EDMONTON, CANADA, June 2012 (Edmonton Examiner): Acharya Shiv Shankar Dwivedi, is a priest–or pandit–at the Edmonton Hindu Cultural Centre. There is now a documentary so you can learn about this remarkable man who leads three separate and very different lives. Panditji, as Dwivedi is affectionately known, is a family man, a philanthropist who has brought education to a small disadvantaged village in India, and above all a deeply spiritual man.
The documentary, called The Three Lives of Panditji, is a first-person account of Dwivedi’s life. Panditji’s mother died when he was a young boy, so he was sent away from his home village to an ashram. There he became a scholar of Sanskrit. After a time, Panditji’s guru encouraged Panditji to leave his life in the ashram and become a Hindu priest in Canada.
Panditji didn’t want to leave his spiritual world to travel to the West and was reluctant to do so, but he realized that the Western world was a place where he would be able to earn enough money to fulfill his dream of bringing free education to the children of Atsaliya in Uttar Pradesh, India, where he grew up.
“When he arrived here [in Edmonton], he made $700 per month at his Hindu temple,” says Robert Chelmick. “He saved $650 a month for a year and a half, went back and he and his father built a school in this tiny village where kids didn’t go to school unless they walked two miles to school in the neighboring village.” There are now 400 students in the school attending Grades 1 to 8, and many Albertans support the school through the Maanaw Seva Association.
The documentary is 54 minutes long. It is written, produced and directed by Chelmick, an award-wining television and radio journalist and news anchor. The documentary will be screened this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal Alberta Museum. The DVD will also be available for purchase in both English and Hindi at the screening or from maanawseva.com.