How this project works

The original Tamil is over two thousand years old and belongs to everyone. For translations and commentary we use only public-domain works we can name and date: G.U. Pope (1886), V.V.S. Aiyar (1916), and Parimelazhagar's 13th-century commentary. We never publish a translation or commentary we cannot freely attribute.

Every Kural shows three English translations at once — never one presented as 'the' translation. Seeing three skilled translators reach for different words is the point: it shows that translating a 2,000-year-old verse is an act of interpretation, not a lookup.

Modern explanations and translations are first drafted with AI. Drafts may be publicly previewed, but every one remains visibly labelled as pending review. Only after a named Tamil scholar reads, edits, and approves an item may it carry scholar-reviewed status; the scholar's name and approval date are then recorded and shown. Review lands chapter by chapter in two honest tiers: a chapter is sample-reviewed once a scholar has blind-read a fixed sample of its verses (the 2nd, 5th and 9th) and found no faults, and fully reviewed only when every narrative in it has been read and approved. A sampled chapter says so — we state each claim at the strength it was earned, and any fault found in a sample escalates that whole chapter to full review.

We know almost nothing reliable about Thiruvalluvar as a person. So our narratives describe the human situation a verse names — never what he 'must have witnessed.' Every narrative carries the line: we make no biographical claims about Thiruvalluvar; the narrative illuminates the situation the verse describes.

Parimelazhagar's commentary appears verbatim, in his own 13th-century Tamil — we do not modernise or rewrite his words. Where we add a plain-English explanation or a plain modern-Tamil paraphrase to make it accessible, it sits beside the original, clearly marked as an AI draft pending scholar review.