Dear Vijay - I am sure with your success of POETRY IN STONE you are burdened to look and provide more qualitative works.
Dear Vairam Palaniappan, You seem to be looking forward to concentrate on specific areas and furnish qualitative literary-research materials.
Dear Adithan - though relative less frequent to our Forum - through Palaniappan Vairam and with specific works you posted - we do realise your potency.
Dear Dr. Gandhiraman - dense discussions on Saiva Siddhantha.
Dear Virarajendra @ Srihari - Variety of subjects related to ancient History - more on South East Asia.
Dear Sankaranarayanan - has now specifically serialising topics.
And We have special works / focus on Heritage from respected Katherine, Saurab Saxena, translations to French / Spanish from Sriraman Rajaraman, indepth study on Murals by PS Shriraman, temple tours by Raju - variety of photo gallaries / blogs and what not by several enthusiastic memebers... like personalities from Plastic Chandra, Satheesh, Shoba Ramakrishnan, Ragothaman ..... and USA Ravi Venu, Sree Sree, Arvindan (Marine Engineer) ...
Media personalities like NDTV Vaidhyanathan...
Long standing heritage lovers like Satish Arun - Venkateswaran Kasirajan ... !
We have established Writers like Venkat, Dhivakar, Gokul, Pavithra, Viswaksenan, .. .. who head the list of August 2009 meet... and subsequent entrants like Dr. Kailasam ...
Omissions inadvertant ...
With such GALAXY of Stars among us, I suggest we now look into the direction of channelising our resources / energies and present things under a larger Umbrella than just PS e-Group./
Dear Sir, This is a good approach. I would like to list few initiatives here for consideration. a. Upload articles to Wikipedia on the persons, places, monuments etc. We can keep a scorecard of this and publish it monthly. Even if one place is properly documented (with or without photographs), geo-tagged by one person, we would have covered a lot of places and monuments in a month. b. Sharing information with local population - students and teachers especially can go a long way in propagating the knowledge. Few camps every 3 months at various locations. c. A monthly updates on activities of organizations like REACH and their upcoming programs can enable volunteers from our group participate in programs of their choice. d. Participation in programs like Friends of Museum and publication of their monthly achievements.
I am sure there will greater ideas flowing in, let us prioritize and take up 2 or 3 activities for a period of 6 months and then review.
Ponnyin Selvan group has served as platform which instantly gives readers for the blogs we write. In similar way if there is platform where we can reach students and other interested individuals who can just spend few more hours than their normal mail reading time we can accomplish a lot. A serious obstacle we are facing is that we are far away from the place we ought to be. Like our VJ is in singapore and all his sculptures are in TN and his target group is totally based in TN - luckily he has very good team which does lot of work for poetry in stone...for the one/two weeks he was in India he has accomplished a lot! I am in US and my target group is in TN. Just because of forums like PVSP and few facebook/orkut group I am able reach some of the target groups. But still if we can reach more people who can spend just say 1 or 2 hrs per week- can be so useful and lot of things can be accomplished very short time frame of 1 to 2 years. PVSP has lot of influential members and many contacts. Such contacts can help bloggers like me to reach the students. One target group I am never able to appeal because we have no means to reach them.
PONNIYINSELVAN HERITAGE ACADEMY - is good start...I wish it is accomplished and please keep reaching out to students when they are young as main aim. Ainthil valyathathu aimbathil valayathu...
Hi, This is indeed a very nice idea to have such kind of institution, a step ahead of e-group. We can start with various activities, as many of those are already suggested by members. 1. Digitisation of inscription/epigraphs - This would be a huge activity where we shouldcombine a photo ofthe present state of the inscription/epigraph with the translated text from Epigrahica Indica/South Indian Inscriptions/Indian Antiquary. Also we should put a geo-tag where this inscription is located, except in case of copper plates we can just where these are now, might be the museum name. 2. Sculptures - This would be again a huge activity in itself. We can divide the sculptures into various groups, like Shiva, Vishnava etc and further divisions within that group. Such an activity was already started by Arvind for three kinds of icons, which can be extended by this academy into full form of Hindu iconography. 3. Historical Places - There were some discussions about temple catalogue of Tamilnadu in this group sometime back. I heard there is a very nice book with such a catalogue. We should extend this with geo-tag of the place, a small article about the history and how to reach that place. 4. Ancient Scriptures - Many of the members have mailed about excerpts from our scriptures so we have many of our friends who posses expertise on this topic. Digitisation of Hindu scriptures is going from various organisation, however I am always scared when I have to search about some references in scriptures, say find out in which all literature Pallava references are made. If we can come up with such an intelligent system, then it would be a great thing, at least quite helpful to me. 5. General Awareness - Heritage tours, school visits etc would help in spreading awareness about this heritage and culture. Our main target should be the coming generation, school kids etc. I have heard from many of my friends how boring history subject was. This was boring as it was not taught correctly, without field visits, without visual aids, without any specific research topics. Can we make it interesting? 6. History Articles - There is a clutter of books available in market on Indian history. Can we come up with the essence of all the books into summarised articles, say about Pallava dynasty, or Chola architecture etc.
These are very few points from my side, many of those are already suggested by other members as well.
Dear Saurabh, Arvind & VJ, I'm in for 'sculpture'. I'll need help w historical information of each. For now, just tell me what murthi you want and I'll see what I already have in my photo collection. When back in India, I'll collect more photos. kathie
PLS HELP ARCHIVING THESE MAILS SO THAT WE CAN REFER THEM QUICKLY WHEN NEEDED - say within a fortnight after hearing most of the views from respected members.