By Madhava Smullen
Sometimes when we see a need, the solution is to step forward and fulfill it ourselves.
This is what Arjun Bhattacharyya, a young devotee known in ISKCON as a photographer and assistant to Deena Bandhu Das, realized when he decided to volunteer his own time to add the original Bengali script that had been missing from the digital version of Sri Caitanya-caritamrita.
The service meant a lot to Arjun personally.
“I am born and brought up in Kolkata,” he explains. “So Bengali is my mother language. When I was in high school, I had to study the history of Bengali literature for two years. In our study course, there was some of Sri Caitanya-caritamrita and other Vaishnava literature, as those are the pillars of our modern Bengali language.”
When Arjun came to ISKCON in 2008, he had just finished college and didn’t have the money to buy a physical set of Sri Caitanya-caritamrita books. Upon discovering that Srila Prabhupada’s entire literary output was available online at the BBT-authorized https://vedabase.io/en/, he felt elated at the prospect of being able to study Sri Caitanya-caritamrita without having to purchase and carry around the heavy books.
To his dismay, however, there was no Bengali script above the English transliteration for each verse online, as in the print books.
Read more: https://iskconnews.org/dedicated-volunteer-brings-original-bengali-script-to-sri-caitanya-caritamrita-online,7559/
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