A special cultural festival is being organized by the Hindu Temple Forum of New Zealand, to celebrate the occasion of Raksha Bandhan. Raksha Bandan is a traditional Hindu festival that promotes universal friendship. The Hindu Temple Forum plans to celebrate this festival in Sydney on the 1st of September.
The Hindu Temple Forum will be arranging the function and organizing the celebration of this festival with help from other members of the Hindu community in Australia. Sri V. Kumar is the head of the organizing committee that will oversee arangements for the festival.
The Hindu Temple Forum has been arranging these celebrations since 2005, starting out small, but now with more than 150 Hindu temples participating in the functions, Each year the participation has been increasing. Sri. Mamata Bhiksha, this year’s festival coordinator said, “The festival conveys that Hindus want to productivly integrate with the greater New Zealand
community. The Hindu Temple Forum will increase this harmonizing integration through celebration of these festivals.”
The aim is to develop bonding and understanding among members of the Hindu community, and improve cooperation amongst various Hindu organizations. There are plans for the Hindu Temple Forum to have yearly meetings to discuss issues relevant to the Hindu community.
The Hindu Temple Forum will gather at least once a year to hash out and debate the outcomes relating to Hindu community members and jointly plan for a better future. This will help reinforce a Hindu personal identity, which takes accepts all like-minded communities on equal terms as one large worldwide fellowship.
“HTF will organize the Raksha Bandhan Festival every year to bring the Hindu community members closer, develop understanding and start collaborate undertakings based on social upliftment for the community”, said Sri. Chandrashekhar Moonga, representative of the assembly.
All willing Hindu organizations, temples, and associations are welcome to join us in these unified celebrations. Each one of the fellow members in Hindu Temple Forum will get an chance to host the functions on a rotation basis each year. The New Zealand Hindu Temple Society will be the host of the assembly in 2011.
“We arrange for all Hindu cultural performances, musical groups and some folk dances to perform in these function,” said Sri. Subbiah, the coordinator for cultural programming.
The fete will have Indian classical performances such as Bharatha Nathyam, Kathak dance, Kuchipudhi, Mohinyattam, Odissi, and Kattakali. There will also be folk dances such as Garbha, Kholi, Maratti, Khanares folk music, Andhra Dance, Bengali, Assamese, Rajasthan, and Bhangra. Vocal music will include Karnatic, Hindustani and instrumental music such as Mridangam, flute, and veena. It will even include music and dance from other civilizations such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Siamese.
The Hindu Temple Forum was formed during the fourth New Zealand national hindu association meeting. This was one of the important milestone results of the group discussions.
