Shakti Sunday celebrated International Mother Earth Day in an event held at Fateh Sagar where they presented fresh talent, and offered an innovative presentation.

In addition to performances by “Udaipur’s Got Talent!” aspirants, the April 27 edition featured moving commemorations of Earth Day’s significance through songs, mime skits, poetry and video.

Mime artist Vilas Janve presented duet sketches boosting eco-consciousness.  Ashok Jain’s Manthan offered powerful planet-protective anti-corporate poetry, and Mother Earth was fêted with songs, poems and movie presentations throughout the evening.

Shakti Sunday, during the event, made a formal announcement of “NGO Shakti Challenge”, a request to Udaipur citizens to rank and vote for their favorite NGOs coupled with an invitation to the NGO community to introduce themselves to the citizens on the Shakti Sunday stage and other venues.

On August 15, the Udaipur Collector will award certificates based on this voting to Udaipur’s “Most Inspiring and Effective NGOs”. To know about – ‘How to vote’, visit the link.

The first NGOs to present themselves on the Shakti Sunday stage were Shikshantar’s innovative ‘Swaraj University’, ‘Herbal Healers’ from Jagran Jan Vikas Samati, and the ‘Banyan Roots Organic Cooperative’.

Swaraj U students’ theatrical sketch made the case that training oneself for terminal incorporation was hardly the ultimate goal of “education”; which once meant to discover and cultivate who you really were inside.

The Jagran Jan rep, Dr. Ram Kishor Deshwal, explained how industrial medicine, like industrial agricultural, was poisoning the basic energies of life; and why Jagran Jan had respectfully returned to grassroots tribal knowledge to reconnect us to our local ecosystems’ healing powers.

Rohit Jain of Banyan Roots Organic Cooperative magnified that theme explaining how our current agricultural economy reflects not our own needs as living beings, but those of a malignant corporate agenda that focuses on profit rather than public health; and how we could reverse that trend by returning to traditional organic food.

Performance in Shakti Sunday events included musical gifts of the Vibes trio, Anarki Cafe’s  Udaipur Music Circle, Pandit Avadh Kishor Pandey’s son & students, as well as virtuoso performances by several new UGT hopefuls.

Shakti Sunday steering committee invites all arts- and ecology-minded Udaipurites to come and join them again at Fateh Sagar on May 11th.