From: narayana@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Kuram T Narayana)
Subject: On Telugu Digests: A clarification
Organization: Penn State Computer Science
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 19:26:04 GMT

Recently I have seen a spate of posts asking whether Telugu digests belong
to a news group called soc.culture.indian.telugu.

When the Telugu digests came into being, I started posting the same 
on the sci for many reasons:

a) We wanted the membership of WCTN to contribute their best to 
  the improvement of culture based articles on sci. We felt that
  posting the digests inproves the quality of articles on the net!
  This holds even now!

b) Telugu culture is an integral part of the Indian culture. Without
 the culture of Aryavartha, Telugu culture cannot survive! It is
 like cutting the umbilical chord of the child and the mother.

c) Without the Telugu culture, Indian culture has lost a limb,
  and that is unspeakable.

d) The creation of scit is not driven from the WCTN. It was an
  independent idea! We have made that clear earlier itself.

e) We try our level best to improve the quality of the articles
  in the digests so that non-telugu speaking people are also
  attracted to the contents of the digests!

f) The digests are experimental. We have only put out about 44
 digests now! Constructing quality digests of interest to all
 people takes time! We try our level best to improve the quality
 within the free time available to us.

g) Some may argue that transliterated telugu text in the digests
 does not interest the sci readership. My contention is that
 language diversity is an integral part of India, more importantly
 it is the culturally enriching aspect of India. It is precisely such posts
 that bring cultural contributions of the diverse citizens of India
 to the attention of the wider audience. This is very important
 for achieving cultural understanding and linguistic tolerance.

 h) For quite sometime I used to post the early history of India.
 For reasons of time, I have currently suspended that effort. I hope to
 come back to the same as the time goes by! That component of the digests
 was being read by a lot of sci readership.

 i) Digest 44 introduces the Sankhya theological doctrine. In the next
 few digests I hope to bring the axiomatic elements of the Sankhya
 philosophy which predates the vedanthic thought! Though Sankhya
 has not independently survived, its influence on Buddhism and 
 its absorption into the vedanthic thought is very much known.
 I hope to bring in digest 45 (in an day or two) the liberation
 axioms of Sankhya and thereafter the Causality axioms. 

 g) These are only the metaphysical elements. Telugu digests contain
 a number of literary discussions on alakaras,  the literary contributions
 from cinema, poetry dating back to the 9th century AD, customs of
 Andhra people, and of course our own set of values! These are all
 part and parcel of Indian culture.

 That is the reason why I continue to post the digests on sci and
 will do so as long as we can produce digests of quality!
 Having scit does not change this a bit!

 regards

 ..kt


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