Annual Report-2004-2005
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2004-2005 THIS IS THE 44th Annual Report of the India International Centre for the year commencing February 2004 up to 31 January 2005. It will be placed before the 49th Annual General Body Meeting of the Centre, to be held on the 28th of March 2005. The tenure of the existing elected representatives on the Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees, from both the Individual and Corporate membership segments, will come to an end on the 31st of March 2005. The Centre would like to place on record its gratitude to the two outgoing Trustees, Shri S.K. Singh and Dr Arun Nigavekar, and to Shri Inder Malhotra, Lt. Gen. (retd) A. S. Kalkat, Dr S. M. Dewan, Dr R. K. Pachauri, Shri M. H. Ansari and Prof. (Mrs.) Sneh Bhargava (members of the Executive Committee), for the interest they have taken and the valuable support they provided towards the Centre’s functioning. The process of filling up the vacancies for the ensuing two-year period, 1 April 2005 to March 2007, has been underway since December 2004. The results of the elections will be announced in the forthcoming Annual General Body Meeting of the Centre. In the year’s national honours list, twenty-five of the Centre’s distinguished Members were vested with Padma awards. Dr Karan Singh, Member of Parliament and a Life Trustee was awarded the Padma Vibhushan. Earlier, Dr Kapila Vatsyayan, also a Life Trustee, and a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, was conferred the ‘Lalit Kala Ratna Award’ by the Akademi on the occasion of its golden jubilee celebrations. Shri S. K. Singh, an Elected Trustee of the Centre, was appointed as Governor of Arunachal Pradesh on 16 December 2004. The Centre wishes all of them continued success in their valuable endeavours. The Centre records the sad passing away of sixty-five of its Members during the past year. Some of them had been closely associated with the programme activities for many years, and their departure is a great loss. 1 The sudden passing away of a former Director (1979-1986), Shri U. S. Bajpai, is mourned by the staff and officers as well as all those who had known him during his long association with the Centre. The Centre continued to make its facilities available, free of charge or at subsidized rates, to support activities of a number of organizations, which pursue objectives worthy of support. During the period under review subventions amounting to Rs. 49.13 lakhs were provided, enabling a large number of institutions to have their programmes at the Centre. Programmes During the past year the Centre organized 262 seminars, talks and discussions, and 618 cultural presentations, documentaries and feature films (month-wise details of programmes organized during the period February 2004-January 2005 are given in Appendices I to VI). Highlights of some of the programmes are given below. New Initiatives The Centre, since inception, has been the preferred venue for the finest discourses, debates, lectures and an array of art forms–both Indian and international–like dance, music, poetry, paintings and films. The IIC EXPERIENCE: A FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS is an initiative whose distinctive features is the range of art forms that it presents–dance, music, theatre, poetry, paintings, films, cuisine–all in the unmatched ambience of the buildings and gardens created by the genius of Stein. The Festival will be an annual celebration, by an institution that has, over the years, evolved into something unique. Despite the paucity of time for its preparation, the first ‘IIC Experience’ festival was held between 5-10 November, and it was an enormous success. 2 Two exhibitions were organized in the course of the 6-day festival. The first exhibition was titled ‘India-Views from the 18th and 19th Centuries’. It was based on rare material which is housed in the IIC Library, namely, the three very unusual collections: the India Collection of the British Council, the Himalayan Collection of the Himalayan Club and the Bilgrami Collection. Photographs of prints from these rare collections, displaying sketches of people, social life, flora and fauna, food, sports, merchandize and manufacture, education, administration of justice and monuments of India during the eighteen and nineteen centuries, were exhibited. The second exhibition was ‘The Elements’, comprising installations and sculpture. This was held in the Gandhi- Martin Luther King Plaza, under the Pilkhan trees. The three artists whose works were displayed were Nilima Sheikh, Kristine Michael and Jyotsna Singh. During the festival a special issue of the Centre’s quarterly journal, Voices at the Centre: The IIC Interviews was released by Dr Karan Singh, to commemorate 30 years of the journal’s existence. Performing Arts programmes were held in the Fountain Lawns. These included a khayal recital by Shubha Mudgal for Hindustani music; a Bharatanatyam dance performance by Alarmel Valli; music and dances from Sikkim; Carnatic vocal recital by Aruna Sairam; a Jazz concert by the Capital Jazz Swingers; and Transpositions, a theatrical show using puppets, dancers and actors, produced and directed by Dadi Pudumjee and the Ishara Puppet Theatre. All programmes were extremely well attended by Members and the public in general. A FESTIVAL OF WORLD CINEMA CLASSICS was held in the Auditorium and twenty-one classic films were screened, like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and other classics by Charles Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, David Lean, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, 3 Glauber Rocha, Tomas Gutierez Alea, Kamal Amrohi, Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Carlos Saura, and Zhang Yimou. Each day culminated in a buffet dinner in the Rose Garden which was open to both Members and non-members. The Centre’s kitchen produced a variety of cuisines from Avadh, Dakshin, Bengal, the West Coast, from the Frontier and from France. The FESTIVAL Of WATER (16-22 February) was a week-long celebration of water in its many manifestations, and on its importance in our lives, depicted through a series of events: exhibitions, music, poetry, talks, discussions, seminars and films. The festival had two sections: the ‘Sea’ and the ‘River’, with an underlying thread stressing the importance of water and the desperate need for conservation and water management. Dr Kapila Vatsyayan inaugurated the Festival. The exhibitions had Anju Vora’s paintings; Clare Arni’s photographic displays called ‘Kaveri: A Portrait of a River’ and ‘Dreams and Discontents: Water in the city of Bangalore’; Sharat Kumar’s photographs, ‘The Brook at Jageshwar’; and an exhibition on ‘Urban Rainwater Harvesting’ prepared by the Centre for Science and Environment. The section on the ‘Sea’ opened with ‘Vanchipattu’, the traditional boat songs of central Kerala. Three documentary films were screened; there was a stimulating discussion on the Indian Ocean; and Shri Bhaskar Chandavarkar gave a talk on the culture and music of the Konkan. The section on the ‘River’ included two talks on the Brahmaputra; a Bharatanatyam recital entitled ‘Ganga’ by Rama Vaidyanathan; and a concert of Bhatiali songs of Bengal by Amar Pal. A seminar was held on the theme of water conservation and resource management and documentary films were screened. Feature films by Ritwik Ghatak, G. Aravindan, Gautam Ghose and Jahnu Barua were also screened. 4 An afternoon session in the garden focused on Water and Poetry, with poets reading in English, Hindi and Urdu. The session was chaired by Shri Keshav Malik. THE OVERWHELMING QUESTION is another interesting initiative to be launched, comprising a series of lectures where persons of pre-eminence will speak on what they consider the ‘overwhelming question’ of their times, their choice of subject not necessarily relating to areas in which they may have achieved distinction. The President of India, Dr A. P. J. Kalam, was the first speaker for the series and for him the overwhelming question was the mission of uplifting 260 million people who live below the poverty line in India. To bring them out of societal and economic impoverishment they need food, shelter, education, work, a reasonable income and medical care. The President felt that this empowering of people can be achieved by inculcating a strong value system based on education with values, on religions that graduate into spirituality, and an enlightened leadership with visionary policies. The lecture was chaired by Shri Soli Sorabjee. Discussions have been initiated with Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia to have university based programmes. A series of lectures by eminent academics and visiting scholars will be held. These lectures will be planned by members of the Academic Staff of Universities, by the students together with the officials of the Centre. One of the most eminent historians of 19th and 20th century Europe, Professor Eric Hobsbawm, was invited to India by The Book Review Literary Trust to deliver the Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture. On this occasion the Centre also invited him for a discussion entitled CONVERSATIONS WITH PROFESSOR ERIC HOBSBAWM (14 December). Three Indian historians were invited to pose questions to Professor Hobsbawm. These were Professor Shahid Amin of Delhi University, Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya of Jawaharlal Nehru University and Professor Hari Vasudevan of Jamia Millia Islamia. Dr Romila Thapar chaired the programme. 5 A novel initiative was the first INDO-PAK STUDENT DEBATE held in December. This was organized by the Miranda House Debating Society and the topic was: ‘When Economies Move Closer, Nations will Follow’. The best Indian team was drawn from the Delhi Debators and the best Pakistani team from the Debating Society of Pakistan. Professor Krishna Kumar, Director of NCERT, chaired the programme; the judges were Shri Soli Sorabjee and Shri P.C.