DDA ’26 · Opening Ceremony
Dharma in the Digital Age
A Forest, Not a Plantation
A natural forest has no concept of crop and weed — every tree, creeper, and grass coexists, sharing and prospering together. A plantation, where one crop is favored and everything else is cleared away, is not a forest at all. That is the difference between Dharma and religion. Swami Chidanandpuri, opening keynote
The Gathering
Three days begin with a lamp and a mantra
DDA ’26 — Dharma Civilization Foundation’s annual global conference on Dharma and Indic Knowledge Systems in the digital age — opened in Houston with a full house of speakers, panelists, and attendees gathered for what emcees Smita Malla and Saurabh Aphale called the start of “three days spent together.” This is the conference’s third year.
The program opened with a Vedic invocation from Sh. Vishwarupa, a Veda‑acharya trained for six years in Krishna Yajurveda at Vedavyasa Gurukulam, Bengaluru, under the guidance of Dr. Ramachandra Bhat Konnamani and other acharyas. He now serves as Executive Director of SVBF USA and resides in Houston. He offered mantras from the Mahanarayana Upanishad, reflecting on the nature of the Supreme and liberation — a reminder, as the hosts noted, that Dharma is both a path and a realization.
Dignitaries then lit the ceremonial lamp — Deepa Prajwalan — joined by the gathering in chanting Asato Ma Sadgamaya together, before the stage was handed to the conference’s three featured voices.
Our Speakers
Three voices opening the conference
The inaugural session was anchored by a monastic scholar, an education researcher and university leader, and the conference’s own president — three very different vantage points on the same question: what does Dharma ask of us in a digital age?
Monastic scholar bringing the depth of the Vedantic tradition to contemporary conversations about purpose and meaning. A distinguished scholar of Advaita Vedanta who took Sannyasa Diksha in 1989 and founded Advaita Ashram in Kolathur, Kerala. Founder and Managing Trustee of Sri Shankara Charitable Trust (12 branches nationwide), visiting professor and chair of Sanatana studies at the University of Calicut, and author of dozens of books. He is extending his mission to the US through SAGE (Shankara Advaita Ashram of Global Enlightenment) in California.
Education researcher and practitioner at the intersection of learning science and Dharmic pedagogy. Vice Chancellor of Gujarat University and former head of Indic and Sanskrit studies, with nearly four decades of academic and administrative experience. A polyglot fluent in eleven languages, her work bridges scholarship, policy, and cultural preservation on national and international platforms.
Technocrat, educator, and President of Dharma Civilization Foundation. Over 37 years of global experience across enterprise architecture and strategy, including establishing the data science and analytics practice at Costco. A three‑decades‑long adjunct faculty member and startup mentor, and creator of CITAP, a framework for excellence in IT architecture.
Welcome Address
“A festival of learning and knowledge”
Welcoming the gathering, Shrikant Palkar described the conference not as a scripted ceremony but as an unfolding energy: people who have “spent 35, 40, 50 years” of their lives dedicated to ideas they believe matter for the betterment of humanity. “Our name for that is Dharma,” he said — a collection of ideas to be shared, protected, and continually re‑contextualized, so that the principles stay constant even as how they reach people changes with time.
He set a simple goal for the three days ahead: that attendees leave with concrete pointers on how to carry Dharma’s ideas into daily life across the conference’s themes, and with renewed energy for the things they already believe are worth following through on. With scholars and practitioners present from across the United States, Bharat, and Europe, he urged everyone to make full use of the time together — “they are very accessible people.”
Keynote · Swami Chidanandpuri
Dharma is not religion
Swami Chidanandpuri opened with what he called the first necessary clarity for the conference: Dharma and religion are not the same thing, and conflating them — as often happens across Bharat — obscures what Dharma actually is.
Key idea · Swami Chidanandpuri
A forest and a plantation can look equally green. Only one of them is alive in the way Dharma is alive — sustaining every being within it, with no concept of “crop” and “weed.”
The order beneath everything
Drawing on the classical definition rooted in Dharayati iti Dharma — that which sustains — he described Dharma as the scheme or order holding everything together, from subatomic particles to the multiverse referenced in the Vedas’ own vision of “Ananta Koti Brahmanda.” Science, economics, political systems, and religion are all, in his framing, only as good as their alignment with that underlying order: standing on the platform of Dharma, they serve the world; detached from it, any one of them can become destructive.
Faith is the beginning, not the end
We live daily by faith in systems we never personally verify — boarding a flight without asking the pilot for a license, riding a train without checking who is driving it. Faith, he said, is essential; without it we could not function. But human beings are, by nature, questioning beings, and this is where he located Sanatana Dharma’s particular strength: its shastras are structured as questions and answers, not as demands to simply believe. He pointed to a striking pattern — a large and growing share of people across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia now describe themselves as non‑religious, not because they have abandoned the inquiry into ultimate reality, but because faith‑based systems that only ask them to “believe, believe, believe” leave their questions unanswered. That, he argued, is exactly the space Dharma is suited to fill.
Technology is not the obstacle
Sanatana Dharma has never stood apart from developing science and technology — it began, he noted, with the invention of the wheel, and every wave of sophistication since has been absorbed rather than resisted. Modern tools make the tenets of Vedanta easier, not harder, to teach. The real work, he said, is translation: adjusting the wavelength so the message reaches a generation that is educated, questioning, and ready — without ever diluting the principle. The message the world most needs, he concluded, is not tolerance but acceptance, and it has to be built by bridging two channels that have drifted apart: the traditional lineage, which carries wisdom from the heart, and the academic world, which carries knowledge from the mind. “There must be a confluence of both,” he said, crediting the conference itself for bringing the two together.
Keynote · Dr. Neerja Gupta
The inner world shapes the outer one
Dr. Neerja Gupta began from language itself: across Sanskrit, Urdu, and English, a single word — prakriti, nature — covers both our inner disposition and the outer environment. What is happening within us, she argued, is what eventually shows up outside us; the turbulence we see in the world is rarely separate from the turbulence we carry inside.
Key idea · Dr. Neerja Gupta
“I know what Dharma is, but I cannot follow it. I know what is wrong, yet I am drawn to it.” The choices are ours — which means the responsibility for living Dharma is ours too.
Shraddha and Viveka
She named faith (shraddha) and discernment (viveka) as the two qualities most central to Dharma — neither of which, she said, can be taught from a book or instilled through fear. They come only from lived, day‑to‑day experience. Drawing on the Charaka Samhita’s framework of afflictions — of mind, speech, body, and ignorance — she argued that real remedy comes not from more information but from dialogue, honesty, and connection.
The loneliness behind the screen
Much of her talk turned to what she called the “walls” of digital life — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — where young people seek validation from strangers and a quiet post can trigger real distress. She traced this to a deeper gap at home: parents who rush to be their children’s “friend” instead of parents, outsourcing rituals and manners to schools and society, leave children without anyone to actually talk to. Her call was direct — families need to recover the practice of sharing feelings, not just information, because emotion, not data, is the base on which Dharma is transmitted.
Revisit the roots before the conclusions
She pushed back on treating only direct, empirical perception as valid knowledge — “if he tells his story, it’s history; if I tell mine, it’s mythology.” Recounting the statue of Sir William Jones in Kolkata, resting his hand on the Manusmriti, she noted that early European translations of Indic texts were driven in part by a search for corroboration of biblical accounts — a reminder, in her telling, to trace ideas back to their sources rather than accept secondhand framings of them.
Physical reality comes first
She closed with a field story from a government assignment in Kashmir, where her team was given ten days to stop children from stone‑pelting. Rather than policing the behavior, they asked why it was happening — and learned that bored children, out of school with nowhere to go, were being paid to collect stones. The team’s recommendation was simple: build playgrounds. Within weeks, dozens went up, and the stone‑pelting stopped. Her point for the room: address the physical and material reality first, because the intellectual and spiritual follow from it — not the other way around.
On Stage
A book inauguration and a competition for the next generation
Prof. K. Ramasubramanian joined Swami Chidanandpuri on stage for the formal inauguration of his new book, The Elusive Ratio and the Advent of Calculus in India, tracing the development of infinitesimal reasoning in Indic mathematics well before the figures usually credited with it in the West.
The conference also introduced this year’s Tejas book‑reading competition, now in its third year, where young participants read four assigned books spanning fiction and nonfiction on Dharma, sustainability, and science — including a novel that opens, fittingly, with trees. Finalists will move through a quiz round, a three‑minute reflection round, and an overnight “Act It Out” performance round over the coming two days, with select performances featured in the closing session.
What’s Ahead
Six themes, seven short talks, two more keynotes
- Six conference themes run across the next two and a half days, two in parallel at any given time — each with roughly two and a half hours to allow for real discussion, not just presentations.
- Seven short talks — “short talk, big impact” — deliver a single concrete, actionable idea in about 20 minutes each, distributed across the three days.
- Two more keynotes: Dr. Anil Rajbanshi, on more than 40 years of agricultural research, opens the second morning; a concluding session on the final day features a longtime DCF advisory board member.
- Every session will be posted to YouTube afterward, so nothing shared on stage is lost to the room.
Closing Thought
Dharma is the most sustainable thing there is
As Dr. Neerja Gupta put it, the digital age does not need to make Dharma sustainable — Dharma already is, which is why it never goes out of date. What the inauguration set in motion was not a conclusion but an invitation: to spend the next two and a half days turning that idea into something each attendee can carry back into their own field, their own family, and their own daily life.
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▶ Watch the Full Session (add video link)The Opening of Six DDA ’26 Conversations