Salute to Varagoor Sri Narayanan Mama

All facebook users need no introduction about Varagoor Sri Narayanan Mama and his contribution to the world of Mahaperiyava. This article is for the rest.

Lack of awareness about digitization is pretty significant in India. Our publishers, libraries, educational institutions have not taken a serious step towards this. When it comes to Periyava devotees, there are so many treasures that are hidden in some books, paper articles. Facebook, this blog and other sites have triggered some amount of efforts in making these contents available digitally. Couple of years back when I visited India, I showed HH Bala Periyava about how we can condense all seven volumes of Dheivathin Kural into one electronic tablet like iPad etc – not that He did not know this earlier but seeing in action is more effective. He blessed me to bring out more contents digitally. Ideally the publishers should take the lead in the digitization process than individuals like us.In fact they could sell more and make more money – I always wonder why they fail to understand this!

From that front, Sri Narayanan mama has been silently bringing out 1000s of articles from various books into digital format by typing them in Tamil Unicode for the past 2+ years. This includes articles from “Dharisana Anubhavangal”, Sakthi Vikatan and various other countless number of sources. Only those who have typed in Tamil would know how time consuming it is when compared to typing in English. Imagine typing 1000s of articles in Tamil from the scratch! It is beyond my comprehension on how much time mama must be spending on this at his age. More importantly how he managed to convince his family for the time he is spending!!!!!! While many of us (self included!!!) are making so much noise about their own work, mama has been silently doing this himalayan task! To me, this is thapas! This is what Periyava had said and we could see how mama follows! Technically speaking, this is a great digital revolution.

Mama predominantly posts in Facebook. The major problem with Facebook’s design is that content/data being very transient. The logic it follows what to display to you when you go to FB is pretty complex. Many times, the article I read 10 mts back would be gone when you visit next time!! That is the way how FB works. The only way to find out is by doing a search, which is not very easy interface anyway….Whereas in traditional websites, blogs like this, data is permanent and you can do a search on a key word, search by a tag and you can easily locate the article. I have already suggested mama to preserve those articles and posts in a web site where it would reside forever.  I have offered to post them in our blog by properly grouping them so that it would result in a great collection of digital books.

On behalf of the blog, I sincerely thank mama for his selfless contribution to the world of periyava devotees. Let us pray Mahaperiyava to give mama and his family all the health, wealth and blessings!

Thank you very much mama! My namaskarams to you!

Hara Hara Sankara Jaya Jaya Sankara!

In the next article, I will write about one similar individual, who is doing most outstanding “similar” contributions to our Sri Kanchi Sankara Matam – Sri BGS.