SLI Lecture: Tamil Culture, A Curtain Raiser

SLI Lecture: TAMIL CULTURE: A CURTAIN RAISER

Date: 18^th October 2016, Tuesday

Time: 10 a.m. to 12 noon

Summary: The Tamils contributed significantly to the fabric of Indian culture with a continuity of over 2000 years. The major fields fall under all the three major areas of creative expressions, literature, fine arts and performing arts, mostly form a religio-spiritual angle typical to the Indian sub-continent.  Such complex web would not be easily understood by those who have not been brought up in this tradition or even those who have been brought up without the awareness of the arts, music or literature. An attempt during this occasion would be made to demystify the culture of the Tamils by profiling the emergence of their literature, arts and music during this lecture.

Speaker: Prof. Swaminathan. S. Swaminathan was born in Pudukkottai, Tamilnadu in 1940. After qualifying as a Mechanical Engineer, he worked as a professor in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi for more than 30 years.

Realizing that Indian youth have an inadequate understanding of their local heritage, Swaminathan decided to acquaint the students of IIT-Delhi with various aspects of Indian culture. The topics he begun to research and explore were Indian music, Sanskrit, ancient Tamil literature, Tamil prosody, development of scripts, Gandhian philosophy, etc. He has authored books on Mahabalipuram monuments and Ajanta caves.

As an activist, he has participated in and initiated a number of socially relevant projects. Among other projects, he co-founded Tamil Heritage Group in Chennai which has for over 5 years now been organizing significant talks and events to promote Tamil heritage. He was also instrumental in setting up a Centre for Arts and Culture, called Sudharsanam, in Pudukkottai, his native place.

Workshop for Fine-tuning District Diagnostic Process and Roll-out Action Plan by TNRTP - Auroville October 6- 8th, 2016

A three day District Diagnostic tool Workshop organized by Tamil Nadu Rural Transformation Project at Auroville. SLI played host to this important event in which the World Bank officials and the Tamilnadu Rural Transformation Project executives and consultants came together to shape and finalize the District Diagnostic Tool for the upcoming project that will be implemented over the next 6 years in over 25 districts of the State. SLI has been  requested to be a partner for the project.

Memorial Meeting for Nick Klotz

SLI organized a memorial meeting for Nick Klotz at Institute's backyard. Friends and Well-wishers of Nick from Auroville joined and payed tribute to him.

Interview: "Capacity Building for youth can rejuvenate Organic Farming in Tamilnadu" - Mrs.Subhashini Sridhar, CIKS

27th september 2016, SLI. An interview with Subhasini Sridhar, Programme Director, Centre for Indian Knowledge System, Sirkazhi, Nagapattinam district.

Tell us about your work and current priorities at CIKS...

Currently we focus mainly on strengthening of farmer groups through Farmer Producer Organisation. We have been working with 9 districts in Tamil Nadu with more than 25,000 farmers and basically our focus is on strengthening of organic farming. The centre is also working on revival of traditional Paddy varieties and validation of tradition knowledge systems in India.

What is the current status of organic farming in Tamil Nadu?

At present people are more aware about organic farming and there seems to be increase in adoption of organic farming methods by the farmers.  Many farmers are now aware about the hazards of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and they want to switch over to organic farming. The only constraint is the marketing of the organic products. There is lack of availability of platforms to market the products and the market is full of products which are adulterated- ‘the so called organic products’, but it contains pesticides residuals. In order to promote organic farming in Tamil Nadu it’s marketing needs to be taken care of.

You mentioned that there are many so called organic products which are not really organic, how do we differentiate between the adulterated organic products with the real products?

Many of the farmers by default practice organic farming and some have switched to organic farming but in spite of that, they do use small amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides though they are selling it as organic products. So in the market there is a competition between the genuine organic as well as the so called organic products.  The onus shifts to the consumers, who need to figure out what is the real organic product. For that consumers need to be aware of the details about the products they are consuming.

Towards this end, we are educating the consumers on how to identify the products as organic, we are also making effort to establish link between the consumers and the farmers, so that the consumers are aware about the producers and the technique adopted by them.

According to you what is the role of youth in Organic farming?

As far as youth are concerned their role is very important but at present there is increase in  migration of rural youth to the urban and semi-urban cities which is very alarming. Presently, mostly people above 40 are engaged in agriculture and the youth are more or less uninterested. But in some pockets we can see that the youth are leaving their corporate jobs and coming back to farming but unfortunately most of the youth are switching off to other occupation.

How do you plan to tackle this issue?

Our centre in collaboration with organisations such as Sustainable Livelihoods Institute wants to retain the village youth in agriculture. Therefore, our major focus for the next two years is to encourage the youth in organic farming by giving them capacity building training focusing on enterprise formation and better agriculture with profitable income.

Memorial for Nick

Discussion on "GM Mustard and our Food Safety" with Mr Arachalur Selvam and Pamayan

Invitation to a talk on Local Self Governance: Panchayat Election in India by Mr. Laksminarayanan