[Advaita-l] Sal Mubarak 2067

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 05:26:15 -0800
> From: dilipm12 at yahoo.com
> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Sal Mubarak 2067
> 
> Please don't use words like 'Sal Mubarak' Those words don't belong to our language. It is the language of our tormenters. Instead you can say "Nuatan Varshabhinanadan"
>  
> Dilip Mehta
> 

Dear Shri Mehta, Venkatesh Murthy and probably some others on this list,
 
I would like to place on record a protest against this criticism. Granted, at one point of time,
the words Sal and Mubarak may not have existed in Gujarati or other Indian languages. Now,
they do, and there is nothing wrong in accepting them as such. If you do not like to use words
that were originally from Arabic or Turkish or Persian, then you should not use the English
language at all. That too was originally a language of another of our tormentors.

Such jingoism is meaningless. Anyone who wants to "cleanse" all Indian languages of words
from middle Eastern languages should also first drop English completely and insist on writing
and conversing in Sanskrit or Tamil, the two most ancient Indian languages.
 
FYI, if  you listen to discourses given by contemporary Sankaracharyas, they freely use words
like Sawal and Jawab interchangeably with praSna and uttara, or ghabar interchangeably with
bhaya. Many other such linguistic examples can be cited. They do not insist upon only Sanskrit
derived words in common vernacular usage. 

Regards,
Vidyasankar