Acknowledgement...
That India’s culture and heritage have to be retold in the west was a message from the late Catherine Galbraith, who made a life-long fascination with India and wrote a book on India for children. She encouraged and sponsored the Harvard University outreach activities in order to draw attention for the need of new scholarly research on India. We wish to express our gratitude to Mrs. Galbraith and her husband Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith for their support and their early motivation. We are thankful to Harvard University for supporting the outreach activities on India and her culture.
Bijoy Misra would like to express his gratitude to hundreds of children, teachers and volunteers in the India cultural school Shishubharati where he had the privilege to teach Indian values and heritage from 1983 to 2004. The children’s questions and their outlook engaged him to create new material for the world youth. The material produced in these pages is a product in response to their inquisitiveness.
The immigrant experience of exploring faith through scriptural reading was nurtured at Srilakshmi Temple in Boston through many religious festivals, social gatherings, organizing Sanskrit study classes and tutorial sessions. We are thankful to the Trustees and the volunteers at the Temple for their help and assistance. We are particularly grateful to the priests Pandit Krishna Bhattar and Pandit Balaji Bhattar at the Temple for their participation in our scriptural exploration.
We are grateful to the assembly and students of High-Tech Yoga Institute for the annual Valmiki analysis sessions organized by Sri Vasant Jinwala and family. Bijoy Misra has been inspired by the devotion and diligence of Sri Prabhulal Rathi and family in organizing the Tulasi Ramayana recitation in public to help create a source of strength in the immigrant Indian community. Association with the Sanskrit scholars' group Bharatiya Vidvat Parishat in India has helped him to be in touch with the current scholarship in the language.
We would like to thank the volunteers at Dwarkamai Vidyapeeth having provided the opportunity to read the text in the Temple premises. Our particular thanks are due to Sri Sandeep Srivastava for helping to review the articles and archive them in the Temple library. We are thankful to Sri Anil Naik for the encouragement and mentoring in all stages of our work. The work in Hindi translations has been supported by Mr. Sudhanshu Misra, Mr. Sanjeev Tripathy and lately by poet Mr. Maneesh Srivastava. Mr. Atmaram Sharma of Garbhanal publications in Bhopal, India has been kind in publishing the Hindi translations in their esteemed literary journal.