Governor R.N. Ravi on Friday said that Bharat, unlike Western countries, was not a product of any king or a conquest but of a “civilisational and cultural evolution that happened over 1000s of years”.
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Addressing at the curtain- raiser for ‘Kashi Tamil Sangamam’ held on the IIT-Madras campus in Chennai, Mr. Ravi contended, “We have been indoctrinated by Western thinking” about how a nation is formed.
“We have been indoctrinated so much by Western thinking that a nation has to be one which was conquered by a king and had the sovereignty over the nation. This is a European concept. Bharat is not the product of any king or a conquest. Bharat is a civilisational and cultural evolution that happened over thousands of years,” he said.
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According to Mr. Ravi, the connection between Kashi and Tamil Nadu has existed for thousands of years. “This notion of India, created by the foreigners has eclipsed the very idea of Bharat. The connection between Kashi and the people of this land – Tamil Nadu – is thousands of years old. We all know that Lord Rama…how he worshipped Lord Shiva at Rameswaram…we know the story,” he said.
The Kashi Tamil Sangamam is an initiative of the Government of India, which is a unique programme in which people from Tamil Nadu belonging to 12 different clusters including art, literature, spirituality and education will be taken on an educational tour to Kashi.
A press release here said around 210 people from different parts of Tamil Nadu will be taken in each groups for a eight-day tour program. The first train will leave on November 16, 2022, from Rameswaram and the last return train will depart from Kashi on December 18, 2022.
Month-long tour
In all, 12 such groups comprising which will be around 2,500 people, will tour visit over a month and they would leave from Rameswaram, Chennai and Coimbatore. As a part of this tour, they will attend academic sessions, visit places in and around Varanasi and Ayodhya including the Ganga cruise.