The Big Picture - Sanskrit conundrum: What's the national policy?

Guests: Shashi Tharoor (MP, Congress and former Union Minister) ; Mohd. Salim (MP, CPI-M) ; R Balashankar (National Convenor, BJP Intellectual Cell) ; Ashok Agarwal (Advocate who represents the All India Parents Association) ; Prof. Apoorvanand (Department of Hindi, University of Delhi)

Anchor: Girish Nikam

Air date: December 4, 2014

[sarkoru]

Poor balashankar. He got battered on all sides.

[MrAkashpratap]

Big Picture you must Invite Shashi Tharoor for most of the debates, love to hear his beautifully structured views with visions.
Thank you.

[acidcrashguy]

Sad to see a debate where a great language like Sanskrit that represents national heritage was viciously attacked and poorly defended. People actually compared Sanskrit - a language of Indian religions, music and poetry with German and Arabic which have no significance whatsoever in the Indian context. Also just like Israel re-learned Hebrew, Indians could relearn Sanskrit. Tamil is perhaps the only other main linguistic branch and still has thousands of Sanskrit words.

[crystalshekhar]

Girishji, please make the discussion more equitable. The spokesmen for BJP you have brought has rarely spoken substantively. Anyway, Girishji, your programme has been outstanding and all I ask is increase discussion time and bring some 'real' spokesman from the govt., who can give the viewers some clarity, which I have already mentioned in other discussions of yours. Thank you. Great show.

[MultiSainath]

when Sanskrit A compulsory subject in a British school! why not in India where it born and spreed to other world?

[MukeshKumarprotagonist]

Great debate. Exposes shallow and totally distorted world view of Sanghi ideology. May this video gain more views. Make it a compulsary viewing, I say. :P

[asifzubair]

the bjp gentleman really had very weak arguments and lacked coherence. 

[ziahasan]

Mr.Balashankar is as confused as the HRD ministry regarding the issue both on the historical aspect as well as on the legal aspect. Apart from being a scoring subject it doesn't serve any other purpose(except being sanskrit teacher or a priest). Let the students and parents decide what they want to study.