Speech by Martin Luther King Jr on winning the Noble Peace Prize

* Dr. King delivered this lecture in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo. This text is taken from Les Prix Nobel en 1964. The text in the New York Times is excerpted. His speech of acceptance delivered the day before in the same place is reported fully both in Les Prix Nobel en 1964 and the New York Times.

The Quest for Peace and Justice


It is impossible to begin this lecture without again expressing my deep appreciation to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament for bestowing upon me and the civil rights movement in the United States such a great honor. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Such is the moment I am presently experiencing. I experience this high and joyous moment not for myself alone but for those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man's scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: "Improved means to an unimproved end". This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man's chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man's ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.

The first problem that I would like to mention is racial injustice. The struggle to eliminate the evil of racial injustice constitutes one of the major struggles of our time. The present upsurge of the Negro people of the United States grows out of a deep and passionate determination to make freedom and equality a reality "here" and "now". In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.

We live in a day, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead2,"when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed." What we are seeing now is a freedom explosion, the realization of "an idea whose time has come", to use Victor Hugo's phrase3. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom, in one majestic chorus the rising masses singing, in the words of our freedom song, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn us around."4 All over the world, like a fever, the freedom movement is spreading in the widest liberation in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and land. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You can hear them rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students, in the churches, and at political meetings. Historic movement was for several centuries that of the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in "conquest" of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is meeting West. The earth is being redistributed. Yes, we are "shifting our basic outlooks".

These developments should not surprise any student of history. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh's court centuries ago and cried, "Let my people go."5 This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story. Something within has reminded the Negro of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers in Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.

Fortunately, some significant strides have been made in the struggle to end the long night of racial injustice. We have seen the magnificent drama of independence unfold in Asia and Africa. Just thirty years ago there were only three independent nations in the whole of Africa. But today thirty-five African nations have risen from colonial bondage. In the United States we have witnessed the gradual demise of the system of racial segregation. The Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools gave a legal and constitutional deathblow to the whole doctrine of separate but equal6. The Court decreed that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that to segregate a child on the basis of race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. This decision came as a beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people. Then came that glowing day a few months ago when a strong Civil Rights Bill became the law of our land7. This bill, which was first recommended and promoted by President Kennedy, was passed because of the overwhelming support and perseverance of millions of Americans, Negro and white. It came as a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for civil rights: the beginning of a second emancipation proclamation providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity. Since the passage of this bill we have seen some encouraging and surprising signs of compliance. I am happy to report that, by and large, communities all over the southern part of the United States are obeying the Civil Rights Law and showing remarkable good sense in the process.

Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression8. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right9. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.

Let me not leave you with a false impression. The problem is far from solved. We still have a long, long way to go before the dream of freedom is a reality for the Negro in the United States. To put it figuratively in biblical language, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt and crossed a Red Sea whose waters had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance. But before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead. We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom.

What the main sections of the civil rights movement in the United States are saying is that the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid.

The word that symbolizes the spirit and the outward form of our encounter is nonviolence, and it is doubtless that factor which made it seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle. Broadly speaking, nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

In a real sense nonviolence seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag that I spoke of earlier as the chief dilemma of modern man. It seeks to secure moral ends through moral means. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

I believe in this method because I think it is the only way to reestablish a broken community. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, and irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.

The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it.

This approach to the problem of racial injustice is not at all without successful precedent. It was used in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire and free his people from the political domination and economic exploitation inflicted upon them for centuries. He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury, and courage10.

In the past ten years unarmed gallant men and women of the United States have given living testimony to the moral power and efficacy of nonviolence. By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white, have temporarily left the ivory towers of learning for the barricades of bias. Their courageous and disciplined activities have come as a refreshing oasis in a desert sweltering with the heat of injustice. They have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. One day all of America will be proud of their achievements11.

I am only too well aware of the human weaknesses and failures which exist, the doubts about the efficacy of nonviolence, and the open advocacy of violence by some. But I am still convinced that nonviolence is both the most practically sound and morally excellent way to grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice.

A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist. This problem of poverty is not only seen in the class division between the highly developed industrial nations and the so-called underdeveloped nations; it is seen in the great economic gaps within the rich nations themselves. Take my own country for example. We have developed the greatest system of production that history has ever known. We have become the richest nation in the world. Our national gross product this year will reach the astounding figure of almost 650 billion dollars. Yet, at least one-fifth of our fellow citizens - some ten million families, comprising about forty million individuals - are bound to a miserable culture of poverty. In a sense the poverty of the poor in America is more frustrating than the poverty of Africa and Asia. The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia is shared misery, a fact of life for the vast majority; they are all poor together as a result of years of exploitation and underdevelopment. In sad contrast, the poor in America know that they live in the richest nation in the world, and that even though they are perishing on a lonely island of poverty they are surrounded by a vast ocean of material prosperity. Glistening towers of glass and steel easily seen from their slum dwellings spring up almost overnight. Jet liners speed over their ghettoes at 600 miles an hour; satellites streak through outer space and reveal details of the moon. President Johnson, in his State of the Union Message12, emphasized this contradiction when he heralded the United States' "highest standard of living in the world", and deplored that it was accompanied by "dislocation; loss of jobs, and the specter of poverty in the midst of plenty".

So it is obvious that if man is to redeem his spiritual and moral "lag", he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the "haves" and the "have nots" of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it. More than a century and a half ago people began to be disturbed about the twin problems of population and production. A thoughtful Englishman named Malthus wrote a book13 that set forth some rather frightening conclusions. He predicted that the human family was gradually moving toward global starvation because the world was producing people faster than it was producing food and material to support them. Later scientists, however, disproved the conclusion of Malthus, and revealed that he had vastly underestimated the resources of the world and the resourcefulness of man.

Not too many years ago, Dr. Kirtley Mather, a Harvard geologist, wrote a book entitled Enough and to Spare14. He set forth the basic theme that famine is wholly unnecessary in the modern world. Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? Even deserts can be irrigated and top soil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-five million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Just as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed - not only its symptoms but its basic causes. This, too, will be a fierce struggle, but we must not be afraid to pursue the remedy no matter how formidable the task.

The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these". Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority.

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne interpreted this truth in graphic terms when he affirmed15:

No man is an Iland, intire of its selfe: every
man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the
maine: if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie
were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends
or of thine owne were: any mans death
diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankinde: and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

A third great evil confronting our world is that of war. Recent events have vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted, in spite of the Limited Test Ban Treaty16. On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non- Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People's Republic17, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation. The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.

So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Therefore, I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.

Here also we have ancient habits to deal with, vast structures of power, indescribably complicated problems to solve. But unless we abdicate our humanity altogether and succumb to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as imperative and urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to racial injustice. Equality with whites will hardly solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a society under the spell of terror and a world doomed to extinction.

I do not wish to minimize the complexity of the problems that need to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. But I think it is a fact that we shall not have the will, the courage, and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual reevaluation - a change of focus which will enable us to see that the things which seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under the sentence of death. We need to make a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world which is now possible, "the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God"18.

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say "We must not wage war." It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace. There is a fascinating little story that is preserved for us in Greek literature about Ulysses and the Sirens. The Sirens had the ability to sing so sweetly that sailors could not resist steering toward their island. Many ships were lured upon the rocks, and men forgot home, duty, and honor as they flung themselves into the sea to be embraced by arms that drew them down to death. Ulysses, determined not to be lured by the Sirens, first decided to tie himself tightly to the mast of his boat, and his crew stuffed their ears with wax. But finally he and his crew learned a better way to save themselves: they took on board the beautiful singer Orpheus whose melodies were sweeter than the music of the Sirens. When Orpheus sang, who bothered to listen to the Sirens?

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a "peace race". If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.

All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind's survival is dependent upon man's ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony. Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together." This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.

This means that more and more our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John19:

Let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone
that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His
love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. As Arnold Toynbee20 says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.

Let me close by saying that I have the personal faith that mankind will somehow rise up to the occasion and give new directions to an age drifting rapidly to its doom. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened to those at the bottom of society. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are developing a new sense of "some-bodiness" and carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."21 Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

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1. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American poet and essayist.

2. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). British philosopher and mathematician, professor at the University of London and Harvard University.

3. "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come." Translations differ; probable origin is Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un crime, "Conclusion-La Chute", chap. 10.

4. "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" is the title of an old Baptist spiritual.

5. Exodus 5:1; 8:1; 9:1; 10:3.

6. "Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka", 347 U.S. 483, contains the decision of May 17, 1954, requiring desegregation of the public schools by the states. "Bolling vs. Sharpe", 347 U.S. 497, contains the decision of same date requiring desegregation of public schools by the federal government; i.e. in Washington, D.C. "Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka", Nos. 1-5. 349 U.S. 249, contains the opinion of May 31, 1955, on appeals from the decisions in the two cases cited above, ordering admission to "public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed".

7. Public Law 88-352, signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.

8. Both Les Prix Nobel and the New York Times read "retrogress".

9. Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a popular vote of 43, 128, 956 to 27,177,873.

10. For a note on Gandhi, seep. 329, fn. 1.

11. For accounts of the civil rights activities by both whites and blacks in the decade from 1954 to 1964, see Alan F. Westin, Freedom Now: The Civil Rights Struggle in America (New York: Basic Books, 1964), especially Part IV, "The Techniques of the Civil Rights Struggle"; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Eugene V. Rostow, "The Freedom Riders and the Future", The Reporter (June 22, 1961); James Peck, Cracking the Color Line: Nonviolent Direct Action Methods of Eliminating Racial Discrimination (New York: CORE, 1960).

12. January 8, 1964.

13. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

14. Kirtley F. Mather, Enough and to Spare: Mother Earth Can Nourish Every Man in Freedom (New York: Harper, 1944).

15. John Donne (1572?-1631), English poet, in the final lines of "Devotions" (1624).

16. Officially called "Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Underwater", and signed by Russia, England, and United States on July 25, 1963.

17. On October 16, 1964.

18. Hebrews II: 10.

19. I John 4:7-8, 12.

20. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889- ), British historian whose monumental work is the 10-volume A Study of Story (1934-1954).

21. This quotation may be based on a phrase from Luke 1:79, "To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death"; or one from Psalms 107:10, "Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death"; or one from Mark Twain's To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), "The people who sit in darkness have noticed it...".

From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1951-1970, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972


Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1964

Time A Resource Curse Got Lifted

Take a map of India. Now mark the districts with forest wealth, where the rich and dense tree cover is found. Then overlay on it the sources of streams and rivers that feed us, our water wealth. Upon this, further locate mineral deposits—iron ore, coal, bauxite, all things nice that make economies rich. Don’t stop here. Mark on all this wealth another indicator: districts where the poorest people of our country live. These are also tribal districts. So you will find a complete match. The richest lands are where the poorest people live. Now complete this cartography of the country with the colour red. These are the very districts Naxalites roam, where the government admits it is battling its own people, who use the gun to terrorize and kill. Here is a lesson of bad development we clearly need to learn from.

Let’s configure this map with events of the last few weeks. Madhu Koda was chief minister of Jharkhand, a mineral-and-forest-rich but poor-people state, for about a year. Today, enforcement agencies are unearthing a mother of all scams—Rs 4,000 crore, and counting, of illegal assets he and his associates looted from the state. This is roughly a fifth of the state’s annual budget. More importantly, this enormous wealth came from the same minerals that never made his people rich.

It does not end here. This past month, when the bjp government in Karnataka was brought to its knees by defiant legislators who wanted the head of the chief minister, we did not connect this episode with the cartography of India. The Reddy brothers—Gali Janardhana Reddy, the tourism minister of Karnataka and his brother, Gali Karunakara Reddy, the revenue minister of the B S Yeddyurappa government, are mining barons. Their wealth and power comes from rapacious mining in the similar rich-poor districts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The Reddy brothers’ fiefdom, Bellary district, produces some 20 per cent of the country’s iron ore. The ore is mined with little or no consideration to environmental safeguards. Water in the region runs red because of mine discharge, the land has been mauled, forests have vanished and people’s livelihood devastated. Bellary has the largest number of registered private aircraft, but ranks third from the bottom in the human development index of Karnataka, with 50 per cent literacy level—a shame for an otherwise progressive state. The Reddy brothers (like Madhu Koda) are products of the extraordinary wealth of regions we still call poor. Why, then, are we surprised when Naxalites profit from the anger of local people, witnesses to the loot of their land?

The problem is we have never taken seriously the issue of sharing wealth with the people, whose land it is. This is not part of the development mandate. Take forests. Some 60 per cent of the country’s dense and most bio-diverse and economically rich forests are found in these tribal districts. This is where the magnificent tigers are found. Ask again: If there is extraordinary wealth, why are the people who live here so poor?

The fact is we have never built a development model for natural resources, which is sustainable and also can benefit local economies and people. The first phase of development was when the state extracted and exploited the forests. Large areas were handed over to the paper and pulp industry, much like what’s happening with minerals today; swathes of dense forests were cut, land was denuded to build the economic wealth of the country. But nothing was shared with local people. This was the forest wealth that built fortunes of governments and private companies. But not its people.

Then came the phase of conservation. The nation decided forests had to be protected; tigers and other wild animals had to be safeguarded. But instead of building an economic model which shared the benefits of conservation with people, the State once again marginalized them. Forests, went the belief, had to be protected from the people who lived on these lands. Today the callous implementation of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, which does not allow (rightly in many cases) diversion of forestland for non-forest purposes, has become the single biggest reason for anger and violence in the region.

See, while forests are cleared for mines, or power or industrial projects, what is delayed and discounted is the little forestland local people need to build a school, a water tank or an access road. Worse, the wealth of the forests is never used to build their economies. Conservation of the tiger happens on their lands, on their backs, with little benefit to them. Are we still surprised at their anger?

This needs to change, and there are avenues. Some years ago, the Supreme Court passed an important order regarding the sharing of the mineral wealth with people. Today, there are new imperatives, national and global, such as protecting forests for water, or climate, security. Can these enable renewed futures? Can we change the rich land-poor people cartography of India? Let’s discuss this the next time.

—Sunita Narain (editor Down to Earth)

Down To Earth is a science and environment fortnightly published by the Society for Environmental Communications, India.

Instruction Manual For Life !!

Have a firm handshake.
Look people in the eye.
Sing in the shower.
Own a great stereo system.
If in a fight, hit first and hit hard.
Keep secrets.
Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen everyday.
Always accept an outstretched hand.
Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.
Whistle.
Avoid sarcastic remarks.
Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 per cent of all your happiness or misery.
Make it a habit to do nice things for people who will never find out.
Lend only those books you never care to see again.
Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all that they have.
When playing games with children, let them win.
Give people a second chance, but not a third.
Be romantic.
Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.
Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the caller's.
Be a good loser.
Be a good winner.
Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.
When someone hugs you, let them be the first to let go.
Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.
Keep it simple.
Beware of the person who has nothing to lose.
Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.
Live your life so that your epitaph could read, No Regrets
Be bold and courageous. When you look back on life, you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the one's you did.
Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.
Remember no one makes it alone. Have a grateful heart and be quick to acknowledge those who helped you.
Take charge of your attitude. Don't let someone else choose it for you.
Visit friends and relatives when they are in hospital; you need only stay a few minutes.
Begin each day with some of your favorite music.
Once in a while, take the scenic route.
Send a lot of Valentine cards. Sign them, 'Someone who thinks you're terrific.'
Answer the phone with enthusiasm and energy in your voice.
Keep a note pad and pencil on your bed-side table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 a.m.
Show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of how trivial their job.
Send your loved ones flowers. Think of a reason later.
Make someone's day by paying the toll for the person in the car behind you.
Become someone's hero.
Marry only for love.
Count your blessings.
Compliment the meal when you're a guest
in someone's home.
Wave at the children on a school bus.
Remember that 80 per cent of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal with people.
Don't expect life to be fair.
Always smile, at least try, if nothing, it improves your face value!
Say something good to someone (even if you dont mean it) and make his day!
Tell someone-"You made my day" and make his/her day!
Life is too short to hate!
There is a difference between people whom you hate and the ones whom you don't like!

This Man Saves Lives !!

For over ten years now, Khushroo Poacha has stood by the sole belief that to do good work you don't need money.

Poacha runs indianblooddonors. com (IBD), a site that lets blood donors and patients in need of blood connect with each other almost instantaneously. He also does not accept cash donations. The site has been live for almost ten years and with over 50,000 donors in its database, IBD is perhaps a classic example of what the Internet is truly capable of. But more importantly, it is a reflection of a single human being's desire to make a difference to this world.

It all started in the mid-'90s when Khushroo Poacha, an employee with the Indian Railways in Nagpur saw a doctor being beaten up because he couldn't save a patient's life. No one in the mob seemed to understand that it was the lack of blood that caused the death.

"A few years later, I witnessed the death of a welder because he couldn't get blood. The two incidents really shook me up," Poacha says, "And that was when I expressed to my wife my desire of doing something."

Poacha, however, had no clue about how he could make a difference until one day, sitting in a cybercafe with a 56 kbps connection, the idea came to him.

"I did not know head or toe of the Internet, let alone about domain names, but I knew this would be the tool that would make a difference," he says, explaining the dotcom extension to the site.

Over the next few months, Poacha liquidated practically all his savings, purchased a domain name and started up indianblooddonors. com. "During the time, there were no companies booking or hosting web domains in India . I was paying USD 300 every three months to keep the site live and running. Meanwhile, I had spent almost Rs 40,000 in developing the site and had gone practically bankrupt," he says.

Poacha says he even went to a local newspaper to place an ad. "I needed visibility and that was the only way I thought I could reach out to the people. The day the ad appeared, I was expecting a flood of registrations," he recollects. "No one registered."

The silver lining to the dark cloud came when someone from the outskirts of his hometown Nagpur contacted him, expressing interest. "It was a saving grace," Poacha says.

Meanwhile, the dotcom bubble had burst and Poacha was being told what a fool he had been. And then there were household expenses to be taken care of too. "There were many occasions when unpaid phone bills would be lying in the house and there would be no money to pay them off," Poacha recollects, adding that "things always have a way of sorting themselves out. And mysteriously during such times, a cheque would make its way into the mailbox."

Poacha admits that his wife was quite apprehensive about his endeavor. "But she believed in me," he says, "And that has made all the difference."

Visibility, however, was still an issue. No publication was willing to write about him. No major hospital or blood bank was interested in taking his calls. And then the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake happened. As visuals of the devastation flashed before his eyes on television, Poacha realized yet again he had to do something.

Only this time he knew just what. "I called up (television channel) Zee News and requested them to flash the site's name on the ticker and they agreed." Five minutes later, the ticker was live. Ten minutes later, the site crashed. "I spoke to the people who were hosting the site (by now website hosting had started off in India ) and explained to them the situation. They immediately put me on a fresh server and over the next three days or so I received some 3,500 odd registrations," Poacha recollects.

Realizing the difference he had made, the 42-year-old started working on getting visibility again.
Over the next few months, Poacha had contacted every major magazine and sure enough, a few responded. "Outlook (magazine) wrote about me, then (British newspaper) The Guardian followed suit and then came the BBC," he says.

Along the way, IBD had also gone mobile. All you had to do was type out a message and send it to a short code and you'd have a list of blood donors in your inbox. As luck would have it, the service became far too popular for Poacha's pocket. "By then I had stopped taking cash donations and had to discontinue it," he says.

Interestingly, IBD is not yet registered as an NGO. "We function as individuals. We don't take donations and only accept bumper stickers (of IBD) and postage stamps to send out those stickers and create awareness," he says, "I was asked to deliver a lecture at IIM during a social entrepreneurship seminar and was asked what my sustenance model was. I replied I didn't have one. And I have been doing this for the last ten years."

Today, the database of IBD is growing at the rate of 10-15 users every day and the requests have grown from 25 to 40 per day. Poacha says he eats, drinks and breathes IBD. "The zeal I had ten years ago has not diminished and the site continuously sees innovation."

The latest, Poacha tells us, is the option of being an exclusive donor to one patient. "During my journey, I realised there were some patients who required blood every month. So if you want, we can put you onto them so you can continue making a sustained difference to one person's life."

IBD is currently on an auto pilot mode and Poacha continues to keep his day job. He says, "Initially I would take the calls and personally connect the donor with the patient's relative. But I know only three languages and I'd get calls from all over India ," he laughs.

Poacha recounts an incident that never left him: "A man from Chandigarh called me and told me he was desperately seeking A-ive blood for his 2-year-old. About five minutes after the call, he got the (difficult to find) blood group he needed. Soon after the surgery he called me up crying, thanking me for saving his child's life. For me, it was just another day at work. But his whole world was at stake that day. I can never forget that call."

Last year Poacha was invited to the Asian Social Entrepreneurs Summit 2008 in South Korea where venture capitalists argued that it wasn't possible to sustain an endeavor without money. He says, "I pointed out that Mother Teresa who had no revenue model when she started the Missionaries of Charity. If you want to do good work, you simply do it."

For someone who has sustained his enterprise for a decade with just a few bumper stickers and postage stamps, Khushroo Poacha knows best. He saved thousands of lives by clicks. So can YOU !!

What is Recession ??

This story is about a man who once upon a time was selling hotdogs by the roadside. He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers. He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television. But enthusiastically, he sold lots of hotdogs. He was smart enough to offer some attractive schemes to increase his sales. His sales and profit went up. He ordered more and more raw material and buns and sold more. He recruited more supporting staff to serve more customers. He started offering home deliveries. Eventually he got himself a bigger and better stove. As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.

Then something strange happened.

The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?" The father replied, "No, but tell me about it." The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic situation is even worse. We should be prepared for the coming bad times."

The man thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, listened to the radio and watched TV. He ought to know and his advice should not be taken lightly. So the next day onwards, the father cut down the his raw material order and buns, took down the colorful signboard, removed all the special schemes he was offering to the customers and was no longer as enthusiastic. He reduced his staff strength by giving layoffs. Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his hotdog stand. And his sales started coming down rapidly and so did the profit. The father said to his son, "Son, you were right”. “We are in the middle of a recession and crisis. I am glad you warned me ahead of time."


Moral of the Story: It’s all in our MIND! And we actually FUEL this recession much more than we think.

Crabby Old Man

When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in North Platte , Nebraska , it was believed that he had nothing left of any value.

Later, when the nurses were going through his meager possessions, they found this poem. Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital. One nurse took her copy to Missouri .

The old man's sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas edition of the News Magazine of the St. Louis Association for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on his simple, but eloquent, poem.

And this little old man, with nothing left to give to the world, is now the author of this 'anonymous' poem winging across the Internet.


Crabby Old Man

What do you see nurses? . . . . . What do you see?
What are you thinking . . . . . when you're looking at me?
A crabby old man . . . . . not very wise,
Uncertain of habit . . . . . with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food . . . . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . . . . . 'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . . . . the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . A sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not . . . . . lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . . . The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking? . . . . . Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse . . . . . you're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am. . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, . . . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . . . . . with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters . . . . . who love one another.

A young boy of Sixteen . . . . with wings on his feet.
Dreaming that soon now . . . . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . . . my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows . . . . . that I promised to keep.

At Twenty-Five, now . . . . . I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . . . . With ties that should last.

At Forty, my young sons . . . . . have grown and are gone,
But my woman's beside me . . . . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . . My loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me . . . . . my wife is now dead.
I look at the future . . . . . shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . . . and the love that I've known.

I'm now an old man . . . . . and nature is cruel.
Tis jest to make old age . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles . . . . . grace and vigor, depart.
There is now a stone . . . . where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass . . . . . a young guy still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . life over again.

I think of the years, all too few . . . . . gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . . open and see.
Not a crabby old man . . . Look closer . . . see ME!!


Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within.

We will all, one day, be there, too!

The best and most beautiful things of this world can't be seen or touched. They must be felt by the heart.

Women Grow Food Basket

from Down To Earth Magazine -- article by Aparna Pallavi


Maharashtra district revives an old farm practice and tackles drought


Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus.

Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from the family’s four-acre (1.6 hectares) farm in Mendhla village in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district. It is like an oasis in the middle of large cotton and soybean farms. Leafy vines of long beans (barbati) climbing up tall sorghum plants, interspersed with okra, pale pink bells of sesame flowers and pendulous waluk melons giving off a musky aroma. The pata now makes up the food basket for the Meshram family.

The small vegetable patch has restored the joy that was missing from agriculture, said Meshram. Agriculture in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region had come to imply repeated crop failures, pest attacks, piling up loans and suicides.

Meshram is one of the 4,000 women farmers who have come together to revive the practice of pata in Yavatmal, the heartland of Vidarbha’s agriculture crisis.

Traditionally, pata signifies a woman’s space in agriculture. Women would plant small strips of land with vegetables, fruits and spices, between the main crops like wheat, sorghum and pigeon pea. They would maintain and harvest them, depending on family needs.

“At midday or in the evening, before going home, my mother would visit the pata and pluck vegetables for the next meal or take something for a snack,” Punjabai Bhagat, a 60-year-old from village Godhani, recalled. People working in the fields could always find something to munch on from the pata. Typically, she added, the pata supplied the family platter with fresh fruits and vegetables for about eight months in a year, and with pulses and oilseeds for the whole year; crops varied depending on the season. The pata ensured nutritional variety, Bhagat said.

That was decades ago. “The practice was lost following the Green Revolution and commercialization of agriculture,” said Vijaya Tulsiwar whose non-profit Dilasa focuses on the revival of traditional agricultural knowledge and practice in Yavatmal. A survey by Dilasa in 2005 showed only 15 families in the district were practising pata cultivation.

Three of the 260 households in my village and neighbouring Lalguda had pata, said Satibai Kumre of Mahadapur, a tribal village. “They always did fairly well despite drought or soaring food prices. This inspired us to create our own pata.” Women in Lalguda and Mahadapur villages were the first to revive the practice in the region.

“We had no seeds. Together, the three families had seven varieties of seeds, against the 16 to 18 varieties that women once sowed on their pata,” said Kumre. Then there was another hurdle—land shortage.

Commercial mono-crop cultivation in recent decades has usurped the traditional space women had in agriculture. Most farmers in this region, with an average landholding of two acres, did not want to divert plots for pata and lose income in cash, Kumre added.

Tulsiwar held meetings with women farmers in 31 villages in Jhari Jamni tehsil. The women pooled available seed stocks, which Tulsiwar’s non-profit bought and multiplied in 2006-2007 by planting them on the existing patas and on its five-acre nursery.

To overcome land shortage, the women came to an arrangement with men of their families: three furrows on a two-acre farmland was decided to be the ideal size for a pata. “Three furrows amounts to two-three per cent of a two-acre farm. The farmers now had no misgivings about losing income,” said Tulsiwar. After much preparation, 750 women from these villages planted 11 varieties of crops on their patas in the kharif season last year. Meshram was one of them.

Initially, the experiment did not instill much confidence among the women. “The patas looked too small to sustain family needs even for a month,” said Tulsiwar. But the result was spectacular.

“We did not spend on vegetables between July and November,” said Sugandha Atram of Lalguda. “We ate more vegetables during those four months than we had eaten in years,” she said. Apart from okra, bitter gourd, snake gourd and beans, Atram harvested 15kg of moong, 11kg of urad and 6kg of moth (pulses). Kumre harvested a record 50kg of moong and 30kg of pigeon pea and 350 corn cobs.

Revival of patas also helped the women revive traditional delicacies like til ka laddu, made of sesame seeds, and jowar lahya (puffed crispy sorghum seeds). With changing agricultural practices, cultivation of sesame—a rich source of calcium—had declined and the indigenous sorghum variety, moti-tura, had virtually disappeared. Their consumption was restricted to festive rituals due to exorbitant costs. But last year, almost every family in the village harvested four-five kg of sesame and sorghum seeds, said Atram. “We made laddus last the whole winter,” she said.

Women from Lalguda and Mahadapur estimate the patas helped them save Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 last year. More than that, they offered a variety of nutritious food. “There is happiness only when there is plenty to eat,” commented Atram.

The best part was the main crop production was not affected by the land diversion for pata, said Maroti Marekar of village Godhani. “What was lost in acreage was gained in pest reduction,” he said. Maroti and his wife Ujjwala planted marigolds on their pata; the plant acts as a pest trap. “It also yielded us fodder and compost.”

Following the initial success, Tulsiwar distributed 4,000 packets of mixed seeds in 180 villages in July for the kharif season; about 8,000 patas have been sown across the district. Scanty rainfall early in the season though did some damage to the legume crops, but the women harvested good quantities of vegetables; sorghum, corn and sesame crops also did well.

Those who had created patas last year have expanded them this year. Satibai, for instance, planted three patas this year, with full support from her husband. He was apprehensive during the trial run.

“It feels good,” he said: “There is shade in the farm and enough vegetables to eat. My daughter and her friends go to the pata these days to play. It is a happy thing.”

Donkey comes home

from http://www.downtoearth.org.in

The country’s only sanctuary offers professional care for the beasts of burden

I was surprised to find my donkey so completely cured, said Makkaji Ibitdar, a small farmer in the hilly district of Nanded in Maharashtra. When Dharma Donkey Sanctuary in Sagroli village handed him his animal after discharge Ibitdar could not stop smiling at it. Only three months earlier, he was planning to abandon the donkey after it became weak, developed bad eyesight and sores on the back. Ibitdar was relieved to find his donkey strong again. It was mid-October and Ibitdar needed it the most for hauling farm equipment across tough terrain to prepare his field for rabi crops.

In July when Sanskruti Sanwardhan Mandal, an educational institution in Sagroli established by social worker Babasaheb Deshmukh organized a medical camp for donkeys in his village, Ibitdar took his ailing donkey there.

It was diagnosed as having worms and vitamin A deficiency due to lack of green grass. The deep bleeding wounds on its back and feet were caused by overloading. The doctors at the camp gave her a tetanus shot and asked Ibitdar to take her to the sanctuary for treatment.

Dharma Donkey Sanctuary, unlike other sanctuaries to protect endangered species, offers shelter and medical care to old, pregnant and sick donkeys.

The only sanctuary of its kind in India, it was set up in 2000 by Babasaheb Deshmukh at the behest of Bonny and Ratilal Shah, an nri couple from usa. The Shahs, who had been associated with the Mandal since 1990, perhaps drew inspiration from Egypt, Kenya and Mexico where donkey sanctuaries are common, said Abhijit Mahajan, manager of the Mandal. They had helped the Mandal purchase six hectares to set up the sanctuary.

It now attends to the beasts of burden from 50 villages where donkeys are the primary carrier of farm goods, fertilizers and construction material. Donkeys can endure overloading and require little water and food. Since the government’s veterinary services are limited to farm animals, donkey owners have nowhere to go to treat the wounded and ailing animals.

Non-profits like Brooke Hospital in UK and Blue Cross of Hyderabad help the sanctuary conduct vaccination and de-worming programmes twice a year and organize free medical camps from time to time.

“About 8,000 donkeys come to our camps every year,” said Mahajan. Those who are severely ill, like the one owned by Ibitdar, are brought to the sanctuary. Here there is plenty of grass to feed on, three tube wells offering ample water and two caretakers are available round the clock, he added. Once the animals are cured, they are handed back to their owners. For the old and abandoned ones, the sanctuary is a permanent shelter. “As of now, we have 10 abandoned donkeys,” said Suresh Mogdekar, a caretaker. “Two have been living here for three years; we have named them Raja and Akash,” he said breaking into a smile. About 20 donkeys come for treatment in a year and stay in our care for some months. It took three months to cure Ibtidar’s donkey. Its wounds needed regular dressing and was given deworming medicine (albendazol), Mogdekar added. Since the sanctuary does not have a fulltime doctor, in case of an emergency a government veterinary doctor from Nanded town treats the donkeys.

While medicines and vaccines are often donated, funds are hard to come by as few understand the need for a donkey sanctuary. To meet the expenses, the management has created a mango orchard in the sanctuary; this earns them Rs 10,000 a year. Trustees bear the salaries of caretakers.

It may take a few years before the sanctuary receives required aid and attention, but it has changed the attitude of people in Nanded towards donkeys, said Ibitdar as he took his donkey back home. He now plans to give it a name.

Drought fails to crush a Bundelkhand village

from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in

Uttar Pradesh's Bundelkhand region has been devastated by drought and other adverse weather conditions over the past four years. Madhaiya Anghela village in Madhogarh sub-division of Jalaun district exhibits the typical symptoms: farm-related livelihoods are in tatters. Villagers say the kharif crop this year is only 20 per cent of normal years. The prospects for the rabi crop are very dim—the soil has little to no moisture.

There is widespread hunger and malnutrition in most villages of Bundelkhand. Pulses and vegetables are a rare sight in the diet. Most families make do with roti and chutney, or worse still, roti and salt. Several families do not get enough of even this. The farms of poor families are typically close to the ravines, adding to difficulties in cultivation.A large number of people have already migrated, and many others are preparing to migrate to Delhi, Mumbai and towns in Gujarat—to look for csula labour in hazardous conditions.

This sad story gets repeated in village after distressed village. And then there is Lachmanpura.

The barren landscape gives way to green fields. The people in this village of small dalit farmers say this greenery is a symbol of a wider change—farm productivity, income, nutrition and health have improved in recent times. "We had a good crop this kharif season and the prospects for the rabi crop are looking good. In fact, a few villagers have taken a third crop of vegetables,' says Mahendra, a farmer. Gyanwati, a resident of Lachmanpura, says, "With better farm productivity in recent years, we get better nutrition, which in turn means fewer illnesses. There is no distress migration in our village.'

The turnaround in Lachmanpura owes a lot to the local voluntary organization Parmarth's resources management project. Over the past five years, the village has witnessed soil and water conservation works, bunds, and check dams. After these public works, the village has taken the assistance of a government scheme to get Rs 1 lakh for tube wells; four of these have been sunk. Women's committees spearheaded several of these efforts.

Parmarth has emphasized low-cost technologies that protect the ecology, like composting. People have been encouraged to avoid chemical pesticides. Easy availability of seeds to needy farmers has saved several of them from turning to borrowing from moneylenders. Farmers have been encouraged to use bullocks instead of tractors. Because fodder from crop residue is now abundant, animal husbandry is in better shape; livestock population has increased 30 per cent.

Some poor families have been provided goats. Parmarth has established a revolving fund which helps small peasants avoid distress crop sales. The mobilization of villagers as a part of this project seems to have increased solidarity, leading to spin-off benefits. Small farmer have started pooling their crops and taking them to bigger markets, where they stand a better chance of obtaining higher prices.

Parmarth is also working in two other villages in Jalaun district: Kadampur and Chotiber. A recent study of theirs found the per acre production of gram in the three villages increased from 300 kg to 450 kg over three years. The production of arhar (red gram) increased from 250 kg to 425 kg in the same period. The per acre income increased by Rs 1,000. The increase in income in a 180-hectare (ha) stretch in the three villages was almost Rs 5 lakh. Soil and water conservation has bought 8 ha of hitherto uncultivated land under the plough. These statistics cover only a part of the project area: the annual increase in farm income in the three villages is likely to be around Rs 9 lakh.

Similar efforts have succeeded in Manikpur block of Chitrakoot district. Here another voluntary group, Akhil Bhartiya Samaj Seva Sansthan, has carried out soil and water conservation work. It has constructed check dams, repaired tanks and dug up new ones. These have provided relief to people, particularly Kol tribals, in times of acute water scarcity.

Go, Kiss The World !!

Subroto Bagchi's Speech at IIM -- Bangalore, 2006 (COO of Mindtree Consulting)

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."

Tips on Living !!

A Pulitzer Prize Winner's Speech... And what a speech !!
This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.


We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've received your test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived".

Can Meditation Be Passionate ??

This is from an email I received.. loved it so much.. couldn't help sharing it..


CAN MEDITATION BE PASSIONATE?


Yes, that is the only way for meditation to exist. Passion is energy, passion is fire, passion is life. If you are doing meditation just so-so, without any passion, without intensity, without fire, nothing will happen. If you are praying just as a formality and it is not love that has arisen in your heart, it is meaningless, it is absurd. If you are praying to God without passion there will be no connection between you and God. Only passion can become the bridge, the thirst, the hunger. The more thirsty you are, the more is the possibility. If you are utterly thirsty, if you have become just a thirst, your whole being is consumed by your passion, then only something happens -- in that intensity, in that moment of hundred-degree passion.


Don't be lukewarm. People live a lukewarm life. They are neither this nor that, hence they remain mediocre. If you want to get beyond mediocrity, create a life of great passion. Whatsoever you do, do it passionately. If you sing, then sing passionately. If you love, then love passionately. If you paint, then paint passionately. If you talk, then talk passionately. If you listen, then listen passionately. If you meditate, then meditate passionately.


And from everywhere you will start having contact with God -- wherever passion is. If you are painting with utter passion, your painting is meditation. There is no need for any other meditation. If you are dancing with absolute passion so that the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, it is meditation, no other need, nowhere to go, no yoga postures. This is the yoga postures: the dancer has disappeared and the dance is there. It is pure energy -- energy vibrating. In that state you contact. Why in that state do you contact? -- because when the passion is great, the ego dies. The ego can exist only in mediocre minds; only mediocre people are egoistic. The really great are not egoistic, they cannot be. But their life has a totally different direction, a different dimension -- the dimension of passion.


Have you observed these two words -- passion and compassion?
Passion becomes transformed into compassion. There is a quantum leap from passion into compassion --
but the quantum leap happens only when you are boiling at one hundred degrees. Then the water becomes vapor. It is the same energy that exists as passion and one day becomes compassion.


Compassion is not antagonistic to passion; it is passion come of age, it is passion bloomed. It is the spring season for passion.


I am all for passion. Do whatsoever you do but be lost into it, abandon yourself into it, dissolve yourself into it. And dissolution becomes salvation.


From The Diamond Sutra - OSHO

Vikram Buddhi -- Anti-Bush Blogger -- Wrongfully Jailed, says Family

The article below is from the Indian Express. Its is about Vikram Buddhi, an IIT alum and a student who till 2006 was pursuing his PhD at Purdue.. that is till the time he was imprisoned in the US on allegations of having written against ex-President Bush on his blog. I remember at my Univ at Ashland, and even other places, people so openly spoke against Bush; then why this disparity??

I am surprised that Vikram Buddhi's case has been highlighted in Indian newspapers alone. When I googled his name, there was not a single US newspaper that mentioned his plight.

From the Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/seeking-sons-release-from-us-jail-father-says-ministers-help-assured/536339/

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Three years after Vikram Buddhi was arrested in the US for allegedly posting an online hate message against then President George Bush, his father will finally hear from the Indian government on what progress it has made in its efforts to secure his release.

On Wednesday, Dr Buddhi Kota Subbarao is set to be given a government update on the action taken. Subbarao has been fighting a lone legal battle for the release of his son, lodged in a prison in Chicago. US authorities had even deported Subbarao to India; illegally, he says, to block legal help to his son.

After several requests to the Ministry of External Affairs, ministers and senators, the Indian Consulate in US, and several officials, Subbarao was finally called on October 29 for a meeting with External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, to explain his son’s case. This was after several letters to the minister and other departments seeking government intervention.

“I explained to the Minister the gross irregularities in Vikram’s case carried out by Judge James T. Moody. The minister agreed there was no valid indictment charge mentioned in the case and Vikram apparently looked to have been framed,” Subbarao said.

Subbarao, a former Indian Navy Captain, urged the Minister for government intervention and a dialogue with the US authorities and Department of Justice for a review of his son’s case.

“The Minister noticed irregularities committed by Judge Moody and referred the case to the law department for possible options before the government in securing justice for Vikram. The minister assured me that by Wednesday, I will be receiving correspondence from the Ministry on the action taken.”

Vikram, who was studying applied mathematics at Purdue University, was arrested in April 2006 and charged on 11 counts. He was found guilty but his sentencing has been getting postponed since 2007. The next date for pronouncement of sentence is November 19.

“Whatever action is taken has to be before the sentence and the government has to act fast. I said as much to Mr Krishna who agreed with me in principle and directed his officials to act swiftly,” said Subbarao.