I'm from Singapore and I'm part of a secret project that's bringing back Indian heritage homes. So secret that this is the first time we're ever publicly speaking about it. Treasures have been looted for decades and centuries and we are working really hard with volunteers, governments across the board to bring them back.

But to really understand what we do today, we'd have to go back a few thousand years to the Brihadeshwara temple complex on the banks of the river Kaveri. Now, this was built by Rajaraja Chola, one of India's biggest dynasties, and it was so cool back in its day, not just did it employ priests, but it employed dancers, scholars, authors, philosophers, what have you. It was kind of like the ink-tots of its time.

The temple was so amazing that in 1954, when the Indian government issued a thousand rupee note, they put a picture of the temple on it. This is how parts of the complex look today. The gods lay in ruins and dogs walk around where people like you and me should.

But why did this happen? The reason is really simple. The Nataraja, the main deity from the Garbhagriha, the sanctum sanctorum, was stolen and smuggled out of India a few years back. And this was one of many hundreds and thousands of antiques and treasures that have been used.

I won't get into the details of how they did it, but readers came in from New York, handpicked these statues, maps, manuscripts, what have you, smuggled them out of India, made fake papers in Hong Kong, sold them through a charity, through an auction house in London, and the statue ended up bought by the government of Australia, not knowing that it was stolen, and placed in their national museum. Now, a quick couple of things about being born Indian, right? One is that they don't let you ask questions in school, so you kind of have to wait till middle age till you start asking questions. Two, every desi kid wants to be James Bond.

So some of us basically got together and really started asking questions, right? Who's stealing the statues? Why? How are they getting sold? Who's buying them? But most importantly, can we really ever get them back? We did whatever any self-respecting investigator would do. We went to Google, and we went on Twitter, and we started blogging. We started connecting with volunteers across the world and saying, hey, listen, you live in Sydney.

We think there's a statue there. Could you take high-res pictures and send it out to us so we can make a match? We reached out to people in Germany. We reached out to people in India, and really started getting the whole momentum going.

Slowly, slowly, we had the best of the museums and art galleries across the world realizing that they're sitting on what we call chori ka maal, or stolen stuff. The picture of that handsome young man you see on the right is my good friend Vijay Sundaresan, and he was the researcher that found the trail of the Nakaraja. He and I are not alone.

There's Donna Yates. There's Kiran Manmohi right here in Bombay. There's Jason Fetch, and there's a whole bunch of people that are saying, hey, let's just put our time and effort.

And then magic starts to happen when the right intent gets together, right? First, we had international media that started waking up to the fact. You know, Sunday Times, and The Guardian, and New York Times, and what have you. Everyone started talking about it and started pressurizing their own governments.

Now, everything was working well. We had museums realizing that they need to give back stuff. We had the villain getting caught, media talking about us.

But then, the statues weren't coming back as yet. And that's what we started working with. And government has a huge role to play.

And we're really, really thankful that the current government realizes its duty. Something magical happened in September last year. Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, came to visit our Prime Minister and brought back the Nataraja, as you can see.

Notice how our Prime Minister's smile now changes with every moving picture, yeah? So that's when the avalanche started. Followed by the Canadian Prime Minister, who gave back some stuff when our Prime Minister was there. And very recently, Anjum Rathna came to India and brought back a villager.

Thank you. The real joy, the real joy is not with, you know, the political victory or the geopolitical victory of India. The real joy is this, right? A village that's lost its God has really lost its heart.

This is how the village looks today once the statues come back. Now, this is just a drop. Where are we now? 200 plus statues.

There are 70,000 that are out there. We don't know when we'll get them and when we'll not. We'll help, we will.

And just, it's not just a volume game. Just in terms of value, here is one raid made in New York on one art dealer and they've bought a hundred million dollars worth of antiques. Just so you know how big the game is.

Now for centuries, we've seen the destruction of culture. The Nazis did it to Jewish art. There are religious wars taking place all over the world.

People are going at it with hammers and chisels and tongs and destroying it as a part of a cultural conquest. When hammers and tongs are not enough, they just drop bombs and destroy heritage. What's different about us in India here is this.

We are not losing our heritage to either terrorists or to conquerors. We are losing it to our own people who are doing it for plain, simple greed. Nothing else.

The question you all have to ask yourself today is, are you willing to just sit by and let this happen? Thank you. So you guys got a small glimpse of who I am and all of that. It gives me more pleasure to introduce to you Vijay on his trip back from New York, New Haven last week, addressing the United Nations conference on Hijj.

The picture you saw there, the Nataraja and all of that was stuff that he figured, he trailed out. It gives me, you know, please a round of applause for Vijay for years and years of work, who is going to quickly take you through some of the super exciting and if I could use the word in an adult audience, really really sexy work that he has done. After that we will follow it up with what each of us could do to help our nation recover the heritage that we have lost.

Over to Vijay. Thank you Anurag. Thank you Srijan Foundation.

And thanks to you all for you to come down here on a busy weekday. So you just saw the video of a rough glimpse. So the next 45 minutes we are going to go through the actual process of what we are doing and I want to share some success stories as well.

So we will go on through how we are doing it, why we are doing it and what needs to be done. And as Anurag said, we need more support from you. And towards the end you will see what support we need from you all.

For centuries we have lost our heritage. People are talking about the Kohinoor very much. But the problem is we are continuing to lose our heritage even now.

From the data that we have in the last 10 years, we have lost close to 10,000 pieces of art which is a targeted loot on an industrial scale. Like Anurag said, people are coming down, visiting our sites, picking and choosing objects. Photographs are taken and then it is loot to order.

So I am going to run you through a few slides which will get you interested to understand the modus operandi of these smugglers. We are not going to focus purely on statues but it is not the last. We have got manuscripts, we have got artifacts, maps, books.

So entire heritage does not emphasize only the movable art. Even the immovable pieces are made movable. They are hacking temple art.

We have got pieces where we cut off the head, legs. So this is gross destruction. We are a global effort.

We have got volunteers all over the world, experts. So I am not alone. I just started this movement and we have been thankful for the last couple of years.

We have got support from volunteers all over the world who are helping us with this initiative. We all have day jobs and thankfully the economy is not that bad. It still pays us for our hobbies in the night.

We have got some support from corporates and government. We could do with more. And our primary objective is to be a deterrent.

For too long India has been a soft target and that's why we named it the India Pride Project. We want to restore India's pride that people outside India don't think that Indian art is fair game. Nobody is bothered.

Just to give you a glimpse of what are the values in international market. For us it is priceless art. It's God, embodiment of God.

But this is an object that was in the market in 2006. It's a Bharat Yakshi dated to the 2nd century BC. It was offered for sale for 15 million dollars.

It's currently seized in America. It is with US customs. This is another object traced to Mount Abu.

You will see later where it is from. So the loot encompasses all religions. So you have got Hindu art, Jain art, Christian art, Islamic art and even pre, we even see something much older as we go down.

This is a Kushan period Buddha which is currently off display in Australia. This is a sad tale. The initial slide, the cover photo and this Nataraja is currently stolen and hidden somewhere in New York.

We have not been able to find where it is hidden for the last 5 years. We are still searching for it. It was valued at 5 million dollars.

Now to give you an idea, this is actually a site in Madhya Pradesh. It's a ceiling and you can see the ceiling has fantastic sculptures and sadly every one of them have been removed. And that's an ASI protected site and that is an ASI photograph.

This is how the site is currently. And all these pieces are currently in Europe. You saw the Mahabal Jina and you can see right now in Mount Abu, there is a modern replacement that's there.

And you can see the original museum and that's the catalogue where dealers are openly advertising for these sales. Not only that, just a little bit of introduction about how we work with India's antiquity laws and the world antiquity laws. Everybody is clear of the UN Statute of 1970 which prohibits illicit removal of antiquities.

So 1970 is considered like a global cut off but it doesn't mean that anything before 1970 is untouchable. Because India has had its antiquity acts in various forms from the late 19th century around 1878 itself. But I want you to look at the provenance.

Provenance is like apparent deed. And you can see even blatantly, the provenance is given as 1995. This is an open sale in an auction house where they are advertising a provenance of 1995 which is well after even the UN Statute has come in place.

There is another one, 1984, 1980s. So this is blatant disregard. These are all open catalogues.

You can go and Google for them. Somebody is openly blatantly selling Indian art that has apparently moved out of India after the international laws were even passed. Forget Indian laws.

And I just want you to look at some of the values in question. This one was sold for close to a million dollars. This went for almost 3 million dollars.

And I want you to highlight this small object right here. That's an Indus seal. This is an anthropomorphic figure which is dated to 4000 BC.

So these are the kind of objects and this is an art dealer's catalogue. So these are the kind of objects that are leaving India and this is just a sample. We have hundreds of such objects that are being traded every year out of India.

I just want to point out, this is all happening. How equipped are our law enforcement and our systems? This is Nataraja which is in the Metropolitan Museum. And if you really closely watch it, it was purchased sometime around 1966 by a collector.

Along with this Samandar. Now the funny part is, sometime two years ago, the law enforcement in Tamil Nadu came up with an award. They want to reward somebody 5000 rupees if somebody gave information saying that this is recently stolen.

So this, they did not even Google it. So that is the level of competency within our current system. Now we are talking about a very sophisticated crime.

These objects are moved via open shipments, declared as garden furniture for as low as 500 dollars. And they are going to Hong Kong, to Bangkok, to Middle East. And then they are sent to restorers in London.

And then they come into the US, into Europe and majorly traded around. So to just bring you up to date, last month there was a big sale as it happens every year in New York. It is called the Asia Week.

It is supposed to be a celebration of all these dealers coming together. So we have been planning this for a long time. So what we managed to work with the US law enforcement and it happened to be a seizure.

And there was a major raid, 6 raids, coordinated raids over the one week to coincide with the Asia Week. And we are pleased to tell you that this is the first time we are making this public. This was our work and this was the robber photo.

So when I told you these guys, they take photographs of the objects once they rob it and they send it to dealers offering them. So these are called robber offering photos. So we had tracked this to a sale in London in 2006.

We missed it that time. But this time when it was put up for sale by Christie's, one of the world's most renowned art auction houses, it was seized. And to give you what kind of work we do, it's not just matching a piece.

You can see the kind of work that we provide as support. So every crack is matched and the object is, that's the foolproof proof that we offer law enforcement. And this object was seized last month.

I just want to show you one aspect. You saw Tony Abbott return the Nataraja. But there was another small statue which was on the side, which is basically Shiva as the Ardhanarishwara.

And that is also a work. In fact, it's a very important find. It was in situ, this is a photograph of a Nish sculpture which was in the Vidhagirishwara temple in Vidhachalam.

It was photographed. It's supposed to be one of the singular Chola artworks. It's so beautiful that unless I tell you that it's broken two hands, you will have to look at it again to realize that two major hands are broken.

So the beauty of this sculpture takes away your focus. And I had studied this as part of my hobby. And I was shocked to see it was sold to Australia.

So what I did was, I went down, this was a photograph that came in the Australian paper. And this was a provenance that was given. And if you see the address, Uttam Singh and Sons is a brass merchant and this is his shop right in Delhi.

And this was the provenance given. It was given as though it was taken out of India just before 1970. And it was actually a documented object where Douglas Barrett has published this book in 1974 with a photograph of this bronze.

And we asked somebody to go down to Vidhachalam to take a photograph and they had made a replica. So once we had the replica photographed and we proved it, the Australian media helped us a lot. And the police finally, after our information, filed the FIR.

We managed to trace the photograph from the French Institute Pondicherry where they had photographed this sculpture as late as 1998. And this was the fake that was there. You can notice that the hands have been redone in a wrong way.

Chola Ardhanarishwara, the right hand will be tapping the Nandi and the left hand will be like this. So both I think must have been amateur sculpture. So this is how it should actually look.

If you had gone to the next village, you would have known how to sculpt at least a better copy. So just to give you an idea, so this was when it was already in the temple. This is when it was moved to the gallery, the replacement.

As it was brought back to India and there you have Modi receiving it and then a final photograph. Now why this is very important might be a very small statue. In terms of value it was sold for about 700,000 dollars in 2006.

It gave us a proven trail and it created a lot of media attraction in Australia. So much so it forced the National Gallery of Australia to do a comprehensive review of the 1500 pieces of Asian art that they had in their collections. Of which what happened was we managed to find a lot of robber photos.

So this is a pair of door guardians. If you notice they have a dhoti behind it. So this is actually a robber who has taken it out of the temple and then here it's better, they have a lungi behind it.

And we have all these objects. So this is just the Nataraja after it was taken out. So these are all the robber photos which the robbers are basically parading their wares to say are you interested to buy and this is how blatantly the sale is done.

Now what happened after this, the Australian press, when they put the pressure, they released a due diligence report. And when we looked at the due diligence report, every object that was bought, was bought surprisingly between 1969 and 1970. And it's like the whole range and it's the same paperwork and if you can really see, this object Mahishasuramardini is Uttam Singh and Sons.

You go down, Sundarini's diplomat, Abdullah Maigoob which is the same as the Nataraja. Abdullah Maigoob and you will have Uttam Singh and Sons. So we had this entire paper trail of fake provenances and as Anurag and me were discussing, at least the robbers had to be little more creative.

It's like when kids, we used to have, maybe study five answers for an exam. If some other question came, we will write whatever we knew. So similarly I think they have just used whatever is possible, the same answers.

And the surprising fact is the optical due diligence of the museum. Now we are looking at it as amateurs, we can see how they have been cheated. So it poses a larger question, were they cheated or they just didn't care.

They just wanted a piece of paper and most likely what they do is, they just check for the Art Loss Register Certificate. Now this is the Interpol Stolen Works Database. If you really look at it, Asia Pacific, not more than 3% of the database comprises Asian art.

There is no point in checking with the Interpol Stolen Works Database. And this was one of the reasons they gave in Australia. We have checked in the Interpol Stolen Works Database, the data is not there.

And now you look at the Art Loss Register Certificate. This is an organization in Europe where you have to register the photograph, pay them a fee to register in the database. And they will check whether any object for sale is in the database.

So you go back, provenance not provided. And this certificate is worthless. And this is the only proof that most of Indian objects are sold even today.

Now as a cascading effect, we later found there is one more object from the same temple was lifted. We managed to find this match in January. Now what this happens is, all of you know what happened.

This is the statue of Mahavira in Bihar, which created a lot of roar last year, towards the end of last year. As soon as this was stolen, we got a confidential mail saying, can you help? So we asked them for the FIR report and photograph. And immediately we tweeted the photograph.

The moment an object has been documented and a photograph is available, it becomes unsellable in the global market because they know there is no point in, they can't openly sell it or exhibit it. And the thieves actually dropped it in a nearby forest. So this is the kind of work that we are currently doing on social media.

Over the next 10 minutes or so, we're really going to talk about why are we so passionately trying to deal with this as a challenge. Every time we come to India and talk about it, there are people that literally tell us that, you know, Anurag ji, India is not a place for people to eat. There is no clothing to wear.

You are after statues. There is a lot of apathy and we'll give you some examples. We just want you to understand why this is a deeper challenge than what is apparent on the surface.

The relationship of art, especially stolen art and money laundering is really, really deep. Given that we have rich man Sanjeev Sanyal in the audience. If Sanjeev Sanyal had to smuggle a million dollars as he usually carries through the airport, it would be really, really difficult for him to pack it in a suitcase and take it along with him.

Somebody at customs or security or CISF or anyone on the other side would spot a big heavy suitcase. However, if he rolls up a million dollar painting and checks it in, nobody's going to know that he's actually carrying a million dollars worth of stuff with him. Two, geopolitical power.

For long, many countries have positioned themselves as powerful because they didn't let others get their way. Unfortunately, what's happened in India as far as it comes to art and art theft and heritage mafia, people kind of assume that India is a no consequence zone. Why is India seen as a no consequence zone? Because we've had zero people going to jail over heritage theft.

Now, if all of you grew up around the age I did, I'm sure all of you saw movies like Shalimar and Jool Thief and all of that. This issue has been existing before my parents were born. But in all these years, I'm surprised that India could not find and convict one person who's been a major criminal in this segment.

So what then happens is, if you go to an art dealer in London or Zurich or New York, he'll tell you, Sunil sahib, you can buy stuff from India, there won't be any problem in the future. And that's really the problem, it kind of perpetuates the challenge that we already have in people specifically targeting India. Finally, restitution of faith.

Now, I'm assuming all of you have grown up in urban India, if you've not, think of your grandparents or aunts or uncles that have grown up in smaller towns and villages. In cities, if I need to catch up with you for a coffee, we'll go to a mall, we'll land up at a press club, we'll go to a restaurant, CPMA milte hai, yeh hai, woh hai. In villages, even today in India, you talk of C&D towns in India, there's a village well, there's a banyan tree and there's a temple.

Society congregates around these three. Weddings happen there, shraads happen there, annaprashan happens there, any ceremony, holi, diwali, everything happens there. The minute you take away the deity from a temple, the temple isn't a temple anymore and therefore the social fabric of the village is kind of shaken.

As you saw in the picture, now imagine if I just showed you this picture and I asked you to describe what that village would be like. You'd say, you know, dead village hai, morose village hai, re yaar yeh kya hai. What emotions or what adjectives come to your mind when you watch something like that? Imagine what a turnaround that village or that society or community has gone through once their deity, the Nataraja in this case was found.

What needs to be done? So coming back to the objectives of India Pride, really we have three objectives that we are working with. The first which Vijay talked about in really good detail is restitution. Figuring out what heritage has gotten stolen from India, when was it stolen, how did it get to where it did and then working with governments on both sides to try and bring that back.

But the challenge is way beyond that. There needs to be an awareness amongst everybody and which is why we are all here. The awareness needs to go down to the deepest of the levels to each and every citizen in India and to people in the world saying that, hey listen, you can't mess around with our heritage.

Our heritage is our identity and that is what defines us today. The third is to build the appetite within the government and that's our big challenge. You saw me in a more public platform, you know, with a thousand people sitting in the audience and therefore I had to be politically correct, which we won't be today.

Right Vijay? We will not be politically correct. There is a huge not my job syndrome that exists within the bureaucracy. I am not talking of anyone specifically but just as a general feel that we get.

Somebody has painted the road and not bothered to move that branch aside to paint a straight line. And I would like to give you a few examples of the challenge that we are up against. Before any of you say ki hey nahi, I am sure the current government is really passionate about this cause.

At a very high level, here are a few countries here, Italy, Cambodia, Greece and China. And we have drawn out, we have compared them on a few parameters. Right? Who is responsible for heritage protection? How recent is their heritage law? Who is responsible for restoring their heritage? Right? Is somebody responsible for documenting? Now think of how weird the situation is.

Right? A small Baniya shop today, a small Baniya shop today, a Pansari ki dukaan jisko hum log bolte the. Us Pansari ko pata hota hai ki dukaan mein kya hai? Do bori chawal hai, you know, 200 lollipop hai, you know, itni Maggi hai, itna Patanjali ka noodles hai, etc. He knows what sets of assets he has.

Across these countries there is somebody who is responsible for maintaining that list. And so on and so forth. Right? That's where India is today.

India has no nodal agency or person responsible for restoring heritage. Nobody knows. We have asked the question to everybody, they have told us it's not their job.

Heritage crimes and this is really important. India has no enforcement agency to solve heritage crimes. Most other countries, so there is a carbonary art squad in Italy.

You know, there is a bunch of different heritage police, art police, they give it different names. Why do we need a separate police? Now heritage crimes are crimes conducted by very sophisticated networks. They are people who can talk multiple languages.

They work in multiple time zones, multiple currencies. They fly business class and in some cases private jets, etc. You cannot expect an average Havaldar on the street due respect to the police who are doing a really tough job.

You can't expect an average Havaldar on the street to solve such a sophisticated crime. So what we've been pushing for is exactly like you have a cyber police who deals with crimes of sophisticated, you know, of internets and hacking and all of that, which an average policeman cannot. Why would you not want an equivalent for heritage crimes? Here is another case in point.

The CAG ran a very comprehensive report in 2013. And amongst a bunch of other things that the CAG said, it said that between 2000 and 2012, India had not even recovered one piece of stolen heritage. Let me repeat that.

Of the few thousand pieces that Vijay showed you and all the sexy investigation he's done, India recovered exactly zero pieces. That's the reality of where we are in terms of how we as a nation prioritize this challenge. Quickly come to, you know, how this trade looks like and why it is really tough dealing with it and why it needs some very specific policy and enforcement focus.

On one end of the trade, you have huge international networks, globe-trotting agents who leverage technology like crazy. Those robber picks are all blasted around the world on Gmail and blah, blah, blah. So five minutes after a statue is looted, potential buyers know the lungi pictures as Vijay was showing you.

So on one end, you have people who are very sophisticated suit-wearing criminals. On the other end, you have brute force at its best, which we used to call Bahubali back in the day. So these are people who get drunk on four pegs of local tharra and then go hack a statue out, transport it, beat up people in the process, tie up priests and so on and so forth.

So there's a huge dichotomy between the types of criminals that we're dealing with. One of them that got caught was Subhash Kapoor. That's him in his, you know, so he had a penthouse in New York overlooking Central Park.

Living up to life, etc. etc. Ran the gallery out of the past.

Later got caught by the Interpol. There was an Interpol red-corner notice. He got caught in Frankfurt and is in Erasat with the Madras, with the Chennai police now.

He's a naturalized American citizen, probably never expected something like this to happen with him, but it did. And we need more of these to happen for there to be a threat or a disincentive. Another quick University of Chicago example.

University of Chicago held an event here in Delhi. The event was called and look at the huge paradox, sad paradox that's going to come up in a minute. It's called Past for Sale, protecting India's cultural heritage.

Now, this is being organized by an American University in Delhi. Those of you that know Delhi, please note it is Baba Khadag Singh Mark. That's the address.

Now, people from the US and UK and Australia all over the place came down here to deal with, you know, how do we protect India's cultural heritage? There was just one set of people conspicuous by their absence. The Ministry of Culture, India's Ministry of Culture. Now, do you know why I feel so bad about this? So I'm aggressively angry about this.

Shastri Bhavan is the Ministry of Culture's office. That's Baba Khadag Singh Mark where this event was happening. As you can see here, it's 2.9 kilometers by taxi.

The people that flew down thousands of miles, Ministry of Culture didn't. The grey route you see here is a walking route just in case it's an odd even wala chakkar. This is from last week when Vijay was in New Haven attending the UN Global Colloquium of University Presidents who had a specific event headed by Ban Ki-moon on protecting cultural heritage.

That's Irena Bokova, the head of UNESCO, the chairperson of UNESCO. And just so you all know how lucky you are, that's how Vijay dresses to go meet a UNESCO director. And this is how he dresses to talk to you guys.

So you guys should know how important he is, how important you are to us. But here's the thing, right? The whole world is talking about India's, about how India's past has been not just looted but plundered. The whole world is trying to solve it for us.

But, you know, the whole world is recognizing our role in that solution. However, there is a huge roadblock which we face in India, which we cannot, which we cannot get over unless each of you raises a voice and says something needs to be done about it. That's a talk.

So when National University of Singapore wanted to do something, they invited us over as well. So the point we are really making is, somebody asked me this in Singapore after my talk. They said, listen, so why really do foreign governments care more about Indian culture than the Indian government does? And that question really hurt me.

It really hurt me at a very, very deep level. The paradox as an economist can explain better than me, and this is what my layman's brain said. The thing with public goods is, everyone wants them, but nobody wants to pay for them.

Nobody wants to take the ownership. Ki ji mujhe apni street pe light sahi hai, but mein khambe pe chadke bulb nahi change karunga. Nobody wants to take ownership.

Nobody wants to pay. And the thing with developing nations is, there is always going to be a prioritization issue. There are roti, kapda, makaan problems which will always take precedent over something like this.

Therefore, the way we look at it today is that private action is the only solution. The bigger point I am trying to make here is this. There has been 70 years of apathy.

In 70 years, we could have built institutions, we could have built filters, we could have taken care of our heritage the way any country, India has a handful of countries that can look back 2000 years and say, hey we have something from 2000 years back. There is really a handful of countries that can do that. 70 years or more of apathy of us as a nation consciously deciding that we will not do something about this.

It's not going to change. If there is an engineer here, please raise your hand. Let's see if you were a good engineer.

What's Newton's first law of motion? I got the number wrong. Inertia. So could you say that aloud anyone? A state of an object will...precisely. So something will stay where it is unless an external force is applied.

And all we are saying today is each of us here is the external force. If you are sitting and hoping that something some way magically our heritage is going to come back, it is not going to come back. If it had to it already would.

So I invite each of you today to change the perception of India internationally. Today we are known as you know the land that you know this whole Shushruta Aryabhatta kind of stuff going on. We are coders today.

We are scientists today and all of that. We kind of need to change the perception and say that hey listen if you really mess around with us, we will still stay the bright cerebral lot that we are. But then there is another version of us that you will have to deal with.

And that message really needs to go out. With that I am moving on to the next section. If I could call Vijay back.

Around how you can help. Now Rahul asked us not to do this but we will still do it. Quickly getting to what we don't need.

We don't need people giving us Gyan. We don't need people giving us advice. We don't need Khayali Pulao ki yaar agar yeh kar de to wo ho jayega.

No we don't need all of that. We need your commitment to take action. Now the next part of this presentation is only going to be about how you can help.

So if you like, if you think you don't want to help and don't want to get involved, then now is when you leave the room. And we won't mind. And you have the next 20 seconds to leave the room.

Because after this it is all action stuff. Wo Q&A mein hum log cover karenge sir. Jo gift wali baat karte hain, we will cover that in the Q&A.

Wo hum log Q&A mein cover karenge sir. Now can I request all you guys to join me in the India Pride Pledge. Does anyone have a crying objection? Again a chance haan.

Can I request Dr. V.K. Verma to come up on stage and lead us with India Pride Pledge sir. For those of you, does the mic work? Yeh bhi hai. Hindi hai English mein.

Jaisa chahiye. So the way we are going to do this is guys, hand on your heart, hand on your heart, stand up if you will. It's 20 seconds long.

Bharat ki sabhiyata aur Bharat ki sanskriti humara gaurav bhi hai. Humara gaurav bhi hai. Aur humara uttardaayit bhi.

Inka aadhar karna. Inka aadhar karna. Aur inne sammaan sahit punah istapit karna.

Aur sammaan sahit punah istapit karna. Humara kartave hai. Isse kshan se.

Isse kshan se. Isse kartave ka. Isse kartave ka.

Palan karna humara sankalpe. Palan karna humara sankalpe. Thank you sir.

So now that all of you have pledged, now there is a list of actions for each of you. And you could do it here or when you go back home whenever you like. Okay.

We have just started an online petition, which basically asks the government to bring back our gods. And we are talking not one or two numbers, we are talking in the thousands. So I would request you, if you have your data connections and it works well, please open your cell phones and try to register.

It takes about 10 seconds for you to register. We would like to have the government hear our voice. And I would sincerely request, if you could also share with 10 of your friends, just go through it.

There is a video of Anurag speaking, a couple of articles of Sanjeev and me, on the petition. You can talk, you can see about it. And if you can be signed, it will be of great help in making our voices heard.

If you have taken a pledge, each of you is going to sign anyway. What Vijay is saying is, each of you get 10 of your friends and family to sign. Talk to them about the project and get them to sign.

Second, now one of the things we have realized is, our big limitation is being in Singapore. Friends like Rahul who are equally passionate about the cause are spreading the message here. But we want each of you to become an ambassador, to speak about us a little more.

When we talk about India Pride to people, nobody stands up and says, what you are doing is wrong. It is just that nobody knows about it enough in India. So please talk about it, tweet about it.

I am really bad with all this new technology, social media stuff. Really, if you guys can support us, that would be very helpful. People like Rahul took it upon themselves and said, where are Piyush and Rajat? So they took it upon themselves as did a bunch of other friends here.

So lo and behold on Monday and Tuesday we were trending on top 5 in India and somebody called me and said it is a big deal or whatever. But it is not just about tweeting etc. Make a phone call to your friends who are likely to be interested in the subject.

Talk to them about it. Call people home for chai and say, hey listen boss, chai pila raha hoon, paanch minute bed ke meri baat suno. Here is something we should do about this subject.

You have friends in the media, talk to them and say, why the heck are you not covering something as important as this? For the really low tech like us, this is a postcard. If you could just write in the old fashioned people and send this postcard to the PMO, I am sure we can get 5 or 10 of your friends, invite them home for a coffee and a cake and give them these postcards. We can supply you with whatever content you can tweet to us.

We will gladly help with the content. Basically what we are trying to do is build awareness at various levels. We like our voices to be heard at the places where it has to be heard because if we don't do it now, I think it's going to be a tremendous blot and we are going to lose the best of Indian art.

Because this is targeted loot. You have 10 items, they pick the best. The next guy comes, picks the second best.

Over 10 years, you have lost the best of Indian art and you need to maybe fly to London, Brussels or New York to see Indian art anymore. You don't need to come to India to do it. And the thing with that is Vijay and Sanjeev can afford all of that.

For the rest of us, we would rather just keep our art here. So anyway, pick up a postcard, get your family, write a letter to the PMO. Say boss, this is your job.

Why should someone like India Pride Project bring back India's treasures? So make the voice known. In the end, all we are saying is remember this is your project. All of us have our full time jobs.

All of us are doing this as a passion. And as you have seen with the few successes earlier, individual passion can actually translate into some real tangible results for us as a nation. So never underestimate what you as an individual could contribute.

At the end of the day, remember it is your project as much as it is our project. And make sure, as I tell everyone, and I do this in colleges as well, If not you, then who? And if not now, then when? What are you waiting for? With that, I would like to thank each of you that came here.