Tuesday, December 13, 2005

spread your wings and fly eagle.. Desmond Tutu

The notice on a pink colour A4 paper remained un-noticed in the campus, and it gave some of us an opportunity to listen to Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace prize winner for the year 1984. I miss most of the Nobel laureate lecture in the Institute because I reach late and the halls will be completely filled, this time it was in J. N. Tata auditorium and because of mentioned reason I could hear this piece of lecture. The presence of sniffer dog/bitches from the police near the stage gave really a wrong introduction to right event.
The speaker of the 7th and the last J.R.D Tata memorial lecture, organized by NIAS was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was really humble at the beginning of the talk. He spent almost 10 min. in thanking us, the Indians. I rarely hear someone talking about Mahatma Gandhi with such emotions. If I am hurting someone, then let me confess I heard very few of them. He sounded more like a Global Spokesman of peace than an arch bishop from Capetown, who fought apartheid and the man behind the reconciliation mission. Of course, South Africa has moved ahead from the apartheid era, but still I wonder how this reconciliation is done; atrocity must be at a level where punishment is the solution. His talk was a reminder of the last century’s blood bath all over the world, and the born of so called super powers who carried that legacy to the next century in the name of west vs. Islamic terrorism. He criticized the America and Britain for their unwanted and unnecessary invasion in Iraq where thousands of people were still getting killed. If the description of the talk is becoming serious then let me put down that he also had a humorous touch in his talk and he mixed them really well. He described the incidents, one about the women who came to the reconciliation court and was requested for forgiveness, and the other of the hotel manager in Washington who mistook him as a chauffer, with equal intensity! There were parts of the lecture where he talked about the oppression, quite depressing but when I read his Nobel lecture, I found he actually didn’t talk about oppression much. Surely, he followed his talk titled “is there hope for humanity?”. Arch Bishop Tutu, is in a UN committee called alliance of civilization and he is carrying out the job for getting together the civilizations around the world, according to him, we can prosper only when we are together. Human being lives in the world of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luthar King (junior), and they are like eagles that fly towards the rising sun and disappears. It was a quite unusual lecture for us but hats off to the man from Capetown!

Few links!

His Nobel lecture

His peace centre

1 comment:

Ravi S Kottada said...

I just read the Hindu article on his speech thanks to ILP notice. Of course, it was great. I was about to suggest it to you and I saw your blog about it (a coincidnece)!!.
In fact, a few weeks back I saw his interview by Stephen Sakher/BBC(he is a real sucker -believe me) in BBC which went in the similar lines of his speech- Iraq, terrorism etc.