Occupation: Teaching Vedas
Please call me Shekar. Parameswaran may be my official name but Shekar or Shekar anna is how I am known to most of the people who live here, in the vicinity of the Sree Sathyavageeswara Temple, Karamana, and beyond. I am a graduate of the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram [1978 batch], and I entered into government service soon after I completed my post-graduate degree. I retired from the Kerala Public Works Department as deputy chief engineer in 2010 and since then I have completely devoted myself to the study and propagation of the Vedas.
I’m just back from the Sree Padmanbhaswamy temple, where I go every morning to chant the Yajur Veda, along with a handful of other devotees. We consider it as an offering to the deity. Once upon a time almost all the ancient treatises – the Rig Veda, the Sama Veda, the Puranas, the Krishna Leela and the likes – used to be chanted at the temple and nowadays, only a few are chanted on a regular basis.
Similarly, I consider studying and teaching the Vedas as an offering to God. For the past 40 years now, every evening at the Sathyavageeswara Temple, I have been taking classes for men and women, anyone and everyone, from children and senior citizens to professionals and homemakers, all of those who are interested in learning the scriptures.
It was my guru V.K. Subramania Sarma, a retired district education officer and Veda scholar, who began classes here at the temple. I took over after my guru moved away from the city in the mid 70s. Following my guru’s style of teaching, I keep the classes short, at the most, half an hour or 45 minutes. Any more than that and I’ve found that the attention of the participants begins to wander.
I teach two to three batches of students every day. There have been times when I’ve taught more than 50 students in one batch and, at other times, there is just a handful. I start out by teaching them small and easy to understand and memorise slokas and kritis, in order to familiarise them with the intricacies of Sanskrit. Only when they’ve grasped the language, do I progress to more complex phrases and thoughts.
Then again, grasping the values embedded in the Vedas is a very individual task. A teacher succeeds in his craft when his students are able to understand the values in the Vedas, analyse the meaning and, most importantly, reproduce it when necessary.
It’s not that children, these days, are not willing to learn. I find that it’s the parents who are not interested, especially when it clashes with academics. If there is an upcoming exam, for example, many parents stop sending their children to class days in advance. That’s a pity because learning the Vedas is one of the best ways of broadening your horizons. I take classes free of cost and I don’t conduct any exams. Apart from this, I take classes for women on Sundara Kandam, Devi Mahatmyam, Bhagavad Gita and so on, and on weekends, in my house, I host a discourse on the Yajur Veda that everyone is welcome to attend.
At the end of the day, I too am only a student of the Vedas. I am currently learning the Yajur Veda under Venkatachala Ghanapadigal, an eminent Vedic scholar, one of those rarest of rare people who can recite the entire text from memory.
I like to think of the four Vedas as an ocean of knowledge, as vast as they are deep, as varied as they are layered. Even now, in my sixtieth year, I can only say that I have barely dipped my toes in this ocean of knowledge.
(A weekly column on men and women who make Thiruvananthapuram what it is)
