Languages....

Why do languages seem to be more of a barrier? Each language has its own repertoire of beautiful works that it does seem highly impossible to appreciate their inherent beauties. To heighten the misery, there are these prejudiced and heavily jaundiced opinions on certain languages.

To add more salt into the wounds, certain works that were meant for ease of comprehension and for the layman; have become esoteric in nature to the people of today. While transliterations do thankfully exist, none of them do justice to the original work of art/ literature.

To name a few, (a not so comprehensive list)

• Thyagaraja Krithis in Telugu - highly philosophical in nature, yet comprehended by a few fortunate souls
• Purandaradasa Keerthanas in Kannada - ironically, simple in content and beautiful in compositions, meant for the layman
• Tirrukural in Tamil - words of wisdom from Tiruvalluvar
• Kabir, Rahim and the vocal compositions of Hindustani classical music in Hindi - profound philosophy in supposedly "simple" language
• Rabindrasangeet in Bengali - the songs of devotion, love, romance, nature, and patriotism
• Pablo Neruda's odes in Spanish - all types of love - both divine and materialistic find sweet mellifluous expressions in his poetry
• Rumi, Hafiz and Khayyam - beautiful poetry in Persian; when the transliterated works are unimaginably beautiful, then what can one say about the originals.
  
• Ghazals, Shers and Shayari's in Urdu
  
• The Gita, Vedas and the Upanishads in Sanksrit
• and so on....
  

What can one do with his/her ignorance of the languages? Doesn't instrumental music sound as the solution?