References of public speeches are found right from the beginning of the Sarvajanik Ganesh festival (the public celebration of the Ganesh festival). Thanks to these speeches, later the festival turned into a national knowledge-gathering event.

In our chawl, we too have been organising public speeches right from the beginning of our festival. Here, illustrious speakers like Lokmanya Tilak, S M Paranjpe, Dadasaheb Khaparde, Bhalakar Bhopatkar, Barrister Jaykar, Jamnadas Mehta, Senapati Bapat, Acharya Atre and Swatantryaveer Savarkar, opened doors of knowledge to the audiences.

However, later as the festival underwent changes and the entertainment content in the festival increased, the response to public speeches reduced. This in turn resulted in the dearth of good speakers.

We devised a solution to this problem and started Lokmanya Vyakhyanmala in 1988. Under this five-day-long series of public speeches, one subject is handled in five different ways. The subjects covered here so far include the Literature of the saints, Swami Vivekanand, Lokmanya Tilak, Health, Computers, Problems of Mumbai and Globalisation etc.