Amish looks to widen appeal and outreach
LONDON:Writer Amish Tripathi, the new director of Nehru Centre, has ‘buckets’ of plans for the cultural wing of the Indian high commission to combine change with continuity and leverage his marketing background to promote the centre as a ‘brand’.
A flagship post of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the centre, established in London in 1992, has previously been headed by late playwright Girish Karnad and diplomats such as Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Pawan Varma, among others.
Tripathi, 45, who succeeds career diplomat Srinivas Gotru, has several initiatives in the pipeline.
Categorising his ideas in what he calls four ‘buckets’, Tripathi has plans for infrastructure, programming, thought leadership and promoting the centre as a brand.
He plans to enhance the centre’s orientation to Indian culture while also retaining its Georgian era façade and heritage. This, he says, includes playing Indian music constantly in the rooms and high-ceiling corridors of the centre located near Hyde Park. “How do we make this centre feel a little more Indian, more cultural? Music has to be playing all the time. Any person who comes in, we have to see them as guests, we have speakers in every place, music sets the mood,” he said.
“Our remit is not just as a cultural centre for one part of the Indian diaspora. We are for the native British as well. How to get people of non-Indian origin coming in: British, African-British, Arab British. They will enrich us, we will enrich them,” he said.
Keen to widen the centre’s appeal and outreach, Tripathi also intends to make it a centre for ‘chintan’ (contemplation) in the form of a thinktank, reviving ancient Indian ideas of ‘shastrartha’ (philosophical debates) and ‘dharam sabha’ (religious gathering).
This agenda could be driven by initiatives such as a think-fest, and inviting intellectuals and thought leaders to share their experiences. The ‘dharma sabhas’, he said, were not only about spirituality, but about the pursuit of knowledge in all its dimensions through ‘shastrartha’.
Three weeks into the post, Tripathi said he has met several MPs, members of the House of Lords, writers, artistes and leaders of cultural organisations in the UK to exchange ideas.