Christmas is dual feast for City Church in Pune

Christmas is dual feast for City Church


http://www.sakaaltimes.com/SakaalTimesBeta/20101219/5127886616320126673.htm
CAMIL PARKHE
Sunday, December 19, 2010 AT 06:12 PM (IST)
Tags: City Church, Christmas 2010
PUNE: This Christmas will be of an added significance for the City Church, the mother of all churches in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad. It was on Christmas feast exactly 218 years ago that the Catholics in Pune had celebrated the first mass on a land gifted by Sawai Madhavrao Peshwa in appreciation of their services in the Maratha army.
It was on this land that the Church of our Lady of Immaculate Conception, popularly known as the City Church, stands today. This first church in Maharashtra (excluding the churches in Mumbai and Thane district) has been the mother of various Catholic churches which have come up in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad during the last two decades.
Today there are altogether 22 Catholic churches in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The British, who took over power in Pune, gifted the adjoining three acres and 14 gunthas land to the church whose population has increased by then. A new church was built on this land in 1852. Exactly a century later, the church’s premises was extended to cater its parishioners whose strength by then had risen to 7,000.
Although the oldest church in the city, the number of parishioners of the City Church has been shrinking during the past few decades. This is because a large number of parishioners during this period have sold their houses in the local area and purchased more spacious houses in Fatimanagar and neighbouring areas, the church’s parish priest, Fr George D’Souza, told Sakàl Times.
As a result now, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the city’s second oldest church built in 1850, has the largest Catholic population of over 1200 families. Now there are around 300 Catholic families in City Church’s jurisdiction.
The church has derived its name ‘City Church’ as it stood at one of the entrances of Pune, the Quarter Gate, which had existed there.

Nehru the gardener was my inspiration

Nehru the gardener was my inspiration
CAMIL PARKHE
Thursday, June 24, 2010 AT 12:00 AM (IST)
Tags: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Gardening
When Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed in Ahmednagar Fort during the Quit India movement, he utilised the prison term to pen his magnum opus ‘Discovery of India’ and to create a rose garden at the historic fort of Chand Bibi. Nehru had no idea as to how long the British rulers would keep him in that prison. But that did not deter him from growing a rose garden there - an act that has inspired me immensely in the past few years.
As a student in Goa, I had developed a garden on an open space near the staircase leading to our hostel. But at that time, I had not known about Nehru’s experiments in the garden.
After marriage, I moved from Deccan Gymkhana to Chinchwad. The large open area in front of our building beckoned me whenever I stood in balcony of our third floor flat. One July morning, I started cleaning the area near our housing society’s water tank. The place had vegetation tall enough to hide buffaloes which roamed there. Next week, I bought a pickaxe and other gardening equipments.
It was then that my wife asked me what I was upto. She could not imagine me cleaning up that dirty place and planning a garden there, especially when the land was not even ours. It was then that Pandit Nehru came to my rescue. “Nehru, a towering leader of his time, made a rose garden even in a prison. So what’s wrong if I develop a garden near our society’s building?” I asked her.
The Nehru example did the trick. Thereafter my wife has never objected to my gardening. Working in a garden which was not even ours was not easy. I was aware of several pairs of eyes watching me scornfully from nearby flats as I cleaned weeds, watered the plants and drove away buffaloes. It was the image of Nehru working in the prison that helped me to carry on. Soon, I developed a garden on that land with many flower plants and some tall trees.
Recently, we shifted to a new building nearby in the same colony. Here, too, the large open space near the building beckoned me. This time, there was no hesitation on my part. I have been developing a garden on this no man’s land, nurturing the saplings with my head held high - thanks to Pandit Nehru !