NANKANA SAHIB
Preparations begin for the largest Gurpurab broadcast ever attempted
Over 400 sevadars and a 40-camera setup will carry Parkash Purab live to a projected audience of 30 million.
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT AT NANKANA SAHIB
The courtyards of Gurdwara Janam Asthan have seen five and a half centuries of Gurpurab mornings. They have never seen anything like the preparation now under way. Along the parikarma, engineers walk beside sevadars, marking the positions where forty cameras will stand — the largest broadcast operation ever attempted at the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
The scale of the undertaking is difficult to overstate. A dedicated uplink will carry the signal out of Nankana Sahib to satellites serving five continents. Over four hundred sevadars have volunteered for duties ranging from camera marshalling to langar for the technical crews. Every camera position has been agreed with the shrine's caretakers so that no sight-line of the sangat, and no moment of the maryada, is disturbed.
For the world's sangat, the significance is not technical but devotional. An estimated thirty million viewers — from Southall to Surrey, from Fresno to Faridkot — are expected to join the Parkash Purab diwan live, many of them elders who left these lands in 1947 and never imagined they would see the morning light on this sarovar again.
"My grandmother is ninety-one," one volunteer told this desk. "She was born an hour's walk from here. When I told her she would watch Asa Di Vaar from Janam Asthan, live, in her front room in Birmingham — she did not believe me. Then she wept."
The broadcast will be free to air, as all darshan on this channel will always be. Rehearsals of the full camera plan begin next month, and this desk will carry weekly reports on the preparations as launch day approaches.
— AS·TV NEWS DESK