The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

THE NEED OF ‘WE’

The prestigious Jamnalal Bajaj Award 2009 has found a match this year in Dr Jaya Arunachalam. It’s not the first time and it’s not the last time when Dr Arunachalam has been conferred with a prestigious recognition for her efforts. The important factor to be mentioned here is nature of her efforts. Like I wrote in one of my earlier write-ups, she has achieved much of her success with help of collective efforts involving the civil society by playing a pivotal role through her initiative the Working Women’s Forum (India) in bringing together the diverse groups of people with means and people seeking means to form a steady flow of subsistence for the needy. Dr Arunachalam’s belief in being an activist and not a fighter compliments the potential of ‘we’ bound by a cause and it emphasizes the need for collective effort.

The need is to believe in power of collective effort. The task before us requires as many helping hands as possible to come together and form a chain of undying spirit. The hunt is to be for likeminded partners to come and share their thoughts and extend their help to the cause of the mankind, graduating from a man to the men.  Obviously the most important asset here is the personal commitment.

We must not claim to be different; nature of the cause requires amalgamation. But, yes, we need to be different for the initiative once we decide over it. In Delhi alone there are over 60,000 registered societies and organizations that claim to be engaged into some sort of empowerment or ‘rectifying an anomaly’ work. Let’s think about the pan India scene. It will start looking disturbing right from the very beginning if we decide to go on social auditing for even a fraction of it. Still a common Indian is looking desperately for an aggregation of differentiators; looking for a consorted effort to help them to get ahead in the race of just standing on their feet.

It was always there – the need for the human factor to every life. It has not come just now when efforts to empower the last person and make her/him parallel to the official definitions are needed to stand out. But have we learnt? Have we been able to zero-in on the nature of efforts that we need to mobilize?

Such efforts speak for the ‘we’ factor. They too know they have proponents and not just a single one. But they need as much multitudes together as possible. This idea and just a discourse-knowledge of ‘others are there too’ is needed to be propagated.  There are some out of numerous who are working to bring some change. The commitment is to be extended among all. There must be a willingness to share the vision and commitment in order to create a ‘differentiator’.

What can be the basic differentiating contributions? Contributions from organizations as well as individuals can be in terms of thought process sharing, conceptualization of themes and projects with relevance for social empowerment, volunteer association for some manpower hours of highly satisfying outcome to name a few.

The need is to look forward to catalyze a pattern change in the way development assistance works nationwide by connecting the local and the global to achieve large scale development driven at the grass roots. Human development is about expanding the capacity of all human beings to take control of their destiny and reach their full potential. Remember, ‘we’ as a ‘unit’ can do wonders to make a difference.