[Madhatter]

Mela is a Sanskrit word meaning get together. In modern usage in the United Kingdom it has become a term for a multicultural (though mainly Asian) festival incorporating music, dance, food and other aspects of British Asian culture in the UK.

Melas regularly are held in larger towns in the UK, especially in areas with large ethnic minority populations. They are often considered important as a way of improving relations between the "indigenous" (white) UK population and the Asian population. The Melas began in the nineteen nineties.

Public money is sometimes available for these festivals. They have also been seen as a way of ensuring that festivals are available for the whole population. (The Arts Council produced a study on this examining eleven festivals in the Leicester region).
.........................
The Sanskrit language (संस्कृतं saṃskṛtam, संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 22 official languages of India.

It has a position in India and Southeast Asia similar to that of Latin and Greek in Europe, and is a central part of Hindu tradition. Its pre-Classical form of Vedic Sanskrit, the liturgical language of the historical Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, the most archaic of the Vedic texts being the Rigveda.

Today, Sanskrit is mostly used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and literature, as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts.

The scope of this article is the Classical Sanskrit language as laid out in the grammar of Panini, roughly around 500 BC. Most Sanskrit texts available today were transmitted orally for several centuries before they were commited to writing.