Yes devanagiri is indeed an impressive design. But to introduce it now to replace a well established tamizh script which has wide and deep reach into the populace? Forget it - It isnt going to happen.
The goal is noble but in real world, people arent going to buy nor should government get into the role of enforcing it. No government can realistically justify extending a script to represent works other languages. A nobler (personal) goal is for people to actually learn the other languages and read the other scripts.
But it would easier to extend the tamizh script to accomodate sounds - particularly those that in well known words already unoffcially part of in the language. It has happened before (ja, ksha, sha), and at that time more should have been done.
If I may be the devil's advocate, as I hinted earlier, this "free and uninhibited" mixing of sanskrit words into tamizh context was probably an inclination of people only of some communities - communities who were signicifantly powerful in the social strata in the past. And they unknowningly (or let us say not deliberately), made the problem significantly worse than it could have been. This would be the counter-argument.
For example, in tamizh CM krithis it may be easier to find occurences of kamalalOcani instead of tAmaRaikkaNNi
. Although no trouble representing either one in this case - i hope you get my point. Why is this? Why does a tamizh krithi begin "gajavadana karuNA sadanA, Sankara bAlA lambOdara sundara". Dont get me wrong, i like this krithi, i love the composer and greatly admire his works and I am
not singling him in any way. But notice that
every word is a sanskrit word or sanskrit based word, and some of them have no meaning in tamizh, and some do have but are used in forms which i do not think is proper in tamizh (karuNA!). This simply points to a trend in tamizh CM krithis, which magnifies the problem significantly, and in many ways made the problem take on giant arms and tentacles.
But this the past and things are the way it is. Given all this, IMO, the solution that could work is to extend the tamizh script. Atleast try to differentiate bAvam (a well known tamizh morph of bhAvam) from pAvam for god sakes
!
Arun