On 30th May, 2023 Brigadier Harshvardhan Singh, an Indian Army officer from the 1987 batch, presented a lecture on the "Geopolitics of India" to the guides of the City Palace Museum in Udaipur, organized by the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation.

The Brigadier highlighted the "geo-politics" of India that defined India's borders. He explained in detail the description of Jambudweep found in the Puranas, and provided the map of unbroken India and the information of the present countries.

He also described India's 15106.7 km border with neighboring countries, including PoK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), LAC (Line of Actual Control), LOC (Line of Control), and Mac Mohan Line, and their geopolitics, tensions, and meetings.

The Brigadier also praised the courage of the soldiers of the Indian Army at Galvan, Doklam, and Nathula border, and highlighted the indomitable courage and inspirational victory campaigns of the Indian Army heroes on every challenge that came their way.

At the end of the lecture, Mr. Bhupendra Singh Auwa, Administrator in Chief of the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, thanked Brigadier Harshvardhan Singh and gifted him Mewar books on behalf of the Foundation.

Brigadier Harshvardhan Singh presenting his lecture
MMCF Conservators Discuss Collaboration with The Met -Multispectral Imaging (MSI) to Preserve Mewar's Living Heritage

On June 30, 2023, conservators from the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation (MMCF) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) held an online interactive session to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a project to set up a Multi-spectral Imaging (MSI) system at the MMCF conservation laboratory.

The session was led by Ms. Marina Ruiz Molina, a paper conservator at The Met, who is currently working on a research project to identify Indian pigments.

Ms. Molina visited the City Palace Museum in Udaipur in March 2023, where she demonstrated the MSI system on some of the Mewar paintings from the museum collection.

The MMCF conservators, Ms. Anuja Mukherjee and Ms. Bhasha Shah, were impressed with the results of the MSI imaging and are interested in collaborating with The Met to set up a similar system at the MMCF laboratory. The MSI system would be used to non-destructively identify pigments in paintings and other works of art, which would be a valuable tool for conservation and research. The online session was a productive opportunity for the two teams to discuss their shared interests and to explore the possibilities for collaboration.

Development in Maharana Mewar Special Library

Maharana Mewar Special Library (MMSL) is an excellent resource for scholars and researchers. It has a collection of more than 36234 books till June 2023 on different subjects. The Library has special collection of books dedicated to Literature, Religion, History, Arts, Zoology, Sports and General Geography of different parts of India and the globe, and a rare collection of books on the Mewar dynasty.

115 new books were received in this month and all the books were processed in Accession Register. Classification done by Dewey decimal classification 19th Rev.

Edition, Cataloguing (AACR II) and Bibliography; details uploaded in Library housekeeping software. Libsys and Eternal Mewar web site http://eternalmewar.in/mmsl. Stamping, tagging and scanning were also done on all these books.

The details of the book include -

Azaad : An Autobiography, Vishva Itihas (1500-1950), Na Bhooto Na Bhavishyati, Hamari Sansad, Swami Vivekanand, Pakistan Mail, Prakrit Vidhya, The Twentieth Wife, The Patriarchs : How to Men Came to Rule, Murder Gone Mad, Meditations on Spiritual Truth, A Tale of Two Cities, Twelve Contemporary Short Stories, Gifted : Inspiring Stories of People with Disabilities, Teatime for the Firefly, Wider