The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 11 October 2014

WHY THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE IS STILL THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS RECOGNITION (BUT WITHIN A FRONTIER)

Peace Nobel is still the most talked about and speculated for Nobel Prize given its ‘political nature’ and the ‘emphasis’ on socio-political themes attached with the decision-making process that gives enhanced recognition to an issue and draws worldwide attention that many ‘powers’ don’t like; or highlights an issue that has been always there with activists working on to bring changes but doesn’t come in the priority list of the ‘powers’. 

And for such reasons, the Peace Nobel decisions draw intense scrutiny, gesturing and maneuvering, generating copiously flow of controversial sub-plots sometimes. 

The most notable example of it has been China’s intense opposition to the Nobel Peace Prize given to The Dalai Lama in 1989 and to the Chinese writer, dissident and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010.

Every year, in the run-up to the Peace Nobel announcement, the buzz starts soon after the nomination starts and starts taking a definitive shape once the nominations are closed and the concerned Nobel Committees short-lists that ‘small and final list’ from out of hundreds of nominations. It starts peaking around in August and reaches its crescendo in the week prior to the announcements in October.


And it is not for nothing. Peace Nobel is still the most prestigious recognition because it draws worldwide attention to an issue, a problem area, affecting scores of human lives, but suppressed or deliberately ignored or not being given due attention, and therefore a symbolic win for the people working to address it and for the humankind that says, yes, there is an urgent need to attend to that specific problem and the time is ‘now’. 

Peace Nobel is still the most prestigious recognition because it has the potential to motivate and unite the people working for a cause by recognizing the efforts of one stellar name from that fraternity. It may be people. It may be organization. It may be some social evil. It may be some international issue plaguing the process of peace for decades. 

Yes, and it does motivate the people acting for the cause to uproot the problem or to address the issue, but it does little to affect the mindset of those behind the issue or the problem. And that is the limit of this recognition, the extent to which its message reaches, the frontier beyond which there lies a wilderness ravaged by the man. 

The Nobel Peace Prize is important for this symbolism that has the potential to translate into significantly enhanced personal endeavors because we cannot expect crowds to lead. It is always the individuals who lead and show the way (or organizations in the case). 

And whatever be the reasons and the vision, grandly worded, the Peace Nobel is to be seen increasingly in this context, the symbolism of it, where it can positively affect the corrective processes in addressing social evils. 

That is what the world needs. That is what the humanity needs where billions of people still languish in abject poverty and are imprisoned in ghettos of inhumanely orthodox and culturally backward societies, especially for its women.  

The world needs people who can work to show these people the way to ‘life’. The world needs many more people like Kailashi Satyarthi, in every part of the world, where humanity is being assassinated every passing day. And a Peace Nobel recognition can motivate many more. And a Peace Nobel decision can draw many more to a ‘cause’. 

Let the world peace and terrorism to the world powers for some time. 

The Peace Nobel cannot bring peace between India and Pakistan because Pakistan’s belligerent ruling class gets its lease of life from its military that in turn draws authority in the country due to its anti-India rhetoric exploiting the deep chasms of Hindu-Muslim divide across the border. It cannot change the way the Taliban treat women in their areas in Pakistan and China or ISIS in Syria and Iraq. It cannot change the undemocratic and anti-humanity ways of dictatorship in China and Russia. It cannot bring peace even between Israel and Palestine, in fact has miserably failed here. It cannot change the conditions of civil war in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria or in many other countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world. 

In the prevailing geopolitical scenario, only forced interventions, military or economic, depending on the war theater, or a large scale internal uprising supported by the world community, can bring the change needed. The efforts to rebuild the humanity can only take place after that. And Peace and the Nobel Peace Prize, to and from such hotbeds of crisis, can come only after that.

Global geopolitical realities are cruel and can change from bad to worse in a matter of months Al Qaeda and ISIS have shown us. And on ‘such realities’, ‘promising’ aspirations don’t work or ‘fail to work’. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com