My Kannada classes

My mother tongue, Kannada has had a dialect that is called as Havyaka. This is the language I was born in and this is what I've spoken since then, at home or with relatives. However, this is not what people speak outside in general and most Kannadigas will raise their eyebrows when they hear this dialect. So I've made efforts to talk some sort of mixed Kannada for Bangaloreans to make sense out of all the nonsense that I utter! Okay, thats how far my Kannada skills go, that is, to spoken language. My reading and writing Kannada is limited to split alphabets and joining them at the pace of a tortoise's walk, even slower sometimes.

A solution to this was found when I visited Ramakrishna ashram a week or so back. On my enquiring whether they had printed bhajans that are sung in the ashram daily for others to read and sing along, I was asked: "which language do you want them in?" I thought "wow, thats interesting" and said "say, Sanskrit or Hindi". After much trouble at their end, they dug up a couple of English books that had transliterations of some bhajans that was of no use for the purpose. So I decided not to buy them. Instead, one of the guys suggested: learn Kannada! I thought again: "ah! what an opportunity and what a blessed way to learn". So I decided to buy the entire set of bhajan books in Kannada and since then, on all my visits, I've begun my Kannada classes... yes, at the ashram, learning from bhajans and that too, from great teachers: Meera, Kabir, Shankaracharya, Swamis of Ramakrishna Math, Tulsidas, etc.. the list being perhaps, endless!!!