Nelson Mandela, a 22-carat 20th century hero, has been explaining the African concept of ubuntu to German elevision audiences. Asked by interviewer Tony Modise as to what he, a personification of ubuntu thought was his understanding of the word, the former President of South Africa says this (verbatim):
Ubuntu is a universal truth, it is a way of life, it underpins the concept of an open society.
“In the old days, when one was young, a traveller travelling through the country would stop at a village. And he did not have to ask for food or for water. Once he stopped villagers would give it themselves and attend on him. This is one aspect of ubuntu. But there are many other ramifications…”
Respect, helpfulness, sharing, commitment, caring, trust, unselfishness….
“Ubuntu does not mean people shouldn’t address themselves. The question is, are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you, to improve things in life? These are very imortant things. If you do so, you’ve done something important in life to be appreciated.”
Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx0qGJCm-qU&eurl
Questions: do we have a Nelson Mandela in our midst? One single man or woman whom we can all uniformally respect or revere? One single man or woman whose stands tall by the sincerity of his or her word and deed? Someone, put simply, we can all look up to, someone who can be representative of the Indian spirit across the globe?
This comment is out of context, but I couldn’t find any place on the website that had a “contact us” tag on it. Who does one have to get in touch with, to contribute to the content of this blog?
Relevant to context:
If there are people in our midst who actually imbibe the qualities that Nelson Mandela does, it might be quite a possibility that they’d rather contribute to the greater good without wanting to get themselves into the limelight. Probably why they’re not so well known.
“The Week” profiles some such people in their ‘person of the year’ issue at the end of each year, though they remain only in our short-term memories, mostly.
Abdul Kalam could have been such a person, had he avoided becoming a president. Consider this about Kalam – Humble background, Came up through hard work, non-political, high intellect, respected by all…. He can still do it, if he has the will.
“One single man or woman whom we can all uniformally respect or revere? One single man or woman whose stands tall by the sincerity of his or her word and deed? ”
If we weren’t such a cynical bunch, we could have found many such people to revere. Take this woman for example. She has refused the highest position in the land not once, but twice or thrice already. If you go back in history you won’t find many such instances anywhere in the world where people have refused a powerful position like that. In all of Indian history/mythology I can only think of Rama, Bhishma, Buddha, Ashoka, Gandhi and maybe JP – people who either had or could have had such a position and walked away from it. All of them are revered even today mainly because of that action of sacrifice. But what do we do today? We insinuate all sorts of things to her – we accuse her of remote controlling the government, if the government tells some UK bank to unlock the account of someone who has been acquitted by the courts we blame it on her and so on.
It is a vicious circle. The more corrupt people we see, we tend to get cynical and start tarring everyone with the same brush without taking notice of the few good ones, which means we start seeing even more corrupt people than there are actually and so it goes…
In any case isnt the message of Mandela wider than his his being a South african or an African. I for one am grateful as a human for Mandela and doesnt he represent all those values that Gandhi himself said was as old as the hills
I do really wish we find someone who the whole country, especially the younger generation could look up to. President Kalam could be one such person.
However one thing about the leaders who are revered, the world over, is that most of them (Mandela included) have been associated with a war, freedom struggle or a some kind of revolutionary movement (I would love to be corrected). It is rarely that we can find tall leaders to inspire us, during times of relative peace or when there is no common ‘enemy’ or ‘evil’ that the whole country has to fight against. So while there could be hundreds of people doing great things, who could be an inspiration to many, it would be very hard to find somebody who would be a near unanimous choice.