Home of India Center of Westchester

We are getting prepared to buy our own building. Please donate whatever you can - for large donations, please contact us. For information, contact us at [email redacted].

We are a non-profit organization, registered in the State of New York. Our website www.indiacenter.us lists  our mission - including our classes, events, and activities.

After 25 years of being a wanderer, IC is finally ready to settle down in her own home where she can blossom into the Provider she was always meant to be. Finally a place to call her own. Finally a place where she can raise and nurture her family! Finally a place where all the members of her family will feel safe and rooted, will find the nurturing and support to learn and grow, to heal and mend, to come into their own without fear of being turned out because a dance rehearsal made too much noise or because the landlord just did not want to be part of this dream any more.

Yes, it started as a dream, with only a few children who wanted to learn Indian music in the basement of our home in Irvington. As you well know, my late husband, Shishir, was a dreamer of many dreams, with India Center being the most compulsive of all of them. The first IC Banquet was held 25 years ago at The Greentree Country Club in New Rochelle and that was when the idea of a community center with premises of its own was first presented to the Indian community in Westchester. The response was an overwhelming YES!! And yet, in the year 2018, we are still without our own home.

Since 2006 when we first opened our doors in a rented warehouse in Elmsford, the need for a physical presence for our association has been amply confirmed. The only reason we have not been able to buy is because we have not been able to raise the funds. Now, with the current lease on Main Street coming to an end, the need to settle down in our own place has become imperative. There has been enough of moving around and being thrown out, enough of throwing our money towards rented space. THE TIME IS NOW. We HAVE to act! Over the past 12 years we have seen how much our classes have expanded, how much our services are utilized, how hard our committee is working and how loved our Center is.

You have watched this growth take place at a rapid pace and how far we have come in our effort at forming a united, congenial group that is fiercely secular and determinedly diverse and uncorrupted in its principles. We are confident we will continue in this committed and transparent vein in our efforts to serve the Indian community.

And, therefore, I request you from the bottom of my heart, to please COME FORWARD AT THIS CRITICAL MOMENT when such a HUGE change is coming about! We will own our own place and YOU will have made it possible for your community and for the generations to follow. You will look back on this day and know you made the RIGHT decision. You will be the major reason for a UNIQUE community center like ours – where no regional group dominates and yet EVERY regional group is important and valued – to survive and thrive and be an inspiration to other groups who are looking for a model to follow, in the quest to keeping India alive in our hyphenated Indian-American identities.

Come as a Trustee, come as a Donor, come as the child who helps the mother settle down in her own home. You will have provided for the entire community for generations to come when you take this vital step today.

We are almost there. 

Let us come together and do this.

I thank you for your continuing support and your generosity and caring. You are the foundation of our common home and we salute you.
India Center Pitch on Building 

Thank you,

Sumita Bhattacharya

President
India Center of Westchester