Hyderabad: Highlighting the need for reinstating values of our civilisational roots as a must to go alongside the administration’s efforts to make India a global superpower was engineer-turned-litigator J. Sai Deepak at the ‘Bharata Uvaca: A Civilisation Speaks’ event.
At the event, organised by Shankarananda Kalakshetra ‘Natyarambha’ in the city on Saturday, Sai Deepak said that while ‘India’ is a narrow take on the concept of the nation, ‘Bharat’ connotes an expansive ocean comprising a whole lot of its facets.
“Don’t dilute the core in the name of conveying the message to a broader audience,” said Sai Deepak in his presentation that opened a series of eleven TED-style talks interspersed by three classical performances at the festival under the aegis of ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’ with the support of the Union ministry of culture.
Taking a cue from a 12-minute Vedic chant that marked the start of the proceedings, renowned dancer-choreographer Dr Ananda Shankar Jayant, who conceived and curated Bharata Uvaca, said the subcontinent’s history had seen its civilisation “often roaring, sometimes whispering and always speaking.”
“We are entering the last quarter of the country’s first century of Independence, this festival will be annual,” she said, emphasising the need for people to take pride and ownership of the culture for Bharat to rise as a ‘Vishwaguru’ that can lead the world together.
Activist-commentator Anuraag Saxena, while decrying a centuries-old “institutionalised kleptomania” that saw foreign powers smuggling out the country’s invaluable heritage objects, expressed optimism over a recent reverse to the trend where no less than 500 such artefacts have returned to India in the past eight years.
Noting that public outrage seldom resulted in action in India, the speaker, in his talk on ‘Kartavya Bhava — From Whining to Winning’, called upon people to focus on “reshaping instead of reacting”.
Foreign affairs expert Gautam Chikermane, speaking on ‘India: The Rise of a Rajasic Nation’, said the country’s current dependence ratio was at 47 per cent in the 15-64 age group. “In 1987, half our population belonged to the class of ‘extremely poor’, while it is close to zero today. A rise in the strength of our domestic knowledge system bodes well for the nation,” he said.
Political analyst Shantanu Gupta, elaborating on ‘The Ramayana School’, made his presentation particularly interactive through modern apps that enabled the audience to digitally answer questions and raise their knowledge about the Valmiki epic.
Art historian Chitra Madhavan, in ‘Temples — Treasure Troves of a Civilisation’, essayed how the places of worship also functioned as centres of art, culture, and education.
Personal finance writer Monika Halan, in ‘Reclaiming the Abundance of Artha’, stressed the need for reclaiming the ancient wisdom that wealth is a definite means to fuel culture and civilisation. Exhorting the delegates to give up on film-fed tropes that portrayed money as invariably ill-gotten and evil, she gave tips on how prudent use of financial resources can work well for society.
