Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies) in her concluding address at Mannotsava: National Mental Health Festival, highlighted the critical need for public engagement platforms that make mental healthcare more accessible and engaging. She reflected on the significance of uniting doctors, academics, mental health practitioners, civil society organizations, artists, and the public – to foster collective approaches aimed at enhancing both individual & community well-being, parallelly strengthening samaaj.
Transcript
0:00:13 Rohini Nilekani: Ellarukum namaskara. How are you? Okay, I’m glad to hear that. Really, thank you all. Good things must come to an end. But in my experience, the best endings always have new beginnings. So I wrote these few notes just now for the end – it’s not too long.
0:00:33 I hope that with all your support, that the end of these two days of the first National Mental Health Festival will actually become a new beginning for a movement that continues across the country. We need many more of such festivals, celebrations, melas, sambhramas, to recognize the need for understanding and protecting our own well-being, our own manasantulana, and that of those around us because we don’t live alone. So thank you all.
0:01:04 Thank you all, first, to the people of Namma Bengaluru, for showing up in such large numbers and participating so fully. Thank you so much to NIMHANS for hosting us here, for being a strategic partner in this lovely campus, and in such a calm, serene and beautiful organised space. Thank you, NIMHANS.
0:01:28 Thank you so much to NCBS, our strategic partner, who have given so many inputs and so many experts. Thank you so much. Without you, it would not be possible. Thank you to all the agencies because the collaboration here is so evident, right? So thank you to all of them. And of course, thank you to my team. Stand up all of you, please. I’ll quickly say it, how much work they have done for this, I cannot even tell you. Natasha, Shruti, Sahana, Tanya, Gautam, Abhishek, Suresh, Srinidhi, Mable, and everyone else. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
0:02:06 So, I learnt so much in these two days and I hope all of you did learn something. I learnt about young people’s alienation, but I yet witnessed their extreme engagement right around me. I learnt that the arts are critical and that Kathak, for example, can help in treating Parkinson’s. I learnt that people, and I met many in these last two days, with their own terrible personal tragedies, can still overcome their own adversity to help others in the mental health space. Yes, I met many of them and some of them are right here. I learnt that there are doctors without borders, but that we people create our own borders to keep mental patients and mental illness out of our sphere.
0:02:54 I learnt that Rahul Dravid can hit sixers outside the cricket pitch and give us life lessons. I learnt that digital futures might create mental health issues, especially for young people, but that technologies exist that will help fill the gaps in the delivery of mental health services. I learnt that we are all communities of fate, but that we can also become communities of care, because no one is alone and we are all more than our illnesses.
0:03:27 Most of all, I learnt from the experts here, the development sector practitioners, the artists, the academics, and people like Dr Shyam Bhat, that if we can all develop our ‘body intelligence’ – I like that phrase, I’ve been thinking of it for a while, body intelligence. And body, of course, includes our mind and our brains, then maybe we can all learn how to do better self-care, to do less self-harm, to know ourselves better, to love ourselves better, and therefore, know others better, and love others better, and develop our maitri, sahanubhuti, and karuna. And so that we can have much more, this empathy, we can spread the empathy.
0:04:09 I am a yoga practitioner, and one of the most simple and elegant sutras in the Patanjali Yoga Sutras for me has always been, “Heyam Dukham Anagatam”, which means, that which can be prevented, that sorrow, that harm, that pain, which can be prevented, should be. And that’s where samaaj comes in. Can we prevent, protect, reduce the harm? Maybe then, if we can learn to do that, as some of the doctors said on these panels, we can reduce the mental health disease burden of our country.
0:04:41 And as Shyam rightly said, India matters greatly in the world. When we already had very simple understanding of the kleshas that all human beings experience, Avidya, Asmita, Raga, Dvesha, Abhinivesha, and some pathways beyond to improve that were also presented to us by sages past, Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Brahmacharya, and Aparigraha. We know all these things. So India’s ancient wisdom matters as much as the modern knowledge, thanks to NIMHANS, thanks to NCBS, thanks to many other countries, is developing at a pace in this country, absolutely at the cutting edge of modern knowledge.
0:05:21 So if we, following in that way, if we can create a public movement… I’m samaaj first, and I really believe it’s the samaaj that can drive change in the world. If we can create a public movement to understand and celebrate mental well-being, celebrate mental well-being, then it can become a global movement too. It won’t happen automatically. It will take Samaaj, Sarkaar and Bazaar. Sorry, I have to slip in that phrase once in my speeches.
0:05:50 Rohini Nilekani: But to end, it seems to me, like something has begun here in these past two days. A little lamp has been lit in this…just before the festival of light begins all over our country. We hope many partners will come forward in the next few months to take this one lamp and turn it into a big sea of light, dispelling the darkness that mental ill health can bring to both individuals and to our whole society. Please join us in this movement.
Dhanyawada. Namaskara.
