Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of Australia the People's Movement
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Holi Mahotsav 2007 Cricket Masala 2007 South Asian Small Business and Cultural Awards 2007 A GALA DINNER TO MARK THE PRESENTATION OF AWARDS CEREMONY ON 24 MAY 2007; 6:30 p.m for 7:00p.m. start, finishing at 10:30p.m. VENUE : RYDE CIVIC CENTRE , 1 DEVLIN STREET, RYDE The Dinner will include at Three course Vegetarian meals and soft drinks. Classical and Contemporary Dances during the dinner and in between the Award Presentation sessions. TICKETS (INCL. DINNER) : $40; CONCESSION (SENIORS, CHILD U12, AND STUDENTS) : $30 For details and tickets, CONTACT: (02) 9267 0953; [email protected]; www.bhavanaustralia.org World Peace William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton Not everything positive I did was controversial. On the sixteenth, I signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was intended to protect a reasonable range of religious expression in public areas like schools and workplaces. The bill was designed to reverse a 1990 Supreme Court decision giving states more authority to regulate religious expression in such areas. America is full of people deeply committed to their very diverse faiths. I thought the bill struck the right balance between protecting their rights and the need for public order. It was sponsored in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, and passed 97-3. The House adopted it by a voice vote. Though the Supreme Court later struck it down, I remain convinced it was a good and needed piece of legislation. I always felt that protecting religious liberty and making the White House accessible to all religious faiths was an important part of my job. I assigned a member of the White House public liaison staff to be our bridge to the religious communities. I attended every one of the National Prayer Breakfasts that are held each year as Congress begins its work, speaking and staying for the entire event so that I could visit with the people of different faiths and political parties who came to pray for God's guidance in our work. And every year when Congress resumed after the August recess, I hosted an interfaith breakfast in the State Dining Room that allowed me to hear the concerns of religious leaders and share mine with them. I wanted to keep open the lines of communication to then even those who disagreed with me, and work with them whenever I could on social problems at home and humanitarian problems around the world. I believe strongly in separation of church and state, but I also believe that both make indisputable contributions to the strength of our nation and that on occasion they can work together for the common good with out violating the Constitution. Government is, by definition, imperfect and experimental, always a work in progress. Faith speaks to the inner life, to the search for truth and the spirit's capacity for profound changes and growth. Government programs don't work as well in a culture that devalues family, work, and mutual respect. And it's hard to live by faith without acting on the scriptural admonitions to care for the poor and downtrodden, and to "love thy neighbor as thyself." I was thinking about the role of faith in our national life in mid-November when I traveled to Memphis to address the convocation of the Church of God in Christ at Mason Temple Church. There had been a number of news reports about the rising tide of violence against children in African-American neighborhoods, and I wanted to discuss with the ministers and laypeople what we could do about it. There were obvious economic and social forces behind the disappearance of work in our inner cities, the breakdown of the family, the problems in schools, and the rise of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births, and violence. But the crushing combination of difficulties had created a culture that accepted as normal the presence of violence and the absence of work and two-parent families, and I was convinced that government alone could not change that culture. Many black churches were beginning to address these issues, and I wanted to encourage them to do more. When I got to Memphis, I was among friends. The Church of God in Christ was the fastest-growing African- American denomination. Its founder, Charles Harrison Mason, received the inspiration for his church's name in Little Rock, on a spot where I had helped lay a plaque two years earlier. His widow was in the church that day. The presiding bishop, Louis Ford of Chicago, had played a leading role in the presidential- campaign. Mason Temple is hallowed ground in the history of civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached his last sermon there, on the night he was killed. I evoked the spirit of King and his uncanny prediction that his life might not last much longer to ask my friends to examine: firstly "the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today." Then I put away my notes and gave what many commentators later said was the best speech of my eight years as President, speaking to from my heart in the language of our shared heritage: If Martin Luther King were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twenty- five years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin…. You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country…. He would say you did a good job creating a black middle class ... in opening opportunity. But he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family- destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon. There are changes we can make from the outside in; that's the job of the President and the Congress and die governors and the mayors and the social service agencies. And then there are some changes we're going to have to make from the inside out, or the others won't mat-ter. Sometimes there are no answers from the outside in; some-times all the answers have to come from the values and the stirrings and the voices that speak to us from within. … Where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope .... who will be there to give structure, discipline, and love to these children? You must do that. And we must help you. So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King.... Somehow, by God's grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities. We won't make all the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together, by the grace of God. The Memphis speech was a hymn of praise to a public philosophy rooted in my personal religious values. Too many things were falling apart; I was trying to put them together. - My Life, by Bill Clinton, Hutchinson 2004 pp558-560 Teaching of fundamental ethics is undoubtedly a function of the state. By religion I have not in mind fundamental ethics but what goes by the name of denominationalism. To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. - Mahatma Gandhi Editorial Page Current Board of Directors Publisher & Managing Office Bearers : Editor: Gambhir Watts President Gambhir Watts [email protected] Vice President Avijit Sarkar Treasurer Catherine Knox Editorial Committee: Chairman Emeritus Pravinchandra V Gandhi - President Bhavan J Rao Palagummi Worldwide Rajesh Katakdhond Company Secretary Sridhar Kumar Kondepudi [email protected] Designing Team: The other directors of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia are: J Rao Palagummi Abbas Raza Alvi; Nayana Purohit, Moksha Watts Utkarsh Doshi Nominees of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Worldwide: Advertising: Homi Navroji Dastur, Executive Secretary and Director General [email protected] Jagannathan Veeraraghavan, Executive Director , Delhi Mathoor Krishnamurti, Executive Director , Bangalore Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia Palladam Narayana Sathanagopal, Additional Registar Suite 100 / 515 Kent Street, P. A Ramakrishnan, Executive Vice Chairman, Puthoucode (Kerala) Sydney NSW 2000 * The views of contributors to The Test of Bhavan’s Right to Exist Bhavan Australia are not necessarily the views of Bhavan Australia or the editor.