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faq The World Ahimsa Day idea, how it came up, and where it has got? This experiment, which simply began in a classroom at the International School of Paris, illustrates once again the far-reaching power of education, the possibilities offered to teachers working in a classroom with young minds open to exploration and experiment. One could speculate endlessly about the sources of a process, but pragmatically speaking, this became possible up when I, an Indian teacher, was asked by my school to take on an English class in addition to my Hindi teaching at this school for almost 15 years. Suddenly, an 11th grade ‘Language-B’ class (almost entirely Japanese and Korean) found themselves with an Indian teacher of English. At once we discerned some special Asian thread that linked us together. Conversation often returned to things Indian and students especially expressed enthusiasm about Mahatma Gandhi. Why students raised and schooled in India are incapable of such enthusiasm is a matter worth some thought. Anyway, we put everything else away and decided to work on English using Attenborough’s film Gandhi, as the main language material in class. Scene by scene, we took the time to ask many questions and grope for answers. “Can ordinary people like us change the world?”. Writing her essay on this theme, one of the best students, a Korean girl, wrote a depressingly pessimistic essay affirming we were powerless before the men who rule, and recounted as evidence a horrific Korean tragedy I was oblivious of : a year earlier, the country had been badly shaken when two US soldiers posted there crushed to death two 13-year-old Korean schoolgirls under their 50-ton tank and got away scot-free despite huge mobilization among Korean people and diaspora. In the staffroom I found that other colleagues (except the Korean teacher) had heard nothing about this Korean story in the “mainstream” world media… Speaking in Seoul about the recent Korean tragedy, Walden Bello said: “Their death captured in a dramatic way Korea’s own tragedy. Their crushing by a US tank symbolized Korea’s being run over, for over half a century now, by the strategic interests of the world’s most powerful country. Suddenly, for Koreans young and old, right and left, in the South and in the North, worker and entrepreneur, civilian and soldier, famous and obscure, everything has become painfully, perfectly clear: you have been run over repeatedly for over half a century. We in Asia have also been shaken by this death of innocents and exoneration of the guilty. For Korea, a nation sliced in half by a superpower’s strategic needs, in turn, symbolizes Asia-a continent that has been repeatedly run over and crushed by colonial powers and great powers in pursuit of the violent logic of commercial and strategic advantage.” With so many Japanese students in the group our thoughts evidently turned to the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese adolescents learnt the Japanese word Hibakusha (survivors of the nuclear holocaust) in Paris, Beena Sarwar’s columns about the tragic-comic absurdity of physical and mental great walls diving South Asia reminded us of the tragic partition of Korea…Happily, the sole European student in my group (Swedish) seemed most interested in these “un-mainstream” matters ! Having studied RSS manipulative pedagogy in India, I remained wary about a teacher’s power of manipulation over available young minds. But seeing the enthusiasm of my colleagues in English (mostly women, Australian, American..), I frankly asked the students if they were ready to give changing-the-world, especially Gandhian non-violence, another try after the failed Korean experience...? The World Social Forum was coming up in Bombay and we saw that the best way to get the children’s voice heard and relayed was to look for the present-day equivalent of the great minds who in 1955 took up the Japanese housewife’s call in the famed Russell-Einstein Manifesto. After desperately trying Chomsky, Mandela, Wallerstein (some of whom did join us later) it was (again) women who came to help. Nisha, whom I knew as a toddler in Delhi put me in touch with Shirin Ebadi who was in Paris, with the FIDH, when her Nobel was announced. Before we knew it a plan was worked out. In Bombay, thanks to a surgeon friend Sanjay Nagral (Journal of Medical Ethics, etc.) and Neha Madhiwala of Sahyog, we took Shirin to a one-room school-cum-clinic for girls of “rehabilitated” (almost all Muslim) families whose homes had been destroyed for the expansion of the Bombay airport during BJP-Shiv Sena shining-India period. Accounts of the visit, especially by Neha, and Iain Ball in the Indian Express, can be read on the net (type shirin ebadi sahyog on Google). Of course Shirin Ebadi had doubts about her call for Ahimsa Day ever being heard and Sahyog and the young girls too felt very fragile in the social and political balance of power. We kept media presence limited (a photographers but no TV cameras). True to our fears, I heard at least one diatribe later on a shining Mumbai TV channel against “some people” who went rummaging about in other people’s backyards (she had met no politicians or VIPs) instead of worrying about the status of women in their own countries”. Earlier, on the opening day of the WSF Neha and I had had the privilege of joining Shirin for an open-air dinner at her simple and tasteful hotel, discussing Sufi qawwalis and Amir Khusro, Gandhi… Shirin wrote (and learnt by heart!) the Sanskrit equivalent of ana’l haqq – aham brahmasmi – and shared her thoughts on Gandhi, and ‘Khusro Dehlavi’, mostly in Persian, with the Iranian friends at our table. The process went a step further when another extraordinary woman, historian Romila Thapar, took interest and suggested an international Call for Ahimsa Day be published on the net (type Ahimsa Day on Google or go to www.petitiononline.com/idnv0123/petition.html ). It was then that Noam Chomsky and Immanuel Wallerstein took us more seriously. In Pakistan we first got the ready support (women first!) of Beena Sarwar and Asma Jahangir, Karamat Ali, Zia Mian etc. In India, apart from our “ inner circle” – Purushottam Agrawal at JNU, Rishi Nanda at St. Stephens, Dilip Simeon at Aman Trust, and Harsh Kapoor at South Asia Citizens Web – the Ahimsa Call was notably signed by K.R. Narayanan, Anand Patwardhan, Ramchandra Guha, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Mushirul Hasan, Sukumar Muralidharan, Praful Bidwai, Bharat Bhushan, Desh Raj Goyal, Robi Chatterjee, Ammu Abraham, Rohini Hensmann, Teesta Setalvad, Javed Anand. Prof. Krishna Kumar, now Director of the NCERT, was with us from the beginning but warned us in a letter about the limits of internet petitions and “big names” http://call4ahimsa.blogspot.com/ . Like him, Romila Thapar also advised us to concentrate on getting the message to school children, advising I contact also Kanti Bajpai at Doon. Desh Raj Goyal insisted on the important of public education and the responsibility of government schools who could learn from the example of the Japanese, Korean and other children in Paris. That’s where we have reached for the moment. Desh Raj ji has written to the Education (‘HRD’) Minister Arjun Singh, and Sheila Dikshit to take an initiative in Indian schools. I suspect that if their response is imaginative and energetic, the process could also go a long way in reviving a tradition in the Indian National Congress. [top] |
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