Oopali Operajita

Operajita went to Rishi Valley School at age six, and studied there for nine years, graduating with the GCE 'O' levels (Indian School Certificate) from the University of Cambridge. At Rishi Valley School, she studied Bharatanatyam of the rigorous Pandanallur style - playing lead roles in dance dramas staged under Rishi Valley's Banyan Tree for its founder, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose favourite classical dancer she was.[9]

She received her higher education at Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Dalhousie University, Canada (where she was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellow); Delhi University; and Utkal University. At Dalhousie University, she wrote her dissertation on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Her thesis supervisor was Canadian poet, J. Andrew Wainwright.

Operajita belongs to a prominent political, intellectual and aristocratic family from India, and is the daughter of Indian public intellectuals, educators and Vice Chancellors, Professor Bidhu Bhusan Das and Professor Prabhat Nalini Das, and a granddaughter of Rai Bahadur Durga Charan Das of the Indian Administrative Service, IAS and poet, Nirmala Devi, who belonged to a well known Zamindari (aristocratic) family. Nirmala Devi's father, Basudev Kanungo, held the title of Diwan, and was renowned for his philanthropy. Her maternal grandparents are Krushna Priya Devi and Professor Radha Krushna Das, who was head of department and professor of Physics at Ravenshaw University and a classmate and friend of Satyendranath Bose. They belonged to a Zamindari family from Puri district in Odisha. Her paternal great aunt is freedom fighter and feminist Sarala Devi, a colleague and friend of Mahatma Gandhi, the first woman Member of the Odisha Legislative Assembly as well as its first woman Speaker. Her great uncle, Nityanand Kanungo, was a member of the first post Independence cabinet of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and successive Nehru cabinets. He was also appointed governor of the provinces of Gujarat and Bihar by Nehru. Operajita is a goddaughter of actress Leela Naidu and her husband, the writer Dom Moraes. Naidu met Operajita in Rishi Valley when she was ten, and requested her parents to let her be her godmother.[10]

Operajita has been a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University where she was appointed by its Founder President Dr Richard Cyert.[11] She is a Senior Adviser on International Affairs, Public Policy and Communication to several of India's senior leaders in the Lok Sabha in the Parliament of India.[12]

Oopalee Operajita is Chair and Founder of Asia's first Sustainable Technology Venture Competition, since 2006, The Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition, which brings new, clean and sustainable technologies to market through entrepreneurship, to fight climate change, enhance sustainability, and fortify energy security on the planet.[13] The competition has become a movement, and has a footprint of some 60,000 students worldwide. Its academic partners are India's Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which rank with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of California at Berkeley and California Institute of Technology (Caltech), as the best technology institutions in the world.[14][15]

A leading disciple of Odissi Guru Padma Vibhushan Kelucharan Mohapatra, and Guru Deba Prasad Das, Operajita has performed worldwide and has been called "the best Odissi interpreter" by the doyen of India's dance critics, P V Subramaniam (Subbudu), of The Statesman. When Mohapatra returned to the performing stage, after a hiatus of twenty years, in the dance drama "Konarka", he cast Operajita to play the female lead opposite him. Operajita studied Odissi for twelve consecutive years with Mohapatra. Earlier, she trained under Guru Deba Prasad Das for five years; and Guru Pankaj Charan Das for two years. Her innovative choreographic pieces for Odissi have been set to music since 1979 by renowned vocalist Padma Vibhushan Pandit Chhannulal Mishra of Varanasi. A winner of many international and national awards for dance, Operajita is also a critic and scholar of the arts.[16] She belongs to the school of Aesthetics and Art Criticism of Arthur Danto, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. She is the first classical Indian artist to have performed at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh. Operajita was invited by the Ministry of External Affairs (India), and the Office of the Prime Minister of India, to choreograph the Rashtrapati Bhavan concert for President Barack Obama in 2010.[17]

Operajita started learning Bharatanatyam, at age six, in the grand Pandanallur style at Rishi Valley School from Guru S. Meenakshi and studied it for nine continuous years. In the early 1980s, she took master lessons in London from the iconic B. Ram Gopal (dancer) who taught her guru, S. Meenakshi. Operajita and her dance partner are the most prominent of Rishi Valley's dancers. As a professional classical dancer, she is a torchbearer of the great Rishi Valley dance tradition, which gave rise to phenomenally beautiful and successful dance dramas in Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil - in which she was always cast in the lead role - staged each year under the school's famous Banyan Tree for its founder, Jiddu Krishnamurti. The music for these productions was composed by Veena G Visalakshi, a disciple of Vizianagaram Venkataramana Das, and the text was chosen or composed by Pandit Chundi Hanumantharao. Operajita studied veena for seven years and Carnatic vocal music for nine years with Veena G Visalakshi.[18]

Operajita was invited by Rishi Valley to choreograph a dance drama for the school. She produced an episode from Kalidasa's "Kumarasambhavam" for which the original score had been composed exclusively for her by Padma Vibhushan Pandit Chhannulal Mishra of Varanasi, thereby resuscitating a great Rishi Valley dance tradition which had lain dormant for decades.

Together with her parents, Operajita has translated pre-eminent Odia author, Gopinath Mohanty's award-winning novel, "Amrutara Santana", widely regarded as his magnum opus, into English - the translation is called, "Amrutara Santana: The Dynasty of The Immortals." It has been published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, the Indian Government's official, apex literary body, in 2016.[19][20] Operajita was invited to read excerpts from this translation at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2017, in a session she shared with actress-author Nandana Sen.[21]

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