The completion ceremony of the reading program for schoolchildren

Bharat Soka Gakkai (BSG), in association with the National Book Trust of India, recently launched a project promoting reading for municipal schoolchildren in Delhi. Ten schools in South Delhi were involved in the first two-week phase of the program. 

BSG educators group members visited schools and held workshops to train teachers in reading education. One hundred and seventeen teachers and 10 headmasters participated in workshops where they were introduced to innovative ways of interacting with children and making reading enjoyable.

Sumitra Meherwal, a teacher at the municipal school in Madangir, said, "I feel like a six-year-old on a picnic. I must have read these stories over 100 times but never had so much fun. I am dying to go back and share this with my students."

At the program's completion ceremony, BSG donated some 10,000 books to the participating schools. Over the next two years, BSG volunteers will conduct weekly follow-ups at these schools.

Education for Creative Living in four Indian languages

Meanwhile, the National Book Trust of India has recently published Education for Creative Living by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, an educator and the first president of the Soka Gakkai, in four official Indian languages--Kannada, Tamil, Urdu and Panjabi. It had previously been translated into Hindi, Assamese and Gujarati.

The English-Hindi version of SGI President Daisaku Ikeda's The World Is Yours to Change has also recently been released. In this anthology of essays, Mr. Ikeda introduces such subjects as Gandhi's ideals of nonviolence in accessible language. At the launch ceremony, former Indian president Kocheril Raman Narayanan expressed his desire for as many Indians as possible to read the book, saying, "We need Gandhi today in the world, especially in India . . . and I think Dr. Ikeda has the right to interpret Gandhiji to us more than anyone else, because he has propounded Gandhiji's ideas for a long time."

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