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 but the script used is more or less the same.

Devanagari as an alternative script for all Indian languages was advocated by Vinoba. Once people start reading each others language they will see many common factors in them. Culturally, India is one nation. It is an Ancient Hindu culture where most of the rituals and practices are common. This commonality is very essential to our culture.

Vinoba was advocating this idea of a common script when there was a clamour for reorganisation of the country on the basis of languages. In his own way, he had an important dream. He said that since China and Japan still use a pictographic script, they also need to adopt an additional script. If India uses a common script, China and Japan may also find that Devanagari is a more stand- ardised script, suitable for modern machine languages with only one sign for one alphabet. Computer users are already finding Sanskrit an easier language for computing than others.

Vinoba said, “If the Roman is the script of the West, Devanagari will be the script of the East tomorrow.”

With love,

Yours, L.N. Godbole

Letter FS

30th December, 1990 My dear Pranav,

The Gita had a great influence on Vinoba. It has been commented upon by many people in India and abroad. Shankarcharya wrote his commentary on it. So did Lokmanya ‘Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba. Each one interpreted it in his own way. The influence of the Gita on Vinoba was manifold.

Vinoba rated the Gita on par with his mother. In Marathi alone there are 65 translations of it. Vinoba’s mother wanted to

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