291 children, five regions, one stage in Kashi: Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat and Kala Utsav 2026 open at BHU

For a few days this week the Pt. Omkarnath Thakur Auditorium on the BHU campus belongs to schoolchildren. The Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan's Varanasi region opened its 'Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat' and Kala Utsav 2026 there on Thursday, and the hall filled up with the art, music and dance that the visiting teams brought with them. The numbers give a sense of the scale: 291 students in all — 178 boys and 113 girls — travelled in with 31 accompanying staff, representing five Kendriya Vidyalaya regions: Jabalpur, Agra, Lucknow, Varanasi and Ranchi. The opening followed the familiar order of a school morning done properly: Vande Mataram, the lighting of the lamp, a Saraswati vandana, and then straight into the performances. Dr Sukrati Revani, Deputy Director of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, inaugurated the festival, with BHU registrar Dr Rajan Srivastava among those present. The idea behind Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is that children from one part of the country should get to know another part first-hand, and a stage is a quick way to do it — a Bundelkhandi folk piece followed by something from Jharkhand tells a twelve-year-old more than a chapter would. For Kashi, a city that has always been a place other Indians arrive in, hosting it is a natural fit.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: KTV Varanasi