Hari Om,
This was the first day for the 2021-22 session. A hearty welcome to all the students!
It was good to see all the eager faces again. We went over the general expectations from the class and some zoom tips. We went over the general sequence we intend to follow in the class - Start prayers, recap, current class, bhagwad geeta and ending prayers. We plan to introduce Shiva Manas puja shlokas later.
The topic for 2021-22 is primarily about the Hindu Culture. We broadly broke today's session into 3 parts:
i) What is Culture?
ii) What is meant by Hindu?
iii) Why is knowing about Hindu Culture relevant for us?
i) We showed a sequence of pictures depicting aspects of culture from different parts of the world but primarily focussed on Bharat. The pictures were of various styles of dances, rituals, practices, food, books, festivals etc.
We connected the introduction of the students with this video. We asked them to introduce themselves - school district they are from, how many years they are associated with Chinmaya Vrindavan, A fun fact about themselves and which picture from the video they most associated themselves with. The class then continued where the class shared ideas that they thought represented Culture.
We shared the definition of Culture as defined by Swami Chinmayananda - 'When a group of people live together for a long time in a particular geographical area, living a certain value, the special fragrance that emanates from that group is said to be their culture'.
We covered how Sanskriti (culture) helps the internal nature (prakriti) from transgression/distortion(Vikriti) and how culture expresses itself in Bhautika(Materialistic) form and Adhyatmika(Spiritual) forms.
ii) We talked about how the word Hindu was coined by outsiders. It is considered as an aberration of the word Sindhu (geographical region around Sindhu river). So, can we think of this word to have a religious connotation, a linguistic, tradition based or geography based meaning? This word has been often overloaded and mis-interpreted by various groups to suit their needs. For the purposes of the Chinmaya course, we would be following the aspects of Sanatana Sanskriti - view of our culture from our scriptures point of view.
iii) One of the students rightly pointed out that knowing about our culture lets us know ourselves better. Our practices, traditions may appear different to others and by knowing the inner meaning ourselves, we get to help others understand us better too. We are the oldest living civilization in the world. We have carried the culture in different ways over centuries. There must be something special that it has withstood the test of time. So, this is the journey to explore this further.
We played the Bhagwad Geeta prelude video where we learned about the Sanskrit pronunciation. Today, Swami Shantananda ji welcomed all the kids in a combined zoom meeting with all Bala Vihar AM students. Aarti and pledge were done there subsequently.
Regards,
Rukmani & Partha