இலண்டன் சைவ மாநாடு (சிறப்புமலர்)

7வது சைவ மாநாடு இலண்டன் 2004 The loss of Saivaism for the youth of tomorrow Ganan Sritharan As a first generation Tamil living away from home for half of the year it is difficult to uphold Saiva traditions in my regular, everyday life. Coupled with the fact that my home is outside of London. I am amazed that I am able to maintain even a vague semblance of my religion. I have the good fortune to have parents that are well versed in Hindu traditions and have a strong link to a temple making it nigh on impossible, unless I actually wished it, to become entirely detached from my heritage. However, it does worry me that when I am older and have a family of my own I will not have this luxury. That, once grown, my inability to speak Tamil fluently and with confidence, let alone read it, will prevent my children having even a taste of the rich heritage that I, even in a very dilute form, have enjoyed all my life. My parents know which days are good and on which days festivals are celebrated through the specially printed yearly almanac and asking priests at our temple. All of this requires a competent command of the Tamil language and I fear that when I am fully grown I will be unable to maintain even my current relatively low level of piety. I appreciate that there are Tamil schools in London and that many of my peers not only have a formidable command of Tamil but are also extremely competent at traditional Tamil art forms such as Barathanatyam and Miruthangam and I admire these people greatly. I, however, also realise that there are also many Tamil children in my position whose children will inevitably be deprived of a link to their heritage even comparable to the one that we now have thanks to our parents. One can either resign themselves to the fact that our children will have very little awareness of the rich heritage from which they originate or one can take measures to prevent this woeful event from occurring. For example, if an effort were made to increase the accessibility of the Saiva religion to non-Tamil speakers by having some of the almanacs that are printed every year in English and hiring priests in our temples who can speak English fluently. Another idea may be to have a printed explanation of services in temples to aid understanding and also have all announcements and notices in English as well as in Tamil. No Easy Sollution This, however, absolves those of us who have not gone to the effort of learning Tamil of responsibility. After all, there is the opportunity open to us via the many Tamil classes that occur on the weekends in many of our temples in London. That does, however, raise a major issue that of how the classes are indeed centred, at least in the south of England, entirely in London. After all, if it means compromising a child's academic career by having them spend their weekends driving to and from London all their formative years when the current schooling system means that almost every year of their teenage years contains an important, academically relevant set of exams, most parents will choose to forgo their children's heritage in order to secure their academic future. 154 There is no easy solution to this issue. After all, the classes only exist because of the conscientiousness of the Tamil communities that organise them and, of course, large enough Tamil communities to make these classes viable only exist in large cities such as London, thus forming rather a catch-22 situation. However, as my generation grow up and move further and further out of London they are also moving away from their heritage and unless something is done about this drift in another generation's time understanding and proper practice of Saivaism will have all but petered out.