I hardly studied Sanskrit in school. At that time, under the system I studied under, there was one year of compulsory Sanskrit in Standard VII. After that, if you opted for what was called the “Science” stream, which I chose, you and Sanskrit parted ways. I remember that one year of compulsory Sanskrit as agony.

Sanskrit is a language. You should begin to learn it like any other language, speak it and converse in it. But Sanskrit grammar is also extremely structured, almost mathematical. Why do some people hate mathematics?

For most such people, the answer is bad teaching in the formative years. Sanskrit is no different. Bad teaching means being forced to mug up tables of grammar. Those tables have principles. If you understand those principles, there is no need to mug anything up.

Unfortunately, you don’t appreciate and understand those principles until you have advanced comprehension of how the language works. It’s a bit like mugging up the roots of a quadratic equation. If you understand the principles, there is no need to memorise anything. You can derive the roots.

But Sanskrit is plagued by bad teaching, bad textbooks and bad syllabi. That’s the reason it becomes agony. It isn’t a problem with the language. If we can’t ensure the teaching, there is no point in making anything compulsory. Children pick up languages easily, more easily than adults do. Many children are certainly trilingual, even more. Taught naturally, at those ages, Sanskrit is no burden at all.

I was drawn to Sanskrit much later in life, when I was more like 35. Contrary to what many people seem to think, Sanskrit isn’t the language of religion. The religious texts are certainly in Sanskrit. But there is a huge corpus of what can be called secular literature, in Sanskrit.

People are sometimes surprised when I say that many Sanskrit texts were authored by Buddhists, including the first ever dictionary/thesaurus, still used. I was initially drawn to Sanskrit because of the literature and learning a language at 35 is much more difficult. I have always regretted not having studied Sanskrit properly in school and envied those of my classmates who chose the “Humanities” stream and studied Sanskrit.

Culture is difficult to pin down and define. But however you choose to define it, culture is intimately connected with language and virtually all Indian languages (Tamil went through a conscious cleansing) owe their origins to Sanskrit. I do wish to know about my country’s history. I do wish to understand what was shaped us, what are my roots. In understanding these answers, Sanskrit enriches me. Had I not studied Sanskrit, the world of Sanskrit would have lost nothing. I would have been the loser. I have met plenty of people who seem to envy me now.

What use would Sanskrit have been, had I compulsorily studied it in school, and not made use of it in later life? What have those of my classmates who studied it, done with it thereafter? I think that’s an irrelevant question.

In school, we don’t know what a kid will do later in life, what his/her skills, aptitude and profession will be. The objective of school education is to provide a template of knowledge and skills, given that uncertainty. What use has my knowledge of chemistry, physics or mechanics done for me? It’s made me more aware. But Sanskrit also does precisely that. It makes all Indians more aware of history, culture and roots and I think that is valuable.

The German versus Sanskrit controversy is irrelevant, in my view. That’s not the choice. Provided we can ensure quality teaching, Sanskrit should be part of the compulsory template. By all means let us teach a “modern” foreign language in addition, and German can be of the choices. Plus English and the mother tongue/Hindi. 4 languages isn’t too much for a child to handle. It seems too much for adults who devise syllabi and textbooks. Not for a kid. Make the child a richer Indian in that sense.