पुराणमित्येव न साधु सर्वं (purANamityEva na sAdhu sarvam) - Not all things ancient are excellent / proper just by virtue of their vintage
In my quest for my spiritual roots, I have been digging into what is understood to be ancient wisdom. But is all ancient wisdom correct or appropriate? Is something new to be rejected if it runs contrary established viewpoints? And in a quaintly ironic way, what if we were to look to this ancient wisdom, and see what it has to say about the validity of well, ancient wisdom? Let us turn to a person we celebrate as arguably India’s greatest ever poet & dramatist. We hold him up as an example of how great our ancients were and bemoan how there has been a steady degradation in quality across all fields, particluarly literature. We turn to mahAkavi Kalidasa. What does Kalidasa himself say about this blind celebration of all things old and disparaging of anything new? But before we go there, what does the word kavi mean, since we call Kalidasa a mahAkavi , or a great kavi ? Of course, the most common meaning of the word kavi is poet. Someone of boundless imagination, who c...