Hello Fellow Freethinkers!

The team of activists at Nirmukta is very excited to unveil our very own Freethought Community Forums. These forums were created with the intention of providing a safe and dependable communication platform for those of us interested in promoting science and reason in India.

You may ask ‘why do we need another forum to discuss Freethought? Aren’t there enough social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Atheist Nexus, Orkut etc…?

The way we see it, these open social networking sites are just the first step in reaching out to Freethinkers. They offer us a public venue to promote our cause and to attract new members into our community. However, we think that it is enormously useful for our community of Freethinkers to have our own online portal to communicate with each other. The new Nirmukta Forums belong to all the Freethinkers of India. A powerful community-owned forum gives us security, privacy and customizability in ways that generic social networks don’t. This is why we hope that you will use these forums to their fullest potential and help propel the Freethought Revolution in India.

Through these forums we can focus on building a community of Freethinkers by Celebrating Science and Reason, providing support to the victims of religion/superstition, discussing Science and Philosophy with other Indian Freethinkers, planning ideas for eradicating the superstitions and oppressive beliefs of our time, holding Regional Group meetups, and planning strategies for Local Action….among other things.

So pelase join us in creating meaningful, moral and naturalistic alternatives to religion and superstition.

Please visit the site, http://nirmukta.net, register for an account (if activation email is missing, please check spam folder- we’re still fixing this problem) and begin sharing with your fellow Freethinkers.

This message is from the team of activists at Nirmukta, including but not limited to:

• Siddharth Singh
• Bala Bhaskar
  
• Shobhit Gupta
• Rakshi Rath
• Sundeep Peswani
• Kitty Hundal
• Prabhakar Kamath
• Sajith Unni
• Jayesh Vijayan
• Sri Harsha Dandibhotla
• Pankaj Kulkarni
• Ajita Kamal

Alone into this world I am born
With no name to call my very own
The womb that fatefully shaped me
And the eyes that lovingly peer at me
Are the ones that give me my identity
The ‘I’ that I so protectively preserve. Read the full story

A group of activists, academics and leaders of the Freethought Movement have come together to propose the foundation of a well-organized, non-profit, freethought organization in India.

Summary: This is a proposal for a management-oriented approach to a Nirmukta organization. It is in three parts- (1) establishing why such an approach is needed, (2) presenting a mission statement and (3) proposing clear objectives to be implemented immediately.

Introduction

Nirmukta had its first online “meeting” on Saturday the 23rd of January, 2010. The members of the Nirmukta team who participated in this meeting include Prof. Narendra Nayak president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA), Dr. Prabhakar Kamath, Pankaj Kulkarni, Siddharth Singh, Ajita Kamal and Kedar Kulkarni. We also had a guest panelist, Blair Scott, the National Affiliate Outreach Director for American Atheists, to help bring us a unique perspective from an established freethought organization in the United States. While the meeting was beset with technical problems, some avoidable by refining protocol and familiarizing ourselves with the format, and some unavoidable (such as the bandwidth issue), we were still able to come up with some good ideas and share them with the group. Read the full story

Greetings Friends!

Members of the Nirmukta team will be broadcasting a live meeting and interactive discussion in the Nirmukta chatroom on Saturday the 23rd, at 21:30 IST (16:00 London, 11:00 New York). You have the chance to participate online by asking questions and presenting suggestions to our panel of activists, skeptics, writers and academics.

The chatroom is located at : http://tinychat.com/nirmukta

RSVP for this on facebook, here.

This event is open to all. A full agenda will be posted very soon along with the list of panel members.

The web-based platform we are using is tinychat.com. This service allows upto 8 panelists to broadcast simultaneously. The text-chat function is open to all audience members who sign in using their facebook or twitter accounts. If you don’t have one yet, consider getting one before the event (although if you don’t have one yet you’re probably here by mistake).

The main subject of the discussion will be the future of the movement, and our panelists will present their views on Nirmukta and its potential role in advancing reason in India. However, there will be other subjects discussed as well. There are many areas to be covered since this is the first meeting and broadcast. In the future we will have scheduled broadcasts of shows on various subjects and in various formats.

So, come talk with us at the chatroom next Saturday. Make a note of it on your calendar. Send us an email and tell us what you’d like to see discussed. Join us and become part of the Nirmukta community.

Important: Please RSVP for this event on the facebook page.

Ajita Kamal

Editor

Send Email to:

info [at] nirmukta.com

or

ajita [at] nirmukta.com

Just a quick post requesting Nirmukta readers to click here and join us on facebook. I have left the group open to all and I hope that those interested in becoming part of the free-thought community in our corner of the world will join. Promoting secularism and science in Southeast Asia are the stated objectives. There will not be much required of you after joining the group, but since getting such a group off the ground is the hard part, please excuse some persistence on my part in getting you to join
I have been having more trouble than I had anticipated with the newsletter, and am considering making it bi-monthly instead of monthly as initially proposed. The good news is that I finally have sufficient material to put together a first issue that will be worthy of Nirmukta! For the millions out there waiting with bated breath, it should be out in the next couple of weeks. There will also be a link to it from the homepage.