NEW YORK (TIP): 2022 has been an amazing year for The India Center because we were selected by the NYCxDesign Festival to exhibit our Graphic Designs for the first time.

There were also some other firsts like being contacted by several schools both private and public to present Indian Cultural Programs to their students.

A group of five friends who were passionate about Indian Culture got together for dinner one evening in 2003 and The India Center was born.

It has been an interesting journey from hosting Dance and Music events on Cable TV to doing full day events at the Baruch Performing Arts Center which included Yoga, Ayurveda and Vastu. Then switching to Zoom during the pandemic.

It is a time to thank all those who have supported us in the last 20 years and to reflect on the path we need to take in the coming years. Our immense gratitude to all our amazing instructors especially Guru Sanjay Attada and Guru Manjulanandji for their staunch support of our projects over the years. We feel so honored when he says, “Working with India Center is always a pleasure because I get to contribute to bringing Indian culture to the larger community. Not only am I fortunate to be able to speak about my favorite aspects of Indian culture — yoga — but also I am able to collaborate with other speakers. Being able to share perspectives with other people equally passionate about Indian culture helps me enrich my own experience and bring out stories to the community at large. The process of working with India Center has always been smooth and cooperative. Speaking with India Center is always enjoyable because everyone is accommodating and allows the event to come together seamlessly. I am thankful to have spoken at the India Center in the past and hope to do so in the future.”

Special thanks to our amazing performers, especially the little ones, some as young as four years old, whose devotion to traditional Indian Arts despite the lack of resources and support is heartening. We had two little boys perform regularly at our festivals. The children would wake up at 3:00 am on Sundays and were driven by their mother, a doctor with a busy work schedule, all the way from their home near PA to their teacher’s home in Long Island NY for their 6:00 am Carnatic Music lessons. They inspire us to do our best and remind us how Indian Culture has survived despite all odds.

We wish to thank our friends at Manhattan Neighborhood Network who have always gone above and beyond their call of duty to help us out. Without them there would be no India Center.

Thanks to Keshav Das for his help and Eddie Stern for letting us use his Patanjali  Yoga Studio to launch the very first Saraswati Arts Festival.

We also wish to thank all our dedicated volunteers who have put in blood sweat and tears to make our events happen. Some of them have worked with us for years – Atul Kapoor, Ashu Kapoor, Anita Ghei, Deepti Vij, Dinesh Pai, Sonali Daripkar, Navin Hadge, Charles Caminiti, Gloria Messer, Patricia Rios, Jasmine Lindo, Nat Wood, Nelson Torres, and scores of others whose names we cannot include because of the paucity of space.

And last but not the least,  a very special thank you to the team at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for believing in us and supporting our projects over the years and to Google for their Adwords Grant. We hope we live up to the expectations of Gurus, performers and supporters in the coming years.

When the India Center was launched in 2003 the goal was to host events that would give children a platform to display their talent in Traditional Indian Arts. Most of the money and resources for the arts has been taken up by Bollywood and there is little space left for Traditional Arts. We felt that our youth who study Traditional Arts which has been passed on from generation to generation through the Guru Shishya Parampara needed our support.

The first hurdle came with the name itself. We were advised by one gentleman to drop the name Saraswati Classical Arts Festival because it would put off donors and instead call it the South Asian Arts Festival to appeal to a wider audience. We politely declined his suggestion and decided we would keep the name with or without donations. The first Saraswati Classical Arts Festival was launched on a princely grant of $740/-

There was no way we could afford to rent an auditorium in New York City with that budget. The only space we managed to get with the help of a friend was a Yoga Studio in Soho. Interestingly, the space had 3 little temples for Ganesh, Shiva, and Krishna. The Saraswati Classical Arts began with the Abhishek of the 400-year-old image of Ganesh – the way Indian Dance was traditionally performed.

We had 26 children perform at the event. The following year we received a larger grant and we decided to launch our second project, the Natraj Folk Arts Festival at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. We had 70 artists performing at the event.

And we continued our live events until 2020. We postponed our festivals hoping that the epidemic would go away, and we could go back to hosting live events. But it did not, so we decided to go virtual. We were of course not happy about going from shooting in a multi-million-dollar television studio to streaming home videos virtually but then we had to learn to adapt. “The only constant in life is change”- Heraclitus

In the middle of the Pandemic, we were contacted by an Indian Dance teacher from Qatar saying his students would like to participate in our festival. The children performed folk dances from various regions of India – Punjab, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu… and suddenly the festival went from being an event for Indian Artists in New York to an event for young Indian Artists from halfway around the globe. Out of something bad came something good.

As the India Center turns 20, we will be creating a series of projects that we have never done before. Stay tuned for our announcements in the coming months.(Advertorial)