His academic research interests and 20+ papers span some aspects of ancient Indian chronology, Indian Knowledge Systems, Landscape in Indic texts, Ancient Indian Jurisprudence, Ideas of India and Philosophy. For his creative contribution to the first edition of the International Day of Yoga, he was invited by the Permanent Mission of India in the United Nations to attend the inaugural event at the UN. Other professional and pro-bono pursuits have included building differentiated digital platforms for Indic texts targeted at specific learning and research needs and music. His research-based compositional Sanskrit album 'Bhārata and her Kāśmīra' has been listed by the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA) while his subsequent album 'Indian Knowledge Systems and Yāskācārya's Nirukta' has recently been accepted for listing by the Vedic Heritage Portal. In 2022, Megh was invited by the National Museum Institute (NMI) to contribute content for multiple projects currently underway at NMI, including ones on Jammu Kashmir & Ladakh and Kedarnath.