OUT OF THIS WORLD

For the past few days I have been taking digital photos of each page of an old Bengali book. The book is so old and crumbly that I have to be very gentle, and using a scanner would be too damaging. I take photos of about 40 pages, then transfer the photos from my camera to my computer, rename them for future reference, delete the photos from the camera (it has a small memory), check on the computer that the photos are not blurry (I am not a good photographer), re-take the photos for any blurred pages, transfer the new shots to the computer, rename them, then start the same process again with the next 40 or so pages. I can think of nothing more mind-numbingly boring to do and it is hard for me to understand how some people actually like to do this kind of thing and even have full-time permanent jobs that involve such repetitive tasks that require so much attention to detail.

The only thing that is keeping me going, and the only reason that this hasn’t driven me complete mad yet, is knowing that this book is written by Bimalaprasada Siddhanta-Sarasvati (aka Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur) and that I am helping to preserve our Gaudiya Vaisnava heritage.

The book is the Vrihaspati and it is dated 1897. In this book, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur provides Bengali translations and commentary on the Goladhyaya of the Siddhanta-siromani of Bhaskara, as well as the Laghu Jataka of Varahamihira, and he also gives some astronomical tables that I presume he calculated himself.

I suppose that the moral of this blog post is that unbearable tasks become bearable when done for Krishna. This reminds me of the time when I took some students from the University of Southampton to Bhaktivedanta Manor for the weekend and their kitchen service was to cut up big blocks of cheese into lots of small cubes. One of them remarked that “I never knew that cutting cheese could be so much fun!” – they had understood that doing something for Krishna is quite different to doing something for material gain. I have had similar experiences rolling hundreds of puris for the Sunday feast.

Still, if I had to do this book photography for more than a week, I doubt that my surrender or devotion would stretch that far. Hopefully I will finish in the next couple of days.

When I have finished taking the photos, I will try to get the book preserved because this may be the only remaining copy of the book in existence. I’ll also try to find someone who can translate the book from Bengali to English so that the book can be used for research purposes for the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium in Mayapura, but it is a very difficult translation task since the translator must know Bengali, Sanskrit, English and mathematical astronomy. Please let me know if you have ever met such a person!