Staff Reporter-
info@indiannewslink.co.nz
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, one of the foremost cultural and social organisations of India will open its New Zealand Chapter later this month with an official ceremony in Auckland.
India’s High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli will inaugurate the Chapter at the Kelston Community Hall in the West Auckland suburb of Henderson on December 25.
National MP Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, Former King George’s Medical University (Lucknow) Vice-Chancellor Dr Om Prakash Singh, Fiji Education Ministry Senior Education Officer Ramesh Chand and Sydney based Engineer Harmohan (Harry) Walia will be among the Guests of Honour at the event.
An Indian media team, comprising Sarjana Sharma (Kabir Communications), Ravi Kant Mittal (Sanskar TV), Seema Gupta (Aaj Tak and India Today), Ravindra Prabhat (Parikalpana Samay) and Dr Anita Srivastava (Rewant Magazine) will also be present at the programme.
Suman Kapoor, Founder-President of the Waikato Chapter of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is also the Founder-President of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in New Zealand. She has been working for more than a year to establish the Chapter in this country.
“The highlights of the inaugural ceremony will include a cultural performance by Kusum Verma, a popular folk singer from Uttar Pradesh, launch of ‘Thatee,’ a collection of short stories by Dr Srivastava and a discussion on international blogs. The programme will be open to all,” she said.
Established by Kulapati Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi on November 7, 1938, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is considered as ‘Adventure in Faith’.
“It is about faith in India’s Past, Present and Future. The Bhavan is based on the preservation and propagation of Bharatiya Sanskriti (Indian culture) and Sanskrit, the mother of languages, the ‘Aakshaya Patra,’ an inexhaustible reservoir. From a modest status as an Indological research institution, the Bhavan has steadily grown to be a comprehensive, cooperative, apolitical, national movement with an international outlook. It seeks to inculcate a value-based life. The promotion of ethical and spiritual values in everything that it does,” an official communique said.
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is the only comprehensive organization of its kind in India
and perhaps the only one in the world.
Multi-dimensional programmes …
devoted to life itself as it were.
… Bhavan’s large and growing extended family continues to grow.
It steadfastly adheres to the Vedic ideal:
“Let noble thoughts come to us from every side.”
The Bangalore Kendra was started in 1965 in rented premises. The Government of Karnataka and the Corporation of the City of Bangalore had allotted 3.363 sqm land on lease for 99 years.
The foundation-stone was laid by Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minister of India, on January 23, 1965. Dr. V.V.Giri, the then Rashtrapati, inaugurated the building on November 16, 1969.
As a young man, Kanhaiyalal Maneklal Munshi was imbued with a sense of India’s greatness. Not yet out of his teens, he learned from his mother’s songs and stories about the sages and seers of India’s past. The heritage that these master-spirits represented was ingrained in the young Munshi deeply; and later this incipient perception received an adult dimension.
The seeds so sown were precognitive and were backed by K. M. Munshi’s great inner strength, which prompted and sustained his external actions. His sense of India as the Motherland of the Spirit impressed him irreversibly. And so, as he moved professionally and politically, rung by rung, it was with a sense of pride in the cultural, intellectual and spiritual heritage of India. India was for him not just a nation but an ongoing civilization; not an accident of history but a design of destiny. For him the vitality of Indian culture and its self renewing greatness constituted a living principle. Like most others of his generation and class, Munshi took to the study of law and rose to the pinnacle of his profession even in the era of legal giants. It was but natural that law led to politics and politics to the service of the country’s heritage. The call of Mahatma Gandhi for sacrifice led to Munshi bidding goodbye to his lucrative practice and prepared to risk his all in the fight against injustice in and to his country. Also his training and temperament inclined him to constitutionalism. The framing of the new nation’s supreme statute called for the gift of idealism as well as realism. Munshi was possessed of both. He regarded India’s independence in 1947 as an opportunity for an ascent once again. He believed that the people of India had it in them to climb up into a new millennium. Munshi showed that a man with pride in the past could also have faith in the future through the instruments of science and technology.
Today when the world is so conscious of the environment and of ecological factors, it is edifying to note that as much as half a century ago, Munshi’s Vanamahotsava scheme heralded the impulse for preserving ecology.
unshi’s vision was as deep as it was vast. A heightened commitment, the genuineness, sincerity and dedication of his played an immensely crucial role in bringing stature to a name which was a binding force of a pan-Indian movement, a pan-Indian spirit and a pan-Indian ethos which would present to contemporary Indians, and to the world at large, a glimpse of the composite magnificence of ancient times.
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.
