NAVRATRI FESTIVAL INCLUDES ALL

One of the festivals in the Hindu calendar of the world is Navratri. It is a festival of nine nights. It is a time when people of all ages come together to celebrate the beauty of creation and give thanks to God for giving us a healthy and prosperous life. It is a festival of motherhood, giving thanks to Mataji for enabling mothers to nurture creation. In the UK, it is celebrated all over the country, and as always, I made a lot of effort to invite the media and civic leaders to come and enjoy the celebrations and see social cohesion in practice. I have always believed that many of the solutions to our intractable problems lie in the past, and they need to come off the boundaries of faiths and cultures, and be shared more widely to enrich the whole world. Navratri is such a festival, and we had two full colour pages in the Gazette this year and a national BBC radio broadcast on the festival - you can view it by clicking this pagelink and listen to the broadcast:(http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/essex/hi/people_and_places/religion_and_ethics/newsid_8283000/8283315.stm.) The awareness of the festival and its virtues are spreading everywhere.