1. Education

2. Family

3. Career

4. Odissi dance

5. Bharatanatyam

6. Author and translator

7. References

8. External links

Senior Performing Arts Fellowship, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute;

Nominated for a Harry Schwalb Award for Excellence in the Arts;

Nominated for an Outstanding Established Artist Award by Pittsburgh Magazine; Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellowship; National Science Talent Scholar; National Scholar; Chancellor's Prize Winner for Debating; Selected to represent India at the English Speaking Union of the Commonwealth

Education

Operajita went to Rishi Valley School - which has consistently been ranked as one of India's best residential schools - at age six, and studied there for nine years. At Rishi Valley School, she is regarded as most outstanding amongst its cadre of bright students - excelling in academics and classical Indian dance, (Bharatanatyam of the rigorous Pandanallur style) - playing lead roles in dance dramas staged under Rishi Valley's Banyan Tree for its founder, Jiddu Krishnamurti; as well, she is remembered for her exceptional talent in theatre, classical music, yoga, writing, science, debating and art. Operajita is known to have been a favourite dancer of Jiddu Krishnamurti.^[7]

She received her higher education at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Utkal University, Delhi University, and Dalhousie University, Canada (where she was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellow). At Dalhousie University, she wrote her dissertation on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Her thesis supervisor was Canadian poet, J. Andrew Wainwright.

Family

Operajita belongs to one of Odisha's most distinguished and renowned aristocratic and political families, and is the daughter of eminent Indian educators and public intellectuals, Professor Bidhu Bhusan Das and Professor Prabhat Nalini Das, and a granddaughter of Rai Bahadur Durga Charan Das of the Indian Administrative Service, IAS, and his award-winning poet wife, Nirmala Devi. Her paternal great aunt is Sarala Devi, a friend and collaborator of Mahatma Gandhi, author, feminist, leader and the first woman speaker of the Orissa Legislative Assembly. Her great uncle, Nityanand Kanungo was a member of the first post Independence cabinet of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and successive Nehru cabinets. He was also appointed governor of the provinces of Gujarat and Bihar by Nehru.^[8] At Rishi Valley, the noted Indian actress, Leela Naidu, met her when she was eight years old and requested Operajita's parents to let her become her god-daughter. She was god-daughter to both Naidu and her husband, the author Dom Moraes.

Career

Operajita has been a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was appointed, in 1990, by its Founder-President Dr Richard Cyert.^[9] She is a Senior Adviser on International Affairs, Public Policy and Communication to several of India's prominent leaders in the Lok Sabha in the Parliament of India. Operajita has been regularly invited, since 2000, to meet with Prime Ministers, Presidents and Heads of Government, together with their top-ranked delegations visiting India.

Oopali Operajita is Chair and Founder of Asia's first Sustainable Technology Venture Competition, since 2006, which brings new, clean and sustainable technologies to market through entrepreneurship, to enhance sustainability on the planet. The competition has become a movement, and has a footprint of some 60,000 students worldwide. Its academic partners are India's Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).^[10][11]

Odissi dance

A prize and favourite disciple of legendary Odissi Guru Padma Vibhushan Kelucharan Mohapatra, Operajita has performed worldwide. Kelucharan Mohapatra taught her for twelve consecutive years at her home, MR3 Rajpath, Bhubaneshwar (one of that city's Otto Konigsberger-designed, historically and architectecturally noteworthy, "Type VIII" bungalows, similar to New Delhi's Edwin Lutyens bungalows). When Mohapatra returned to the performing stage, after a hiatus of twenty years, in the dance drama "Konarka", (entirely at the behest and persuasion of Operajita's mother, Professor Prabhat Nalini Das), he cast Operajita to play the female lead opposite him. Earlier, she trained under Guru Debaprasad Das for five years; and Guru Pankaj Charan Das for two years. A winner of many international and national awards for dance,

Operajita is also a critic and scholar of the arts.^[12] She is the first classical Indian artist to have performed at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh. Given her expertise in cross cultural relations and awareness, and her unique position as an internationally celebrated interpreter of classical Indian dance, music and art for several decades, across many continents, Operajita was invited by the Ministry of External Affairs (India), and the Office of the Prime Minister of India, to choreograph the Rashtrapati Bhavan concert for President Barack Obama in 2010.^[13]

Bharatanatyam

Operajita started learning Bharatanatyam, at age six, in the grand Pandanallur style at Rishi Valley School from Guru S. Meenakshi and studied it for nine continuous years. In the early 1980s, she took master lessons in London from the iconic B. Ram Gopal (dancer) who taught her guru, S. Meenakshi. Operajita and her dance partner are the most prominent of Rishi Valley's dancers. As a professional classical dancer, she is a torchbearer of the great Rishi Valley dance tradition, which gave rise to phenomenally beautiful and successful dance dramas in Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil - in which she was always cast in the lead role - staged each year under the school's famous Banyan Tree for its founder, Jiddu Krishnamurti. The music for these productions was composed by Veena G Visalakshi, a disciple of Vizianagaram Venkataramana Das, and the text was chosen or composed by Pandit Chundi Hanumantharao. Operajita studied veena for seven years and Carnatic vocal music for nine years with Veena G Visalakshi.{{sfn|Balasundaram|2012|p=77}}

Operajita was invited by Rishi Valley to choreograph a dance drama for the school. She produced an episode from Kalidasa's "Kumarasambhavam" for which the original score had been composed exclusively for her by Padma Bhushan Pandit Chhannulal Mishra of Varanasi, thereby resuscitating a great Rishi Valley dance tradition which had lain dormant for decades.

Author and translator

Together with her parents, Operajita has translated pre-eminent Odia author, Gopinath Mohanty's award-winning novel, "Amrutara Santana", widely regarded as his magnum opus, into English - the translation is called, "Amrutara Santana: The Dynasty of The Immortals." It has been published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, the Indian Government's official, apex literary body, in 2016.^[14][15] Operajita was invited to read excerpts from this translation at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2017, in a session she shared with actress-author Nandana Sen.

References

External links

• Official site

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