Sage of Kanchi

Deivathin Kural (Corrected Version)

Mahesh

0241

In late 2012, I thought of an idea to bring Deivathin Kural to electronic tablets/handhelds. As a first step I contacted Sri Kanchi Matam web team to discuss this. I was pleasantly surprised to hear very positive feedback with the idea of digitizing the material. However, they cautioned me on some copyright issues. Hence, they recommended me to break the project into two phases – (1) Fixing all the mistakes that are in the current online version on our matam site (2) bringing to handheld etc after all copyright issues are resolved. I kicked off this project and pulled in nearly 25 folks, who kindly agreed to participate in this spell-check project both from US & India and formed a very wonderful team – lots of moms at home, working moms, working dads, traveling executives etc etc. Major thanks should go to Shri Suresh Panchanathan in getting lots of folks from west coast and some contacts in India. Big thanks to Smt Lakshmi Anand, niece of Shri Ganapathi anna for her outstanding contribution to this project.

We started the project with great pace. We finished 2 rounds of spell check on most of the volumes. Team spent lots and lots of time in doing a fine work amidst their daily routines…It was an amazing experience to work with this team. This team – pure periyava devotees, with a passion to do some kainkaryam within their limits. They outperformed all my expectations, I must say. I have delivered 100s of IT projects – but this was the first non-IT project – globally delivered with great quality and commitment! When I was in India this January – updated both the Periyavas about this project – HH Pudhu Periyava was happy to know this effort and was kind enough to give silver coins to all volunteers who participated in this effort and blessed them all and so did HH Bala Periyava. Now we have the much accurate version of deivathin kural. I am positive that Mahaperiyava blesses all those volunteers who actually typed and worked – not me, who just asked for status 🙂 When I started, I thought this is a very easy task – but once we were into this, we realized how time consuming this is. Imagine, if spell-check itself is tough, think of Shri Ra Ganapathi anna who wrote all these seven volumes. Without the divine support (who else – our thatha ummachi only!) this is not even humanly possible! Our namaskarams to anna also for all his work.

Here is the finale – after we all are done with our work, we reached out to our matam web team to request them to upload the corrected contents to the site. I guess due to lack of time of the web masters, I haven’t received any updates yet. So, I am sharing the updated contents through this blog to the public. This will be available till Sri Matam web team uploads to their site or they raise a concern, whichever happens first.

Here are the links to the updated contents::

The team still is committed to do similar projects related to Mahaperiyava. Hope He will give us a similar project soon!

Comparing our Sri Matam site with other comparable institutions like Puttaparthi, Sringeri etc, our matam really needs to do lot of work on their site and improve the way how they can effectively deliver contents, news, announcements, maintain devotees well connected to the matam etc…There is so much they can do or they should do for the glory and the history of the peetam. I know for fact that they have absolutely no volunteers to lend hands in revamping this. I wish there is some renewed force to take this as a priority and do it right. I also wish there are more serious web developers who can volunteer to do this task. I have already offered to help them in whatever way I could.

Jaya Jaya Sankara Hara Hara Sankara

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