LEARNING FROM NATURE REMEMBERING TAGORE

India International Center, New Delhi

1st October, 2011

That lays the corners of its garments

And waits for us.

Life rears itself from her breast,

Flowers bloom from her smiles

Her call is the sweetest music;

Her lap stretches from one corner to the other,

She controls the strings of life.

Her warbling waters bring

The murmur of life from all eternity.

- Rabindranath Tagore (Palliprakiti, i)

10:00 -10:10 – Invocation to Mother Earth Rabindra sangeet school choir)

10:10 – 10:20 – Opening statement by  Dr Vandana Shiva

10:20 – 11:20 – Panel One: Tagore’s Vision of Nature and Reverence for the Earth

11:20- 11:30 -   Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth, Signing of the declaration and Diya

Lighting Ceremony

Session Two: Robbery of the Soil

“The temptation of an inordinately high level of living, which was once confined only to a small section of the community, becomes widespread. The blindness is sure to prove fatal to the civilization which puts no restraint upon the emulation of self indulgence………

When they had reduced the limited store of material in their immediate surroundings, they proceeded to wage various wars among their different sections, each wanting his own special allotment of the lion’s share. In their scramble for the right to self-indulgence, they laughed at moral law and took it to be a sign of superiority to be ruthless in the satisfaction each of his own desire. They exhausted the water, cut down the trees, reduced the surface of the planet to a desert, riddled it with enormous pits and made its interior a rifled pocket, emptied of its valuables.”

- Rabindranath Tagore

The Robbery of The Soil in EWRT, Vol. III, 866 (870)

Attachments:

Bhoomi 2011