 Welcome. I welcome you all to this course called Samasa in Paninian Grammar. This is the first course on Samasa and I am here to introduce this course to all of you. In this video, I shall present in brief what all we shall be doing in this particular course. Compounding is a very important process as far as word building is concerned in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit word for this process is Samasa and this is what also appears in the title of this particular course. We also observe that this particular process is also very productive in many languages across the globe. Be it English or German for example, or the modern Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi as well as Tamil, Telugu, etc. We also have compound verbs, complex predicates which are prevalent in these languages. There is another expression that I have seen being used in the activities of natural language processing. Multi-word expressions and also local word groups. All these phenomena in modern Indian languages and also other languages in the world, they are very productive and have remarkable similarity with the process of compounding that is described in Paninian grammar. In this course, we shall study how Paninian grammar treats this particular process of compounding or Samasa. How Paninian grammar prescribes as well as describes the process of compounding. So, what is the precondition for a compound to take place? What is the theoretical implication? Can there be a theory of the process of compounding? Is there dependency involved in the process of compounding? That is a very important question. Similarly, is the question which is very crucial is about the meaning of the compound. As there is compositionality, as far as the words are concerned, so also does it exist in the realm of the meaning? So, how does the meaning get represented by the compounding process? What does the School of Grammarians or the Vaya Karanas say about this aspect? What are the types of compounds and what are their features? What are the primary features of the compound and what makes the four types of compounds distinct? In terms of the meaning, in terms of the form, etc. We shall study these and many more topics in this particular course and it is hoped that this study will enhance our understanding of the theory of compounding that is propounded by Panini in his Grammar of Samskrit and the later Paninian grammatical tradition which developed this theory further. We will focus in this particular course mainly on the Tattpurusha compound and we shall deal with the other three types of compounds namely Avyaibhava, Bahubrihi and Dvandva in the next course. I hope this course will be found fruitful and beneficial by Samskritists which are part of the group of Indologists as well as linguists and also the computer scientists. Thank you all.