good morning it’s a real honor to be
giving this TEDx talk at the Cody
International School challenges they
come in all shapes and forms there
various different sizes and most often
they are set by other people you want to
do something your parents don’t like it
they think it won’t get you a job or
your friends think you live in la-la
land
or your teachers say that you aren’t
focused those the challenges that are
part of daily life and that we all
experience in one way or another but
when I started researching for this
particular talk I discovered something
that surprised me every great man or
woman has set his own challenge or her
own challenge it’s not other people’s
challenges that matter to them it was
the challenge that they asked of
themselves take Mary calm people used to
say that boxing is for men and not for
women and I thought I will show them
someday I promised myself she said and I
proved myself it’s not often that we get
to say words like that and when someone
does achieve it we can only be delighted
for them and hope for ourselves that we
can do as well another time my own
challenge came in terms of confronting
violence and seeing whether there were
ways the we in our own lives and in the
worlds that we live in in our country
could help make peace it was 1984 the
year that in Oregon he was assassinated
and most of you won’t know this but her
assassination was immediately followed
by a pogrom against the Sikh
in New Delhi and in some other cities in
India in the matter of three days more
than 3000 people were really brutally
killed and it wasn’t just the killing
it was the humiliation men was seized
and their beards were torn off people
were set on fire with burning tires
around their necks and as the news came
out hundreds and hundreds of citizens of
Delhi including myself poured out of our
houses to go and stop the killing we
went into the bye lanes of East Delhi of
North Delhi of paths we had never seen
before I had to help wounded families
scrape the bones of their loved ones of
the streets as you can imagine it was a
horribly formative experience for me but
it was an incredibly important
experience for me because I learned that
as a citizen of my city I could not sit
there and watch other people killing the
soul of this city and I also learnt that
it only took one it took one phone call
to me to bring me out
it took one phone call for me to bring
my friends out and if in three hours
more than a thousand people could gather
and commit themselves to rescuing people
from burning houses and streets to
setting up shelters for them to looking
not only to their rescue and their
survival for those few horrible days but
working with them for the next months
and years to ensure that they could have
new homes and new livelihoods well then
there was huge hope for my city and
there was huge hope for my country as
well that was a lesson I didn’t forget
at
over time my life went into dealing with
other conflicts and seeing other ways in
which people sort citizens sought to
make peace in their world my next
challenge game very much later when the
government of India asked me to work as
an interlocutor for Jammu and Kashmir
and I discovered something that perhaps
I had forgotten over the years the most
difficult thing of all is to deal with
the suffering of other people your own
suffering you can somehow find a way to
cope with if you’re lucky you’ll have
family and friends to help you you might
have mentors but other people suffering
how do you deal with that I sometimes
felt in that one year that I acted as an
interlocutor in Kashmir that my sole
task was to be a sponge for the anger
and pain that I heard everyday every
hour the phone calls would start at 7:00
in the morning they would end at
midnight I opened a Facebook page only
to reach out within days it was full I
had 15,000 people writing to me every
day and 99.9% of the messages I caught
were messages of anger and hate and I
had to read them and I had to reply and
I had to find some way every time of
creating a space where people could come
down from that high of rage and hatred
and start to listen a little and to
think a little but again what was the
most hopeful thing for me was to find
that actually it could be done people
did come down from their high of rage
and their hatred people did start to
listen to each other what are the most
moving things for me was to see
the wife of one of the dissidents in the
Kashmir Valley we did some role-playing
exercises in the university and one of
the scenarios we looked at was the
horrible war in Bosnia Herzegovina which
was a war of different communities and
different religions as well as obviously
international geopolitical circumstances
that accompanied the end of the Cold War
and this young lady volunteered to act
the role of a Bosnian Serb at a time
when they were most hated across the
world as people who had launched a war
of aggression upon fellow citizens of
different faiths and communities equally
moving was to see the young lady who had
to play the role of one of the
persecuted communities in Bosnia
Herzegovina that was expelled in a war
of ethnic what what grew to be called
ethnic cleansing now in Kashmir you had
had the pundits community that had been
expelled over the years of conflict from
the 1990s on this young lady was one of
the Muslims who was not given the
opportunity to leave the conflict area
and again you can imagine that in a
situation of conflict people everybody
is a victim it doesn’t matter which
faith or which community it doesn’t
matter that you might be a majority or
you might be a minority you’re all
equally victims of war and aggression
and violence but because a minority is
more vulnerable quite often it’s
impossible for the minority to
understand that members of the majority
are also victims
and equally often when it is a majority
that has not been able to prevent ethnic
cleansing there is a sense of guilt and
culpability which leads to defensiveness
and the statement that I didn’t do it it
was me which leads you then to say there
must be something wrong with those
people who allowed themselves to be
ethnically cleansed
that’s the way you justify the fact that
you still continue to exist it’s
understandable even if we cannot excuse
it it’s still an understandable
sentiment and to see in this role play
both people from minority and from
majority communities beginning to
understand that neither self
justification was adequate that each had
to sympathize with the sacrifices and
the suffering of the other was truly not
only moving but empowering so then came
the other question if citizens are
capable of change and are capable of
taking perhaps the biggest challenge of
all which is the loss of somebody you
love very much and being able to move
towards forgiveness then why is it or
how is it that we can translate that
into a political process a political
process which will allow you to come to
an actual resolution of the conflict an
actual moment of peace now in our
country we tend to think that
peacemaking is easy it’s an attitude
it’s an it’s it’s a kind of little bit
of will that you have to show if you’re
a nice person it really should not be
difficult to make peace well think about
it the other way what if you’re a very
nice person but your father has been
killed in front of your own eyes
your mother has been raped your sister
has had to run away your other brother
has perhaps been killed by yet another
opposing force is it so easy to make
peace with the person who has who you
think has been responsible for all this
suffering in your life if you look at
any conflict situation there is loss on
every single side some of us say we
don’t want to hear about the loss of
Kashmiri Kashmiri militants or young
people who’ve taken up the gun they are
terrorists we only want to look at the
losses that are brave Jevons who had to
face that our civil servants have had to
face who have been targeted that our
police who have been targeted have had
to face there’s certainly a great deal
of loss there but what about the loss on
the other side equally those who support
the boys who take up the guns will say
we don’t want to think about the loss of
the Jevons or other administrators or of
the police they are the people who are
oppressing us well so here’s the first
challenge of peacemaking both have to
recognize that the other has suffered
loss both have to recognize that the
other has some reason on their side
whether you agree with that reason or
not is actually completely unimportant
your task is not to agree your task is
to recognize that that person feels
justified in what they are doing every
single one of the people who are part of
that violence are also part of the
suffering they’re also part of the
compensation and they have to be a part
of the solution so at the end of the day
what is it the challenge
for peacemaking the challenge for
peacemaking
is to first create those moments of
recognition and awareness and then to
see how can you translate that into a
political act how can you make it a part
of a policy that will lead to the end of
a conflict sometimes it seems as if it
can’t be done it looks as if the
suffering has been so very great that
it’s not going to be possible for people
to forget and to lay the past behind
them and to move forward yet it is a
fact that it has been done it has been
done by statesmen who have found a way
to take that little little awareness and
turn it into a political advantage
they’ve been able to sell to their
publics that the sacrifice has paved the
way for the resolution and the
resolution is always a compromise so you
can imagine what a huge political task
it is to sell a compromise as a
victorious sacrifice yet it is so that
it does happen it has happened and
though unfortunately in our own mission
in Kashmir it did not happen
we were not able to achieve those goals
that we had set for ourselves the truth
is also that every peace process takes
years decades and generally decades of
sustained effort if you have effort for
five years and then a break and then
again an effort for another five years
and then again a break all you do is
prolong the suffering and you prolong
the time before you can reach a
conclusion if you can sustain a peace
process for 10 years or more then your
chances of arriving at a real
sustainable settlement are just that
much higher and that’s something I know
is an
demmick activist because unfortunately
thus far in my personal life I haven’t
seen it a few more words for those of
you who might want to engage in the task
of peacemaking in our country you tend
to be mocked and you tend to be scorned
somehow in modern India we seem to think
that peacemaking
is for the weak not for the strong
somehow we seem to think that the strong
can dominate and force their way through
well of course that is not the case
everybody has enough strength in them to
resist efforts at forceful conviction
Gandhiji once said first they ignore you
then they laugh at you then they fight
you and then you win I think that’s a
very good statement of how things work
in this country of course I’m only 64
now so I hope by the time I’m 80 I would
have won and I don’t think that that’s
an unfair hope I think it’s quite
realistic why should I not win at the
age of 80 we all should finally let me
remind you of something else everyone
believes that some goals are not
achievable we say to ourselves we have a
5,000 year old civilization we are a
very mature and sophisticated country
and then we turn around and we have our
nice young anchors on television all
yelling and shouting at their guests as
if their sole purpose and function in
life is to browbeat everybody else into
submission great achievement for a 5,000
year old civilization let’s see maybe
our young men and women will grow up a
little bit perhaps when they are 40 they
we’ll be a different type of an anchor
perhaps there will be anchors who will
actually bring people together into a
dialogue rather than into a
confrontation is it that we create
confrontations in order to forget the
greater more harder elements of life
that we have to deal with one of our
favorite phrases in our country is give
me a little merged masala and we really
especially like mirch masala in
television debates yet there is a really
serious element over here the merge
masala that we hear day in and day out
on our electronic and social media has
impacted us as a polity in the gravest
and most ugly of ways we seem to be
becoming a people who do not want to
listen to each other if we continue in
that way we will never be able to live
at peace and we are a country of 1.3
billion people we need peace more than
most people do so I hope I hope that we
can go back to what we learnt from our
great ones that you must persist but
more important than that is the dream
that you have the imagination that you
let free imagine the world that John
Lennon told us about imagine the world
that we read in the Bhagavad Gita or in
the Ramayana or in the Mahabharata
we can imagine great and glorious worlds
for ourselves and as Mandela said it
seems impossible until it’s done and
then it’s not impossible at all thank
you
[Applause]
giving this TEDx talk at the Cody
International School challenges they
come in all shapes and forms there
various different sizes and most often
they are set by other people you want to
do something your parents don’t like it
they think it won’t get you a job or
your friends think you live in la-la
land
or your teachers say that you aren’t
focused those the challenges that are
part of daily life and that we all
experience in one way or another but
when I started researching for this
particular talk I discovered something
that surprised me every great man or
woman has set his own challenge or her
own challenge it’s not other people’s
challenges that matter to them it was
the challenge that they asked of
themselves take Mary calm people used to
say that boxing is for men and not for
women and I thought I will show them
someday I promised myself she said and I
proved myself it’s not often that we get
to say words like that and when someone
does achieve it we can only be delighted
for them and hope for ourselves that we
can do as well another time my own
challenge came in terms of confronting
violence and seeing whether there were
ways the we in our own lives and in the
worlds that we live in in our country
could help make peace it was 1984 the
year that in Oregon he was assassinated
and most of you won’t know this but her
assassination was immediately followed
by a pogrom against the Sikh
in New Delhi and in some other cities in
India in the matter of three days more
than 3000 people were really brutally
killed and it wasn’t just the killing
it was the humiliation men was seized
and their beards were torn off people
were set on fire with burning tires
around their necks and as the news came
out hundreds and hundreds of citizens of
Delhi including myself poured out of our
houses to go and stop the killing we
went into the bye lanes of East Delhi of
North Delhi of paths we had never seen
before I had to help wounded families
scrape the bones of their loved ones of
the streets as you can imagine it was a
horribly formative experience for me but
it was an incredibly important
experience for me because I learned that
as a citizen of my city I could not sit
there and watch other people killing the
soul of this city and I also learnt that
it only took one it took one phone call
to me to bring me out
it took one phone call for me to bring
my friends out and if in three hours
more than a thousand people could gather
and commit themselves to rescuing people
from burning houses and streets to
setting up shelters for them to looking
not only to their rescue and their
survival for those few horrible days but
working with them for the next months
and years to ensure that they could have
new homes and new livelihoods well then
there was huge hope for my city and
there was huge hope for my country as
well that was a lesson I didn’t forget
at
over time my life went into dealing with
other conflicts and seeing other ways in
which people sort citizens sought to
make peace in their world my next
challenge game very much later when the
government of India asked me to work as
an interlocutor for Jammu and Kashmir
and I discovered something that perhaps
I had forgotten over the years the most
difficult thing of all is to deal with
the suffering of other people your own
suffering you can somehow find a way to
cope with if you’re lucky you’ll have
family and friends to help you you might
have mentors but other people suffering
how do you deal with that I sometimes
felt in that one year that I acted as an
interlocutor in Kashmir that my sole
task was to be a sponge for the anger
and pain that I heard everyday every
hour the phone calls would start at 7:00
in the morning they would end at
midnight I opened a Facebook page only
to reach out within days it was full I
had 15,000 people writing to me every
day and 99.9% of the messages I caught
were messages of anger and hate and I
had to read them and I had to reply and
I had to find some way every time of
creating a space where people could come
down from that high of rage and hatred
and start to listen a little and to
think a little but again what was the
most hopeful thing for me was to find
that actually it could be done people
did come down from their high of rage
and their hatred people did start to
listen to each other what are the most
moving things for me was to see
the wife of one of the dissidents in the
Kashmir Valley we did some role-playing
exercises in the university and one of
the scenarios we looked at was the
horrible war in Bosnia Herzegovina which
was a war of different communities and
different religions as well as obviously
international geopolitical circumstances
that accompanied the end of the Cold War
and this young lady volunteered to act
the role of a Bosnian Serb at a time
when they were most hated across the
world as people who had launched a war
of aggression upon fellow citizens of
different faiths and communities equally
moving was to see the young lady who had
to play the role of one of the
persecuted communities in Bosnia
Herzegovina that was expelled in a war
of ethnic what what grew to be called
ethnic cleansing now in Kashmir you had
had the pundits community that had been
expelled over the years of conflict from
the 1990s on this young lady was one of
the Muslims who was not given the
opportunity to leave the conflict area
and again you can imagine that in a
situation of conflict people everybody
is a victim it doesn’t matter which
faith or which community it doesn’t
matter that you might be a majority or
you might be a minority you’re all
equally victims of war and aggression
and violence but because a minority is
more vulnerable quite often it’s
impossible for the minority to
understand that members of the majority
are also victims
and equally often when it is a majority
that has not been able to prevent ethnic
cleansing there is a sense of guilt and
culpability which leads to defensiveness
and the statement that I didn’t do it it
was me which leads you then to say there
must be something wrong with those
people who allowed themselves to be
ethnically cleansed
that’s the way you justify the fact that
you still continue to exist it’s
understandable even if we cannot excuse
it it’s still an understandable
sentiment and to see in this role play
both people from minority and from
majority communities beginning to
understand that neither self
justification was adequate that each had
to sympathize with the sacrifices and
the suffering of the other was truly not
only moving but empowering so then came
the other question if citizens are
capable of change and are capable of
taking perhaps the biggest challenge of
all which is the loss of somebody you
love very much and being able to move
towards forgiveness then why is it or
how is it that we can translate that
into a political process a political
process which will allow you to come to
an actual resolution of the conflict an
actual moment of peace now in our
country we tend to think that
peacemaking is easy it’s an attitude
it’s an it’s it’s a kind of little bit
of will that you have to show if you’re
a nice person it really should not be
difficult to make peace well think about
it the other way what if you’re a very
nice person but your father has been
killed in front of your own eyes
your mother has been raped your sister
has had to run away your other brother
has perhaps been killed by yet another
opposing force is it so easy to make
peace with the person who has who you
think has been responsible for all this
suffering in your life if you look at
any conflict situation there is loss on
every single side some of us say we
don’t want to hear about the loss of
Kashmiri Kashmiri militants or young
people who’ve taken up the gun they are
terrorists we only want to look at the
losses that are brave Jevons who had to
face that our civil servants have had to
face who have been targeted that our
police who have been targeted have had
to face there’s certainly a great deal
of loss there but what about the loss on
the other side equally those who support
the boys who take up the guns will say
we don’t want to think about the loss of
the Jevons or other administrators or of
the police they are the people who are
oppressing us well so here’s the first
challenge of peacemaking both have to
recognize that the other has suffered
loss both have to recognize that the
other has some reason on their side
whether you agree with that reason or
not is actually completely unimportant
your task is not to agree your task is
to recognize that that person feels
justified in what they are doing every
single one of the people who are part of
that violence are also part of the
suffering they’re also part of the
compensation and they have to be a part
of the solution so at the end of the day
what is it the challenge
for peacemaking the challenge for
peacemaking
is to first create those moments of
recognition and awareness and then to
see how can you translate that into a
political act how can you make it a part
of a policy that will lead to the end of
a conflict sometimes it seems as if it
can’t be done it looks as if the
suffering has been so very great that
it’s not going to be possible for people
to forget and to lay the past behind
them and to move forward yet it is a
fact that it has been done it has been
done by statesmen who have found a way
to take that little little awareness and
turn it into a political advantage
they’ve been able to sell to their
publics that the sacrifice has paved the
way for the resolution and the
resolution is always a compromise so you
can imagine what a huge political task
it is to sell a compromise as a
victorious sacrifice yet it is so that
it does happen it has happened and
though unfortunately in our own mission
in Kashmir it did not happen
we were not able to achieve those goals
that we had set for ourselves the truth
is also that every peace process takes
years decades and generally decades of
sustained effort if you have effort for
five years and then a break and then
again an effort for another five years
and then again a break all you do is
prolong the suffering and you prolong
the time before you can reach a
conclusion if you can sustain a peace
process for 10 years or more then your
chances of arriving at a real
sustainable settlement are just that
much higher and that’s something I know
is an
demmick activist because unfortunately
thus far in my personal life I haven’t
seen it a few more words for those of
you who might want to engage in the task
of peacemaking in our country you tend
to be mocked and you tend to be scorned
somehow in modern India we seem to think
that peacemaking
is for the weak not for the strong
somehow we seem to think that the strong
can dominate and force their way through
well of course that is not the case
everybody has enough strength in them to
resist efforts at forceful conviction
Gandhiji once said first they ignore you
then they laugh at you then they fight
you and then you win I think that’s a
very good statement of how things work
in this country of course I’m only 64
now so I hope by the time I’m 80 I would
have won and I don’t think that that’s
an unfair hope I think it’s quite
realistic why should I not win at the
age of 80 we all should finally let me
remind you of something else everyone
believes that some goals are not
achievable we say to ourselves we have a
5,000 year old civilization we are a
very mature and sophisticated country
and then we turn around and we have our
nice young anchors on television all
yelling and shouting at their guests as
if their sole purpose and function in
life is to browbeat everybody else into
submission great achievement for a 5,000
year old civilization let’s see maybe
our young men and women will grow up a
little bit perhaps when they are 40 they
we’ll be a different type of an anchor
perhaps there will be anchors who will
actually bring people together into a
dialogue rather than into a
confrontation is it that we create
confrontations in order to forget the
greater more harder elements of life
that we have to deal with one of our
favorite phrases in our country is give
me a little merged masala and we really
especially like mirch masala in
television debates yet there is a really
serious element over here the merge
masala that we hear day in and day out
on our electronic and social media has
impacted us as a polity in the gravest
and most ugly of ways we seem to be
becoming a people who do not want to
listen to each other if we continue in
that way we will never be able to live
at peace and we are a country of 1.3
billion people we need peace more than
most people do so I hope I hope that we
can go back to what we learnt from our
great ones that you must persist but
more important than that is the dream
that you have the imagination that you
let free imagine the world that John
Lennon told us about imagine the world
that we read in the Bhagavad Gita or in
the Ramayana or in the Mahabharata
we can imagine great and glorious worlds
for ourselves and as Mandela said it
seems impossible until it’s done and
then it’s not impossible at all thank
you
[Applause]
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