Motivation
- One of the greatest (and useful) pleasures we’ve had in tough times is retreat for a while into the world of beautiful subhAShita-s - and then burst back out like the vRtraghna armed with dadhIchi’s bones.
- I especially like online collections curated by some friends and myself:
- since a book is not always available, and
- I want to collect + easily access choice ones for future enjoyment.
- But it is tedious (atleast for me) to sit in front of a computer to do the following:
- read them,
- or scour the internet for new ones
- or collect favorites in a spreadsheet
- or just annotate them with comments.
- So, it is desirable to:
- make the above as simple and easy as possible,
- and to share our collective labor so that we can benefit more easily from each others’ work.
A Universal database
We’ve set out to build a **database of subhAShita-s (= worthy quotes)*- which is:
- Universal
- Its goal is to contain within it every worthy subhAShita- ever composed.
- In fact, the ambition encompasses all languages, *verse- and *prose- forms.
- Freely and easily available. Anyone should be able to
- Access it
- Export it in other formats
- Present it in any way users will find convenient.
- Eg. the upcoming [subhAShita-pratimAlA] app project.
- Growing constantly in number
- sarasvatI still suckles some amongst us at her bosom!
- Growing constantly in annotations/ ratings
- add annotations (rating, description, translations, metre, flaws, sources …)
Expected extensions
- We hope that this will motivate other such long-sought-after universal databases for sanskrit connoiseurs, like: one for metres.
- The clients built for this database could serve as a model for other kAvya readers.
- Similarly, one can build a collaboratively annotated and rated collection of verses/ sentences within the context of long sequential works (rather than free floating subhAShita-s).