OPPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE

Hindu Council of Australia invites expression of interests from anyone who wishes to expand their horizons and get involve with one of the biggest community events of Sydney. It will provide huge exposure and networking opportunity to the successful applicants.

We are looking for enthusiastic people who will have the opportunity to make a huge difference to the iconic fairs and the existing process. You will bring fresh ideas and show your skills at a grand stage.

If you are motivated, enthusiastic and wish to make a mark, we are looking for positions in the following areas:

• Event Manager

• Sponsorship co-ordinator

• Media co-ordinator

• Marketing co-ordinator

• Cultural co-ordinator

• Volunteering co-ordinator

Please note that these are voluntary positions.

Deepavali Fair is held in Sydney at iconic locations by Hindu Council. The fair is extremely popular among Indian Diaspora and a major event in Sydney’s events calendar. It is a means to bond with cultural roots and acquaint children to the rich Indian culture and heritage. This year we wish to expand the program to the wider sections of the Australian community.

Hindu Council of Australia Ltd is a leading community organisation which acts as a representative organisation of various Hindu associations.

Please feel free to contact Raman Bhalla (Program Director) on 0401 057 224 to discuss any of these positions in detail.

Please apply in strictest confidence at: info@deepavali.com.au AND or ring 1300 HINDUS www.hinducouncil.com.au

A gesture that had touched the ‘Iron Lady’ in India

Margaret Thatcher did not approve of the state of emergency in force during her visit to India in 1976. But she was so touched by a gesture of her host and prime minister Indira Gandhi that she made it a point to mention it in her memoirs.

“I lunched with Indira Gandhi in her own modest home, where she insisted on seeing that her guests were all looked after, and clearing away the plates while discussing matters of high politics,” Thatcher, who died recently, wrote in The Path to Power.

“Both her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, were present, although it was the former who had most to say for himself. He had, indeed, allegedly been responsible for many of the abuses such as forced sterilisation and compulsory re-housing which had provoked such bitter opposition,” she said.

“But in spite of everything I found myself liking Mrs Gandhi herself. Perhaps, I naturally sympathised with a woman politician faced with the huge strains and difficulties of governing a country as vast as India.”

Thatcher had visited India in September 1976 as an opposition leader, three years before she became prime minister, at the invitation of Indira Gandhi. The British press had criticised her for her comment post-visit, “I came to learn and not to comment.”

Yet, in her memoirs, Thacker did say that she did not see eye-to-eye on Indira Gandhi’s emergency and the restrictions on the press.

“In spite of a long self justificatory account she gave me of why the state of emergency had been necessary, I could not approve of her government’s methods,” said Thatcher, who was called the Iron Lady for the way she handled some pressing labour issues.

“She had taken a wrong turning and was to discover the fact at her Party’s devastating election defeat in 1977,” Thatcher added.

The fact that Indira Gandhi’s gesture of clearing the plates herself had touched Thatcher is also mentioned in the declassified documents from British archives that were released in December 2006.

Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of Britain died on April 7, after suffering a stroke. She was 87.

delhi Police turn to yoga as stress buster

Battling crime day in and day out, Delhi’s policemen are a totally stressed out lot. So now the men in khaki are turning to yoga as a stress buster.

After yoga classes showed positive results at one police station, Delhi Police are planning to take them to more men in the capital.

“Our men daily deal with crime, criminals and work for abnormal hours on occasion. All this is bound to lead to stress,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Northwest Delhi) P Karunakaran.

It was his initiative to conduct a yoga camp at the Jahangirpuri police station.

At the camp March 18-April 2, around 35 police personnel participated. The session was held between 4.30 pm-5.30 pm every day. The exercise will continue in the district’s 17 police stations.

“We got a very good response, and now similar yoga camps can be organised in other police stations across the city,” Karunakaran added. Delhi has 180 police stations.

“The classes were successful and satisfying. I am getting feedback from participants that they feel a change in themselves after attending the yoga classes,” Assistant Sub-Inspector Pushpendra Kumar, who conducted the class, said.

He said the policemen found it “very helpful”.

“We could notice the slight changes in them due to yoga. They look more tensionfree, relaxed and have more energy for work. We also noticed an improvement in their day-to-day health problems, including depression,” Kumar said.

Kumar, 30, who has been practising yoga for the last five years, said he used to instruct policemen on yoga wherever he was posted.

Another senior police officer said, “such classes also help in increasing the working capacity of the policemen”.

The idea of yoga was explored when it was noticed that policemen were feeling stressed due to being overworked.

There were complaints of sleep-related problems, headaches and indigestion.

“A policemen has to be on duty for more than 10 hours a day, specially those on the law and order duties or posted at a police station. Yoga is very helpful in relaxing and rejuvenating the person,” stated Constable Satender Singh, who attended the classes.

Australian know-how for Jaipur’s Man Singh museum makeover

A five-member heritage delegation from Australia has arrived in Jaipur to collaborate with the Maharaj Sawai Man Singh II Museum Trust on heritage conservation and cultural tourism. The delegation will tour the Pink City and “assess the condition of the museum and the artifacts”.

The Australian and Indian teams will take part in a joint forum on museum collections and conservation, heritage architecture and conservation, and cultural tourism, the embassy of Australia said.

AusHeritage chairman and Australian cultural heritage expert, Vinod Daniel, set the tone for the forum with an address on “the Museum of the 21st Century”. He said museums had to move out of the conventional spaces and reach out to people and conservation technology had to be upgraded to control depreciation of heritage and cultural artifacts with time and extreme Indian weather.

The participants visited the Jaipur City Palace and the Jaigarh Fort.

Australian Deputy High Commissioner

Bernard Philip, said in New Delhi, that he was delighted to be at the City Palace for the forum.

“Initiatives such as this one, funded by the Australia-India Council, are an important part of the ongoing conversation between our two countries,” he said.

Aditi Mehta, Rajasthan’s additional chief secretary, will inaugurate the forum, hosted by the secretary of the Museum Trust, Diya Kumari. “This forum is yet another effort on the part of the trust to learn the scientific and modern methods to conserve our heritage architecture as well as promoting cultural tourism,” she said.

“We are happy to join hands with AusHeritage in this endeavour,” Divya Kumari added.

Vinod Daniel said the five-member AusHeritage team had a wide range of expertise and he was delighted to collaborate on a project involving the City Palace, a site on every Indian visitor’s wishlist.

In addition to Daniel, Australian experts visiting Jaipur for the forum are collections specialist Charlotte Galloway, heritage architecture specialist Roger Beeston, materials scientist Jim Mann and cultural tourism academic, Keir Reeves.

The Australia-India Council (AIC) established in 1992 to encourage peoplepeople links between the two countries, has been supporting AusHeritage members to work on many projects in India, including providing assistance for designing an international exhibition gallery for the Chatrapathi Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, developing a charter for conservation of buildings for the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture, providing capacity building for museums in Assam, Kerala and West Bengal, besides Mumbai and Delhi, and developing a function brief for a Tagore museum in Shanthinketan.

AusHeritage has memoranda of understanding with INTACH and the Madras Christian College.

Indian Jane Austen’s death ends rich era of crossover literature

Described by English writer-editor Ian Jack as the Jane Austen of India, award-winning novelist and screenplay writer Ruth Prawar Jhabvala was renowned for her evocative novels of the rainbow societies of 1920th century India, two of which became successful films.

Jhabvala, 85, died on April 3 in her Manhattan home of a pulmonary disorder, long-time friend and associate James Ivory told the media. She lived in a modest apartment in Manhattan decked up with books and the trophies she brought home for her writing.

Her novels were full of rich colour and details of India that she had adopted as her homeland, and the people inhabiting her books were like her, global citizens juxtaposed against Indian society and drawing on the commonalities and the clash of cultures.

Jhabvala moved to India in the early 1950s following her remarriage to Parsi architect Cyrus Jhabvala. The era with its vestiges of the British Raj, the decadence of the native royalty, the economic gulf between the elite and the masses, cultures, relationships across multi-ethnic lines and lifestyles that allowed the tradition and western modernism to co-exist, captured the literary imagination of the young English literature post-graduate from the University of London.

Two of her iconic classics were The Householder (1960), and Heat and Dust (1975), that won the Booker Prize in 1975. Both of them were adapted into movies by Merchant-Ivory Productions, with whom she collaborated for nearly 50 years for nearly two-dozen scripts.

The Householder is built around its lead character Prem, who graduates from a student to a householder. It chronicles his experiences, his crisis of spiritual identity and matured independence through a cast of characters like Prem’s mother, wife, his high school friends, the white folks in India and their servant, who is Prem’s landlord.

In Heat and Dust, Jhabvala looks at two generations of impetuous Indo-British women in the country who become pregnant outside wedlock and move to live in seclusion. The story is told through a narrator, whose life takes off on her English step-grandmother Olivia who is charmed by a nawab and flees his principality over a pregnancy scandal.

The fair petite writer, born to a German Jewish family in Cologne, was influenced by the cultural millieu of central Europe before the world wars.

“I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves,” she wrote in one of her short story anthologies, How I Became the Holy Mother

But her passion for central Europe changed one evening as the family sat on the terrace of their home watching a Nazi parade. Her parents, Marcus and Eleanora, were later arrested but let off. They fled to Britain with Ruth and son Siegbert in 1939.

According to Jhabvala’s biographers, Marcus committed suicide in 1948 after he came to know how his clan had died during the Holocaust. Her chequered childhood was a source of deep torment for the sensitive writer.

Says writer Janet Watts in The Guardian, “Jhabvala never wrote of her early life. She never spoke of it in public, until 1979, when she received the Nell Gunn International fellowship and gave a public lecture in Edinburgh. Her chosen subject was disinheritance”.

“I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I amnothing,” Watts quoted Jhabvala, “who liked it that way” as saying.

Literature became Jhabvala’s shelter, her world of creative expression to pour our her angst and script a new identity. She wrote eight anthologies of short stories and more than a dozen novels which also included Out of India, Three Continents and My Nine Lives

Jhabvala was honoured with several awards including two Academy Awards for the screenplays of the The Room With A View and Howards’ End, the Bafta award for Heat and Dust, the O’Henry for Refuge in London and the Writers’ Guild of America award.

India successfully test fires nuclear-capable Agni-II missile

India successfully test-fired its nuclearcapable Agni-II strategic ballistic missile from a military base in Odisha on April 6, a defence official said.

The test was conducted from Wheeler’s Island in Bhadrak district, around 200 km from Bhubaneshwar, at about 10.20 am by army personnel as part of routine usertrials, said M.V.K.V. Prasad, director of the Integrated Test Range.

“The missile successfully hit the target. It was a perfect launch,” he said.

The medium-range missile with a range of over 2,000 km has already been inducted into the army, and is part of the Strategic Forces arsenal for nuclear deterrence. The Agni-II is part of India’s Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme.

The two-stage surface-to-surface missile, equipped with an advanced high-accuracy navigation system and guided by a novel state-of-the-art command and control system, is powered by a solid rocket propellant system.

The missile weighs 17 tonnes and its range can be increased to 3,000 km by reducing the payload. It can be fired from both rail and road mobile launchers. It takes only 15 minutes for the missile to be readied for firing.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation first tested Agni-II in 1999.

However, the Indian Army’s Strategic Forces Command, which operates the missile, could test it only May 17, 2010 after two successive failures in 2009.

The failed tests did not meet the mission’s desired objectives as, on both occasions, the missile lost speed and deviated from its flight path.

Since then, it has been successfully tested several times. The latest successful test once again proved the reliability of the missile, the official said.

Water management must for India: President

President Pranab Mukherjee recently said efficient water management is crucial to keep pace with population growth and economic development.

“Available water must be managed judiciously to meet the twin burden of population growth and economic development. Conservation, balanced distribution and reclamation of used water are essential cogs in the wheel of water management,” Mukherjee said while inaugurating the India Water Week 2013 with the theme ‘Efficient Water Management: Challenges and Opportunities’ organised in New Delhi by the Ministry of Water Resources.

He added that India is home to 17 per cent of the world’s population but has only four per cent of its renewable water resource.

He said “severe drought in some parts of the country, particularly in Maharashtra, was a matter of grave concern.”

“The increasing occurrence of droughts and floods in India has underlined the need to find solutions to improve the management of water resources,” said the president.

The president said adverse impact of climate change on the hydrologic cycle was leading to variations in rain cycles.

“This has often resulted in occurrence of floods in some areas and drought in others. Climate change also has the potential to affect ground water by reducing its table and quality,” he said.

Mukherjee said the “government must contain decreasing ground water levels through improved technology and better management and rain water harvesting should be popularised. Water supply, especially in urban areas, should be metered to boost conservation and ensure recovery of user charge,” he said.

He said the agriculture sector was a big user of water and the total irrigation potential is close to 94 million hectare.

“The strategy of ‘reduce, recycle and reuse’ must find application in our farmlands. Our irrigation system should encourage judicious use of water. Microirrigation techniques like drip and sprinkler, and adoption of cropping pattern suited to natural resource endowments should mark our approach to water-saving in agriculture,” he said.

Stressing that citizens should have access to safe drinking water, he said investment in water and sanitation infrastructure can reduce child mortality across countries by an average of 25 deaths per 1,000 child births.

“From 76 per cent in 1990, the proportion of global population with safe drinking water source has increased to 89 per cent in 2010. The number of people benefited by this has increased over this period by two billion, of which our country accounts for more than one-fourth. But there is still a significant portion of humanity which remains denied of access to this basic necessity,” he said.

“Many of our rural areas are bereft of basic water infrastructure, requiring women to spend a considerable amount of time and energy in collection of water, thereby depriving them from pursuing income generating activities,” he said.

IANs