True even the old inscription (on the bell) is pretty easy to read, compared to some of the old stuff you find in temples in Madurai / Tirupati.
Wow, first time I've heard of it. Read some of the article. Seems like Malayalam, Sinhalese and one or two other languages are derived from Grantha, and Tamil is a sister language of it.
Also interesting is that the article says that at some period, some documents were written in a mixture of Sanskrit and Grantha, sometimes mixing them even in the same word(!)
Edit: IIRC, I also first got to know about the Modi script via some earlier thread on HN: