The celebration of Durga Puja in the New Taipei City Library in Sijhih District (汐止) early this month shows once again the deepening cultural and educational ties between Taiwan and India.
Illustrating the deepening ties, Sujeet Kumar, an Indian member of parliament and Taiwan enthusiast, also attended the festival, which had extra significance due to it being recognized for its cultural value by the UN.
UNESCO this year inscribed Durga Puja on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and lauded the festival “as the best instance of public performance of religion and art... During the event, the divides of class, religion and ethnicity collapse as crowds of spectators walk around to admire the installations.”
Photo courtesy of Nandana Biswass
Durga is an important Hindu goddess and is worshiped as the symbol of the triumph of good over evil. The goddess, riding a tiger or lion, is associated with the protection of her children and fights demons and destructive forces.
The resolve and infinite energy of Durga is a persona that some in the Indian community feel President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) embodies, as she remains calm in the face of the saber-rattling behemoth across the Taiwan Strait.
Although the festival is celebrated every year in October, primarily by the Bengali community, of late it has acquired a pan-India character and as such it is now celebrated in Indian communities across the globe.
The 10-day festival begins with Mahalaya, when the chanting of hymns consecrated to Durga permeates the ambiance in crescendo with the beating of the drums and the blowing of conks.
Due to Taiwan’s religious diversity and tolerance, the Indian community, estimated to be over 5,000, has started celebrating festivals like Durga Puja and Dewali (the festival of light) with gusto, receiving the wholehearted support and cooperation of locals and civic authorities in terms of finding proper venues.
It augurs well that, although India and Taiwan may not share formal diplomatic relations, the extent to which the two have moved closer culturally and educationally in recent years could not have been imagined decades earlier.
The relationship between civil society and coverage in the media both in India and Taiwan also raised awareness among the people and empathy for each other has grown phenomenally.
Rup Narayan Das is a Taiwan Fellow at National Chung-Hsing University and author of the book ‘Hong Kong Conundrum: Pangs of Transition.’
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS