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CULTURE | LANGUAGES | MULTILINGUALISM
Here is why I keep teaching Sanskrit
(and sending away messages into the clouds)
Even as a young boy, I was a bit of “another kind” of kid. I showed little or no interest in what most of my classmates were into. Much of what they did was football (soccer) and watching telly. I did neither. My interests were discovering the woodlands where we lived, swimming naked in secret forest ponds and feeling how the fish came kissing my body all over, exploring the 20-kilometer stretch of flatlands between my parents’ house and the dunes and beaches along the North Sea, horses, birds, music, and books.
And my bicycle. How many hundreds of kilometers did I ride every month on my shiny bicycle?
It was the rides and the books that made me long for exotic lands and cultures. When I was twelve, with my pocket money, I purchased my first little book about India. It was in French, not really a native language even to me, although it was the language in which my parents conversed with one another. I acquired the book in the bookshop of a Benedictine monastery that lay hidden in the forests not far from our house. I often cycled there. I was awestruck by the peaceful lifestyle of the monks, and I admired how they combined study with labor. I loved to lend a hand in the…
