The Vanza Society of London Annual General Meeting this year was held on Sunday, 22 June 2025, at Belmont Community Hall, Harrow. This was combined with Arts & Crafts Exhibition and Careers advice.
The day started with Guru Gopal Lal and Hingraj Mataji’s aarti. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition started at 1pm, and we had participants for clothes, handmade items, and sarees, as well as advice on health and wellbeing.

There was a wonderful hand painted display of Mandala Art by Shilpa Mandalia. This is a very intricate and time-consuming form of artwork; each piece individually painted with a lot of patience and skill. Every item had its own design and would look beautiful in a home, office or any other place.

Lilaben Chohan also brought her handmade crocheted and knitted pieces which consisted of shawls, baby hats, mittens, blankets and various other forms of clothing. In addition, we had a beautiful selection of sarees, Chanya cholis, dupattas, and ethnic Indian outfits from Sona Chudasama.

For health and wellbeing, we had Chetna Parmar who is a podiatrist and gave some very important and useful information on foot health and how to look after our feet, and gave advice and suggestions to questions which were raised.

Dr Donna Arya was also on hand to answer any questions which were medically related. Kirit Sonigra gave an insight into pharmacy and their roles, duties and voluntary services like delivering prescription medicines to.

Kirit Sonigra

Kirit Sonigra patients homes free of charge, and certain responsibilities which they carry out so that you don’t have to visit the doctor for minorailments.

Bharat Mandalia was on hand to provide guidance to anyone wishing to enter the legal profession and also emphasised the importance of having "Lasting Power of Attorney's" and as well as a properly executed "Will" in place to avoid problems later on.

As it was a very hot day, we were all very grateful to Rupal Parmar and Sona Chudasama for making and serving cooling non-alcoholic Mojitos to everyone.

Bharat Mandalia

The AGM then started at 3pm. The “minutes” of the last AGM meeting were read by Nalini Bhundia. After an update on this year’s events by the President Harshida Tailor, Secretary Pradip Borkhataria, financial report by Treasurer, Sunil Solanki and Trustee Vijay Vaghela, the existing Committee was dissolved by President.

-By Nalini Bhundia