Nayan Sthankiya is a Canadian photojournalist of East Indian decent, currently based in India covering international news in the Asia Pacific region. He has traveled to over 40 countries world wide. He studied multi-media arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Nayan slowly gravitated to photography. After spending a year lobbying the Chinese for the release of an imprisoned Korean photojournalist, he realized the power of the image to effect change and to inform and teach the world.
I feature Nayan's photo essay on a Sanskrit school in Karnataka, India. Sanskrit is one of the world's oldest languages and is still in use in India today. Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has influenced many modern-day languages of the world. A school in the tiny village of Melkote is dedicated to its study, and is an archive for some 2000 texts. The school has been in operation for the last 150 years.
Nayan's Indian Sanskrit
