I've been reading up on Tamil / sanskrit poetry, and hindu mythology books once again. Not regularly, but in the evenings when I'm bored. Or avoiding writing in these pages. Every bout of interest I get a couple of weeks, I learn something new. It expands my understanding of the history and culture. Puts things in context. The dream is to project that -- along with contemporary data -- into the future, and attempt to make predictions. It's impossible, really, but an understanding of a culture does give one a sense of contentment that's otherwise quite hard to come.
Meghaduta is such a heartwrenching, garment-rendering piece. But I enjoy the commentary of it more than the actual material. I read somewhere the 'fun' thing about old sanskrit pieces is/was that they were created to open possibility for commentary. And now a compendium of commentary on those is itself a thing of its own. The commentary culture is so interesting. I've been reading this new website, china heritage, and they have old essays presented as commentary on each other. They post all essays and their commentary right in there, so it feels a lot more heady than 'western' newspapers.
Wish somebody would do that for South Asian classical works too...
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