Mitr:
Hearty Greetings from LILA! It is summer again–the most revolutionary and passionate among the seasons. Since its inception, on every May Day, in the true spirit of the times of ripeness and fruition, LILA has taken a seminal step ahead — whether it is moving to a new space, or starting a publication, or launching a programme. The brightness of the season, and its radical histories merge with LILA’s understanding of luminosity as the ground and condition for living our own free and light spirit within our community.

Down Memory Lane: An image from 2013

Our world-wide thought and transformaction connective, LILA Terra-Sutra invests itself in discovering, nurturing, celebrating, distributing, renewing and conserving resources in various fields of knowledge and creativity, so that the possibility of equitable and ecological living becomes apparent and integral to every human being. Under the banner LILA Terra-Sutra, we organise regular courses, workshops and other projects with eminent experts in various fields ranging from urban gardening to traditional martial arts, green architecture to poetry.

This year Lila began its Terra-Sutra activities with an intensive course in the philosophy and practice of Holistic Living THE TAO WAY OF LIFE APPRECIATION held from 27-28 Feb until 5-6 Mar 2016 at the Lotus Farm, Kadarpur, a retreat space offered by our friends Priya and Ravish Mehra. The course guide, Master Nicholas Packard is a renowned healer and Qigong (pronounced Chee Kung) expert. We will have more of these workshops and courses coming up through the year. LILA welcomes you to this wonderful experience wherein you will discover a set of practices that helps to keep the mind, body, and soul engaged & strong. You can read the review and find the photos of the workshop here!

Nicholas Packard was born in America, and has lived in many parts of the world, including India, Italy, China and Thailand. He has lived in the Himalayas of India and the mountains of China for more than twenty years. He has trained with Masters in China in the philosophy and practice of Tai Chi Qigong for over ten years, during which he studied Tai Chi with the Grand Master Gaoyang Meng, a Taoist priest at Qingyang temple in Chengdu, Sichuan China. Now a maestro in Tai Chi Qigong, he travels all over the world helping the sick to build the inner confidence to sustain their life ahead. Nicholas has also established a non-profit organization in the United States, called The Tao of Holistic Living.

Green Fingers Workshop

LILA Terra-Sutra programmes in Life Appreciation are a manifestation of LILA’s mission to help individuals and communities find their most organic means to happiness. LILA in collaboration with  organises Green Fingers Workshop which shall take you closer to nature whereby you experience the innate pleasure of being with mother  nature. At this workshop participants learn to plant, design and efficiently run a kitchen garden even in a space-choked city. If the idea of a small vegetable garden is hanging somewhere in your mind, then join us now! Here are some ideas for growing vegetables on a small and manageable scale. Click to join us online!

The Terra-Sutra workshops and courses use the principles of ‘Organic Design’, uniquely developed by LILA. They are customised and open for all age groups. You can read the reports on some of the innovative experimental workshops organised by LILA in the past three years, which may enhance your way of life appreciation.

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LILA has been organising the interdisciplinary series of lectures, LILA PRISM, during Aug-Dec every year. PRISM, for us, holds together five constituent elements of transformation: Performativity, Innovation, Sustainability and Multiplicity. PRISM is conceptualized to be worked out through three major phases – The Annual Lecture Series (August-December every year), Nation wide Public interface programmes, and development of inter-linked open-source archives. Over the past three years, this annual series of public lectures has explored the questions of development, culture and governance in the particular context of India, through the prisms of various disciplines. Under the banner, so far LILA has hosted 45 lectures featuring eminent minds from various fields of knowledge and creative practices. Each year the series takes off from some of the seminal questions raised by the previous speakers, and extends the discourse  on living and knowing.

This year’s LILA PRISM series of lectures titled ‘INSTITUTION AS ABHYAS’ continues the concerns  raised by the speakers and audiences of PRISM 2015 on ‘Transformative Governance’. The series asks questions like: What transforms an individual or collective into an institution? Is there a way of compiling the best practices in Institution building? What is the abhyas that one has to follow in this regard? Why do many of our institutions, especially State-run establishments, tend to fail or become redundant after the exit of their first generation leaders? How can we evolve a renewable methodology to build institutions and to ensure their good governance through time? We are bringing together a set of eminent minds to reflect on the above, and welcome the intellectual and creative communities of the country to participate and engage in these deliberations. Read the concepts and other details of the upcoming lecture series here!

As part of the first phase of the PRISM programme, fifteen seminal thinkers who have made remarkable contributions to their fields – ranging from Politics to Arts, New Media to Tribal Research, Media to Grassroots Innovation – agreed to collaborate with us and deliver public lectures from August to December 2013. This made the LILA PRISM LECTURE SERIES 2013!

In 2014, the LILA PRISM Lecture Series featured thirty other major stakeholders, agents and thinkers from a variety of fields, all joining our movement to reflect on the theme of this season: Cultures as Continuum. Click on the following image to find all the related information. Get more details of our Lecture Series here!

LILA PRISM 2015 on Transformative Governance was designed as a definitive step towards creating a connective for ‘Organic Governance’ facilitating equitable growth in the Indian Democracy. Read more about our thirty experts as speakers and discussants and listen to their remarkable conversation here!

Kaapi LILA is a monthly gathering of like-minded friends, over coffee. At each Kaapi LILA, we discuss a work in progress presented by its visualisers. It is a platform for discoveries, explorations and reflections among culture-makers from across borders. Through these intense conversations, we hope to energise the climate of creation in the city and beyond. Here are some clicks from our Kaapi LILA gatherings. Enjoy! LILA promises to bring more colorful, more vibrant participants this year. Wait and watch!

LILA Newsletter introduces a new column Out of the Box whereby you are connected to the immediate world around! You can find here the latest news, updates, interviews, videos, blogs, paintings etc that address current affairs. After-all we need to think Out of the Box sometimes! This month have a look at an informative interview titled Medicine Man where  our super actress Manisha Koirala is in conversation  with the Tai Chi Qigong expert Master Nicholas Packard. They discuss in detail about  the impact of Hippocrates and the hundreds of generations of healers who followed…Read the interview here!

Send us your opinions, suggestions, blogs, interviews and other innovative experiments that force people to think out of the box. The best will be published here! Hurry up. Sometimes one chance is all you need! Write to our editors for further queries:
Ayshath Shamah Rahmath – shamah@lilafoundation.in
Latha Narayanaswamy – lathadac@gmail.com