Raised in Conflict
Thursday night was my favourite night of the week because my parents came home from work mid-afternoon and Mum would prepare a special meal of Afghan delicacies that I would eat after I finished a neighbourhood soccer match. I would go to school in the afternoon and finish at five. One particular Thursday I could not wait to finish school because there was soccer against a team from...Read More
Head in Sky, Feet Not in the Abyss
I work as a public school cinema studies teacher with detained youth in the United States. As I prepared to begin the Rotary Peace & Development Fellowship, I dreamed about how my Social Change Initiative would inspire policy to end juvenile incarceration, or at least put an end to the horror it causes my students and their families. Twelve weeks into the program, I’ve come to realize I...Read More
Stories For Peace
Stories are often relegated to the realm of entertainment. Certainly, in a world focused on measurable outcomes, stories do not share the prestige of the measurable units in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects. Yet, the world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, is reported to have advised a mother, who wanted her son to be a scientist, to read him “fairy tales...Read More
Can Mediation Do Harm? And, Other Stories
During this week’s online sessions in our Rotary Peace Center course (September 6th -12th 2021), our professor Roxana Cristescu introduced us the principles of mediation ethics, such as impartiality, voluntariness, confidentiality, self-determination, honesty, informed consent and the principle of “Do No Harm”. Our professor gave us a task to choose the three most important principles for...Read More
Innovative Development Program Design
Days after finishing our sessions on Innovative Development Program Design in the Rotary Peace Fellowship at Chulalongkorn University, the words of Professor Kai Brand Jacobsen came to mind over and over again. I was in Chocó, the jungle of the Colombian Pacific region. A territory historically marked by violence between guerrillas, drug trafficking, and illegal mining, but with a very...Read More
Building Your Own Wellness & Self-Care Action Plan
This week’s topic on Fostering Wellness: Transforming Stress & Trauma Through Self-Care & Resilience by Dr. Heidi Kar led the class to think deeply about how to best take care of yourself to promote mental and emotional health and wellbeing. The lectures and skill development exercises provided a wealth of information and ideas on how to build your own action that best works for...Read More
Compatibility Problem: Missing “Peace-Lens” Behind Problem of Federalization in Nepal
After ten years of violent communist insurgency, Nepal entered into a peace process in 2006 under international auspices and with domestic pressure. The Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-Maoist) agreed to join peaceful competitive politics if a new set of rules, mutually agreed by key actors and endorsed by the people, were set. An alliance of seven political parties, which were in...Read More
Non-Violent Actions & Peace: Need of the Hour Inclusion in School Curriculum is Essential
As a media academic and researcher, I have travelled to few countries on various continents of the world, including Thailand, Turkey, Portugal, USA, Greece, Finland, Canada, Italy, Ethiopia, Scotland (UK), and France. During my visits, other academic’s, researchers, students and others asked me one unique question: “Are you from Gandhi’s country? Are you from India? It’s...Read More