UHJT and Hindu Youth Empowerment
Vivek Gupta, Youth Ambassador, UHJT
UHJT is an overarching umbrella organization comprising 14 temples in the Metropolitan DC. UHJT has consistently led an active involvement in the community beyond the footprints of the individual temples. Whether it is donating to the cause of Chennai Floods, supporting Nepal Earth quake victims through IDRF, fundraising for Hindu American Foundation, partnering with Indian Embassy for International Day of Yoga in DC, or empowering the DESI -Develop Empower & Synergize India – student led group at the University of Maryland College park (UMD), UHJT has always played a bigger and broader role in shaping the community outreach narrative in the Metropolitan DC area.
UHJT has always championed youth involvement through multiple projects. Here is one of the examples. After graduating from UMD and as a volunteer with DESI (Develop Empower Synergize India), I thought to bridge the gap between the youth and the seasoned Indian community in the DMV area. I felt the need to bring the community together and financially support for the student-led organization, so that a temple trip can be organized twice a year, once in the fall and one in the spring, where a large group of students can join and explore the Indian diaspora. Fortunately, I was in a perfect position, after having graduated from UMD and having volunteered as one of the directors in the UHJT, to write a proposal for DESI so they can help bring students together with the community. My proposal to fund a DESI Temple trip was accepted unanimously by the UHJT Board Members.
UHJT also empowered me to represent Hindu faith in the Youth Interfaith Leadership Summit in Washington DC since last 4 years. Hindu participation is slowly and steadily increasing. The summit provides a platform to raise the awareness of our faith while learning from others. Last year we had a session on meditation and chanting from a learned professor Naveen Krishna Das who is also a priest in ISKCON temple in Potomac. The session was a big hit with a lot of people trying bead meditation and breathing exercises for the first time. Earlier this year, UHJT provided me the opportunity to represent Hindu faith at the Martin Luther King Jr. ceremony, where I spoke about how MLK Jr. went to India and learned the practice of nonviolence from the Dharmic ethos of Hinduism and from the influence of Mahatma Gandhi which helped led a totally nonviolent civil rights movement in US.
We live in a very connected, diverse, and mutually dependent world, more so than ever. Therefore, it has become extremely important to connect our youths and to give them the reasoning and meaning behind the rituals, the activities, and the cultures of our civilization. I remember while growing up I learned from my mother, chanting Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu and many other powerful Sanskrit shlokas. It is true that kids learn at home and from parents and their upbringing. However, in the US, in a very religiously diverse and heterogeneous environment, kids learn more from outside and bring different perspectives and thinking to home. Their ideologies are constantly reforming as they meet other friends in school, hear and see things. That is why it is even more imperative to give our kids a conscious civilizational understanding and cultural identity to develop their perspective, so that while they learn and grow from others, they can also share their beliefs and contribute to the larger discussion in a diverse platform to make others aware of their faith. This leads to a bidirectional learning and understanding which we all agree we need in a today’s multifarious society.
Uniting and nurturing youth has always been very important to me. We need to prepare the leaders of the future by training, guiding, motivating and exposing them to the plethora of rich cultural knowledge that is given to us by one of the oldest civilizations. I humbly thank the UHJT team for their perennial support and for providing me a platform to work on several causes. I request all the parents to continue to mentor and nurture youth to make them future leaders who continuously further the community service, activism and advocacy work in the Metropolitan DC area and carry the Dharmic torch. If you have any ideas and would like to write to us, UHJT is willing to offer support and is here to help.
Vivek Gupta
Director, UHJT
Rajdhani Mandir
