Live Report from the 15th JAINA Convention

Translated from the Gujarati. Chitralekha's live report from the 15th JAINA Convention, held over the American Independence Day weekend at the Jain Center of Southern California's newly built Jain Bhavan, where more than two thousand Jains from the USA, the UK, Canada, Dubai and Mumbai gathered under the theme “Ecology — The Jain Way”.

Along with the various lectures and seminars, the cultural programmes held every day were also engaging — among them the first performance of the Gujarati play Siddha Hem, written by Mumbai's Johny Shah and directed by Manoj Shah, which took place in Los Angeles. That too can be called one of the convention's great achievements.

The play was to be performed at half past seven in the evening, and the audience's eagerness to see it was such that they had queued to enter the auditorium from five o'clock. The rush was so great that a live telecast had to be arranged on the upper floor of the cultural complex.

For the research behind the script of this play — based on the life of Acharya Hemchandracharya, without whose grammar the Gujarati language cannot even be imagined — the writer Johny Shah combed Khambhat, the Acharya's field of work, and the country around it, and met every scholar who could tell him anything about him, however small.

In the end the labour of Johny, Manoj and a team of eight gifted young performers bore fruit. The packed hall greeted them at the close of the two-hour play with thunderous applause and a standing ovation, and several Jain sanghs invited the play to their own parts of America. As this is written, those performances have already begun, from New Jersey.

It was this same Manoj Shah team that performed Apurva Avsar, based on the life of Shrimad Rajchandra, at the 2007 convention in New Jersey.