 Welcome, I welcome you all to this course Introduction to Paninian Grammar. My name is Malhar Arvind Kulkarni, I am the instructor of this course. I have been teaching a course of the same title at the undergraduate level, fourth year elective at IIT Bombay for more than past 10 years. I have received tremendous amount of feedback from students during the teaching of this course. The feedback mainly catered to the contents, the overall application of the material presented and the overall treatment. Notable amongst them is the introduction to the system of Paninian Grammar, the text of Ashtadhyay, the core of the Paninian Grammar and the continuity of the tradition of Paninian Grammar till this date. I will introduce you to this wonderful grammar composed by Panini and the tradition which has continued the study of this particular grammar for past more than 2000 years and the study continues till today. Myself, I have learned this grammar at the feet of Pandit Vaman Shastri Bhagavata Pune and also Pandit Shivaram Shastri Joshi Pune. I have also learned about this grammar at the university level, thus following both the traditional as well as the university curriculum. I have been studying this grammar for more than 25 years now and I have been teaching this grammar for more than 20 years to the traditional as well as the university students and also the students here at IIT Bombay. In this course, we will study several key factors of the system of Paninian Grammar along with the key features of the text called Ashtadhyay which forms the core of the Paninian Grammar. We shall study the features of metal language with the help of which it becomes easier to decode the terse sutras which are part of this Paninian Grammar. Today, some computer scientists state that this Paninian grammar can be considered as the first instance of a grammar written in computational style. Come, let us see what the features of this grammar are. Let us see the intricacies, the complexities and the most important aspect of it, the exhaustiveness and also the deep insight that we get after studying this particular grammar. The current Paninian Grammatical Tradition also looks at this grammar from cognitive point of view and presents several insights which will be helpful to a student to understand grammar in general as well as language in general and Paninian grammar and Sanskrit language in specifics. I hope study of this grammar will help the students, the researchers, the learners to get better insights into this wonderful grammar. Thank you very much.