BENGALURU: Developed like a simple game that involves drawing cards from a deck and collecting a good set, Charu Smitha Rao and Neelacantan Balasubramanian have created DevaBhaasha, a Sanskrit card game. It will be launched soon and sold across the country.
The concept struck the Bengaluru-based business partners 18 months ago, during the first few months of the pandemic. “We always thought about how to revive our cultural roots/language and have made games before to promote Kannada. My partner, Neel, was interested in learning Sanskrit and brainstormed with an expert in the language, and we developed the idea for DevaBhaasha,” said Charu.
While building the game’s logic, the couple learnt that picking up Sanskrit was difficult without being familiar with its grammar. However, they wanted to create a card game for people who have no familiarity with the language or its grammar. “We went ahead and made it with a ‘language-first’ approach. This is aided using a combination of colours, symbols and patterns, making sentence formation easy for the player,” Charu added.
