By Kishan Bhatt
The National Hindu Students Forum (UK) are taking a leaping initiative at their next annual conference entitled The Hindu Times: Be The News You Wish To See to be held on Saturday 21st November at the City University, London. The conference is to tackle the misconceptions of the Hindu faith that are common to the wider world and to teach the future of our community the opportunities to act. The conference will be split up into spirituality, the Hindu community (samaj) and politics. The workshops on spirituality are to educate students on whether or not the Ramayana and Mahabharata are still relevant or just myths based on fiction. The Hindu community workshops aim to explore caste discrimination, the inequality of men and women and whether or not our Hindu dharma is becoming too bollywoodised. The political workshops will speak out directly on the most current political issues such as the underrepresentation of Hindus in British politics, the rise of the BNP and its affect on the Hindu Community and the human rights and civil rights that should be invested to Hindus around the world.
The educating, exploring and empowering form part of the core aim to get our students to stand up and speak up on some of the most important issues that will govern the future of our Hindu community. That to me is real politics! For too long now the Hindu community has been passive, silent and inactive. It is this inactiveness and passiveness that has taken the Hindu community for granted on so many different levels from the misconceptions of Idol worshipping to caste discrimination and the misguided representation of Hindus in British political life. Students tell me that they may never see a Hindu Prime Minister yet I see Obama as the first African-American President. There are far too many choices and decisions that need to be made correctly and this conference will engage with these choices and decisions with the people that influence this country.
Baroness Verma, Virendra Sharma MP and Seema Malhotra (Former Chair of the Young Fabians) are all speaking on the day by giving workshops and taking part in a Question Time panel that will address the issues discussed at the conference and enable our students to fire questions at them. Keith Vaz MP, Barry Gardiner MP, Angela Watkinson MP and other senior politicians and figures are also attending on the day. Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, will be providing us with his views on the conference through a video link.
The conference will pave the way for a variety of hopeful initiatives to engineer the Hindu community and its students to be more active on issues that affect us most.
If you are interested in attending please visit www.nhsf.org.uk/hindutimes for further information and opportunities to register.
Alternatively, please contact Kishan.bhatt@nhsf.org.uk