Stutimaṇḍala

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Poetry Competition: Krsnakavyakusumanjali 2006

Hello All:

The poetry competition has been named as Krsnakavyakusumanjali 2006 — Offering of flower of poetry to Krishna — and the announcement page at stutimandal is here.

REGISTER REGISTER REGISTER

Have fun and let us know if you have any questions.

Wishing well,
Stutimandal

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

English Diacritics Support

Hello Friends:

At stutimandal we consistently strive to bring out new and helpful features. Today we have added one experimental poem in English Diacritics. Check it out here.

We have posted only one poem in english diacritics for feedback. Please tell us about its appearance and readability. More specifically, we will be interested in knowing if the font-size in english diacritic can be made a little bit (10%) smaller. That will a boost to the designers.

For those who are not aware of diacritics, these diacritics are a convention to help spell Sanskrit in english language and helps people from outside India learn the pronunciations. These conventions are somewhat arbitrary and can vary sometime. The convention used here is one such popular scheme.

Wishing Well,
Stutimandal

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Discussions on Poetry Competition

We are planning to have a poetry competition on a purely merit basis. The website design team will refrain from participation. In what follows, poet is used for a poet or a poetess, whichever applies.

A few thoughts that came to our mind are as follows:

1) Rules: We plan to have
strict rules. If we look back at old poetry tradition, confirmity to grammar (vyaakara.na), metric rules (cha.mda), ornation (ala"nkaara), emotion (bhaava) and theme was followed -- at the least. In order to re-clinch the past Sanskrit heritage, we wish to have all these rules in place. Any comments are appreciated.

2) Topic: Right now the topic in our mind is
Baby Krishna. We wish to coincide the deadlines for submission with SriKrishna Janmashtami in 2006, and we believe that Baby Krishna topic will do justice therein. That also marks the first anniversary of Stutimandal website.

3) Format: Since our website is dedicated to stuti or eulogies, we request only a stuti or a eulogy as a submission. Please stick to the rules mentioned in Point 1). If you don't know what cha.mda or metric rules are, wait for an article at stutimandal on the same. We don't want to promote free-verse. The length of the poem may not be more than 16 cantos or 16 stanzas. The language can be Sanskrit, Hindi, Avadhi, or Vraj. It should, however, not be a mixture. Stick to one language that you are comfortable with.

3) Submission: We are planning two-stage submissions. In the first stage, the poets will submit their poems and it will be reviewed by randomly selected reviewers. Since many words in Sanskrit have more than one meaning, we request a translation (preferably in english, hindi is fine too) as well. Five entries will be selected and then the poets will be sent with a feedback from the reviewers. The poets will have a small chance to revise their submission.

In round 2, the best poem will receive a first prize and other four poems will be honorable mentions.

4) Prizes: Unfortunately, we don't have any source of earning through the website. The prize will consist of a certificate signed by Stutimandal. Either a scanned copy, or a paper) copy will be sent to the winner.

5) Ownership: We don't wish to protect or own the submissions. Thus, the poems will remain a property of the poet only. However, we will keep the right to publish the poem of the winners at our website for an indefinite period of time.

Did we forget anything? Please let us know if some point is unclear or has not been addressed.

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Poem hits

While looking through the statistics, we found the following three poems to be the most-read (most-popular) ones:

  1. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_devi/durga_shatnaam.htm
  2. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_misc/vishnu_vandanam.htm
  3. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_misc/shiv_panchakshar.htm

To our surprise, some of the following had received very little attention. This post is just a pointer to the following poems which may have been missed by the readers:

  1. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_suur/gopal_jhulan.htm
  2. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_ganesh/ganesh_bhujangam.htm
  3. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_adi/lalita_panchakam.htm
  4. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_tulsi/uluukhal_bandhan.htm
  5. http://www.stutimandal.com/gif_tulsi/giidh_krita_raam.htm