A thought provoking note from my friend on whats app. Iam sharing. It has been about 30 hours since the breaking news of Nobel Peace prize to Mr. Kailash Satyarthi. In these 20 hrs I did a bit of research on him and this is what I found. He gave up his career as an electrical engineer. He began his mission of fighting for childrens rights in 1980 i.e he has been at it for 34 years now. 2 of his colleagues got murdered and he himself got attacked once. Which means forget the Nobel prize, being alive itself is a huge award for him. He won his first award in 1984 and since then he won about 8 awards. And guess how many of those awards were given by his motherland for his yeoman service? ZERO! During these 34 years approximately 4000 Padma awards and about 25 Bharat Ratnas and many more awards have been doled out, but Mr Satyarthi is not one of them. Because you see our standards are very high!! During the same period dozens of eminent people have been nominated to Rajya Sabha and to many other such prestigious positions. But once again Mr Satyarthi did not qualify for any of them. No PM ever felt it important to call him for discussions ( even as they were meeting Film stars) and ask him what needs to be done to give children their rights!! And guess who nominated him for the Nobel prize this year? Indian Parliament? BJP? Congress? RSS? VHP? MP government ( his home state)? Rajiv gandhi Foundation? NO. He was nominated by EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT! So in nutshell he won this Nobel peace prize entirely due to his efforts and despite the Government/Media/Civil Society ( largely, because some people from the civil society did help him along). But today we all want a piece of his fame and glory. Who knows there might be a queue of Bollywood producers outside his door!!
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 06:50:42 +0000