Eklavya

The latest film my wife and I went to see was called Eklavya. We saw it at our local movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. Much of the film was shot in the Devigarh Place in Upaipur, India. If we had unlimited money, then it would be a fun place to visit for a 2nd honeymoon! I enjoy movies like this one, because they have a point instead of being pure entertainment with no thinking involved. I liked how they took a traditional story from the ancient Mahabharata and came up with a story in the present that showed the same struggles as the original story. The struggle of following traditional values in a new age at any cost is such an important topic for today. The original story on the surface does not seem to be applicable for today, but the same question remains, should I follow dharma or not?

Names in Hindi

Rick : िरक
Sarah : सारा
Nathan : नाथन
Daniel : ढानेले
Andrew : एनडरू
Jake : जेक
Jessica : जेिसका
Evans : इळनस

Hindi Unicode Editor

Learning Hindi हिंदी

My current long term goal is to learn Hindi हिंदी. A group at work is learning Hindi during lunch breaks on Mondays. I am not a huge fan of the book we are using as the font is so small. It is the classic book for learning Hindi called Teach Yourself Hindi.

I really like the Hindi Script Tutor web site as I can see how the letters are drawn and can hear them spoken so I don't have to guess on either.

As soon as I can get a grip on the Devanagari script I am going to go thru the NC State Hindi site by Afroz Taj. He is also on local TV in Raleigh on Time Warner channel 18 from 9-10pm on Monday and Wednesdays.

These are my other 3 attempts at learning non-English languages:

1. 1980 to 1982 - while in India I was mostly in in West Bengal and Bangladesh so I learned Bengali using the LAMP method. The beauty of this method is immersion in the local culture. I lived with people who did not know English so I learned the language by listening and knowing what was the correct thing to say in the appropriate situation. This is so much better than learning by translating from English to Bengali. I taught myself to write and read the script only when I returned to USA when being around Bengali friends.



2. 1983 - to graduate at VaTech I was required to take a foreign language, so I chose Spanish and took a compressed full year of Spanish in 9 weeks in summer school. The class was 3 hours a day 3 times a week and we had to speak 1 hour of each class to our Cuban speaker in Spanish only.



3. 1987 to 1989 - while living in Saudi Arabia I taught myself how to write Arabic since I love the calligraphy of the language. I enjoyed the artist value of the language as they use it as an art form as well as a language. An example of this is Hassan Massoudy's art

So far I have learned how to write the vowels and my name is pretty easy to write: िरक, using this on-line Hindi unicode editor.