There are men and women who made / are making a difference to the lives of millions of people across the globe . They initiated changes through personal example and worked fearlessly, selflessly, bearing pain and difficulties, but never deviated from their path. Their work shows us the way, gives us the courage, inspiration and the resolve to move forward for the cause we are aspiring for. Could there be better Role Models for us? Certainly not. The best way to pay tribute to them is to follow their footsteps.
I wonder what life has in store for me
I think a painter is what I'll be
Mix the black with the white
On the canvas of life
Create the artistry
The picture is humanity
One world with so many tongues
Must now sing the song unsung
Just one melody
So let your voices ring
Create the harmony
The song is humanity
Na na na......
One people one planet
Don't take your brother for granted
Na na na......
Shake a hand make a friend
And let the love begin
At the sound of the drum
The race is run
Man vs. Man
For number one
But if we call it a truce
There's no way we could lose
A winner's vanity
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ALFRED HERMANN FRIED
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Alfred Hermann Fried (November 11, 1864-May 5, 1921) was born in Vienna, but pursued most of his active journalistic career in Germany. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, he worked in his native city as a bookseller, then a few years later went to Berlin where he opened his own press in 1887.
Influenced by Bertha von Suttner, Fried became interested in the peace movement, founded the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft [German Peace Society], and edited its major publication, Monatliche Friedenskorrespondenz [Monthly Peace Correspondence], from 1894 to 1899. Having persuaded Baroness von Suttner to serve as editor, he started a peace journal, naming it Die Waffen Nieder! [Lay Down Your Arms], the title of the Baroness' famous antiwar novel1. In 1899 this was replaced by Die Friedenswarte [The Peace Watch], which he edited and which Norman Angell called «the most efficient periodical of the Pacifist movement in the world»2. This publication, which was addressed to an audience of intellectuals, has had a continuous history to the present time; edited by Fried until his death in 1921, then by Hans Wehberg, it was moved to Zürich in 1933. In 1905 Fried founded another journal, Annuaire de la vie internationale, which reflected his growing interest in international cooperation, particularly as exemplified by the Pan-American movement and the work of the Hague Conferences.
The peace literature which flowed from his pen - reports, editorials, essays, pamphlets, books - was extensive, but he also contributed to the cause his capacity as an organizer. He was a member of the Bern Peace Bureau, secretary of the International Conciliation for Central Europe, and secretary-general of the Union internationale de la presse pour la paix.
The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 was a turning point in the development of Fried's philosophy of pacifism. Thereafter, in his appeals to the German intellectual community he placed more reliance on economic cooperation and political organization among nations as bases for peace, and less upon limitation of armaments and schemes for international justice3. «War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy», he said. «If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.
Fried's efforts were partly responsible for the founding of the Verband für internationale Verständigung [Society for International Understanding] in 1911. His theory of internationalism did not preclude nationalism. In the Pan-American movement he perceived a model for the preservation of national identity within international organization In keeping with this position, Fried defended Germany before World War I by chronicling Wilhelm II's positive attitude toward world peace and during the war by refuting what he considered to be unreasonable criticism of Germany in the French, British, and American press.
Fried was in Vienna when war broke out in 1914. Since pacifist activities there were curtailed by government censorship and intolerant public opinion, Fried shifted his organizational and journalistic work to Switzerland. He was active in efforts to ameliorate the conditions of prisoners of war and continued to publish Die Friedenswarte as a rallying point for international peace efforts. Accused of treason by the Austrian government, he was unable to return to Vienna until the war's end.
The war over, Fried published Mein Kriegstagebuch [My War Journal], a «diary» which he kept during the war years to record his sentiments and his activities, along with those of his colleagues in the peace movement; he expressed dissatisfaction with the peace settlement and organized a journalistic campaign against the Versailles Treaty; he tirelessly pressed the point in his propaganda for peace that the war was proof of the validity of the pacifistic analysis of world politics.
Fried lost what wealth he possessed in the collapse of Austria-Hungary and died in poverty of a lung infection in Vienna at the age of fifty-seven.
THOMAS WOODROW WILSON
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856-February 3, 1924) was born in Staunton, Virginia, to parents of a predominantly Scottish heritage. Since his father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow was raised in a pious and academic household. He spent a year at Davidson College in North Carolina and three at Princeton University where he received a baccalaureate degree in 1879.
After graduating from the Law School of the University of Virginia*, he practiced law for a year in Atlanta, Georgia, but it was a feeble practice. He entered graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1883 and three years later received the doctorate. In 1885 he published Congressional Government, a splendid piece of scholarship which analyzes the difficulties arising from the separation of the legislative and executive powers in the American Constitution.
Before joining the faculty of Princeton University as a professor of jurisprudence and political economy, Wilson taught for three years at Bryn Mawr College and for two years at Wesleyan College. He was enormously successful as a lecturer and productive as a scholar.
As president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, Wilson became widely known for his ideas on reforming education. In pursuit of his idealized intellectual life for democratically chosen students, he wanted to change the admission system, the pedagogical system, the social system, even the architectural layout of the campus. But Wilson was a thinker who needed to act. So he entered politics and as governor of the State of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913 distinguished himself once again as a reformer.
Wilson won the presidential election of 1912 when William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote. Upon taking office he set about instituting the reforms he had outlined in his book The New Freedom, including the changing of the tariff, the revising of the banking system, the checking of monopolies and fraudulent advertising, the prohibiting of unfair business practices, and the like.
But the attention of this man of peace was forced to turn to war. In the early days of World War I, Wilson was determined to maintain neutrality. He protested British as well as German acts; he offered mediation to both sides but was rebuffed. The American electorate in 1916, reacting to the slogan «He kept us out of war», reelected Wilson to the presidency. However, in 1917 the issue of freedom of the seas compelled a decisive change. On January 31 Germany announced that «unrestricted submarine warfare» was already started; on March 27, after four American ships had been sunk, Wilson decided to ask for a declaration of war; on April 2 he made the formal request to Congress; and on April 6 the Congress granted it.
Wilson never doubted the outcome. He mobilized a nation - its manpower, its industry, its commerce, its agriculture. He was himself the chief mover in the propaganda war. His speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, on the «Fourteen Points» was a decisive stroke in winning that war, for people everywhere saw in his peace aims the vision of a world in which freedom, justice, and peace could flourish.
Although at the apogee of his fame when the 1919 Peace Conference assembled in Versailles, Wilson failed to carry his total conception of an ideal peace, but he did secure the adoption of the Covenant of the League of Nations. His major failure, however, was suffered at home when the Senate declined to approve American acceptance of the League of Nations. This stunning defeat resulted from his losing control of Congress after he had made the congressional election of 1918 virtually a vote of confidence, from his failure to appoint to the American peace delegation those who could speak for the Republican Party or for the Senate, from his unwillingness to compromise when some minor compromises might well have carried the day, from his physical incapacity in the days just prior to the vote.
The cause of this physical incapacity was the strain of the massive effort he made to obtain the support of the American people for the ratification of the Covenant of the League. After a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, 1919, he collapsed and a week later suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from the effects of which he never fully recovered. An invalid, he completed the remaining seventeen months of his term of office and lived in retirement for the last three years.
JANE ADDAMS
(Laura) Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a feminist, and as an internationalist.
She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War; he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began «My Dear Double D-'ed Addams». Because of a congenital spinal defect, Jane was not physically vigorous when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.
In 1881 Jane Addams was graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor's degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be. At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London's East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.
Miss Addams and Miss Starr made speeches about the needs of the neighborhood, raised money, convinced young women of well-to-do families to help, took care of children, nursed the sick, listened to outpourings from troubled people. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to two thousand people every week. There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull-House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, a labor museum.
As her reputation grew, Miss Addams was drawn into larger fields of civic responsibility. In 1905 she was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education and subsequently made chairman of the School Management Committee; in 1908 she participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and in the next year became the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.
Jane Addams was an ardent feminist by philosophy. In those days before women's suffrage she believed that women should make their voices heard in legislation and therefore should have the right to vote, but more comprehensively, she thought that women should generate aspirations and search out opportunities to realize them.
For her own aspiration to rid the world of war, Jane Addams created opportunities or seized those offered to her to advance the cause. In 1906 she gave a course of lectures at the University of Wisconsin summer session which she published the next year as a book, Newer Ideals of Peace. She spoke for peace in 1913 at a ceremony commemorating the building of the Peace Palace at The Hague and in the next two years, as a lecturer sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, spoke against America's entry into the First World War. In January, 1915, she accepted the chairmanship of the Women's Peace Party, an American organization, and four months later the presidency of the International Congress of Women convened at The Hague largely upon the initiative of Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist leader of many and varied talents. When this congress later founded the organization called the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Jane Addams served as president until 1929, as presiding officer of its six international conferences in those years, and as honorary president for the remainder of her life.
Publicly opposed to America's entry into the war, Miss Addams was attacked in the press and expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she found an outlet for her humanitarian impulses as an assistant to Herbert Hoover in providing relief supplies of food to the women and children of the enemy nations, the story of which she told in her book Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).
After sustaining a heart attack in 1926, Miss Addams never fully regained her health. Indeed, she was being admitted to a Baltimore hospital on the very day, December 10, 1931, that the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to her in Oslo. She died in 1935 three days after an operation revealed unsuspected cancer. The funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull-House.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR
“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood”----- Martin Luther King, Jr
Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, nnessee, wre as to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
MOTHER TERESA
MOTHER TERESA
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje*, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months' training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.
On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, "The Missionaries of Charity", whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.
Today the order comprises Active and Contemplative branches of Sisters and Brothers in many countries. In 1963 both the Contemplative branch of the Sisters and the Active branch of the Brothers was founded. In 1979 the Contemplative branch of the Brothers was added, and in 1984 the Priest branch was established.
The Society of Missionaries has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The order also has houses in North America, Europe and Australia, where they take care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers.
The Missionaries of Charity throughout the world are aided and assisted by Co-Workers who became an official International Association on March 29, 1969. By the 1990s there were over one million Co-Workers in more than 40 countries. Along with the Co-Workers, the lay Missionaries of Charity try to follow Mother Teresa's spirit and charism in their families.
Mother Teresa's work has been recognised and acclaimed throughout the world and she has received a number of awards and distinctions, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971) and the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding (1972). She also received the Balzan Prize (1979) and the Templeton and Magsaysay awards.
Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.
ABDUL SATTAR EDHI- A LIVING LEGEND
Every society is destined to face the problems of looking after the welfare of the sick, the weak, the destitute and the needy. All societies are alike in this respect. One way of assessing the status of a society on the road to civilization is the value accorded to an individual and his basic human needs. These have not always received the attention they deserve in the planning of economics, particularly in developing countries. Most of the available resources are consumed by defense needs and pressing demands for technological progress.
Programs for development in the social sector remain a long way behind mainly because of financial constraints. Special efforts are, therefore, needed to mobilize community resources to initiate and develop programs for the welfare of the weak and the disadvantaged members of the society.
Abdul Sattar Edhi was born in 1928 in a small village of Bantva near Junahgarh, Gujrat (India). The seeds of compassion for the suffering humanity were sown in his soul by his mother's infirmity. When Edhi was just eighteen, his mother was paralyzed and later developed metally illness. Young Abdul Sattar devoted himself for looking after all her needs; cleaning, bathing, changing clothes and feeding. This proved to be a losing battle, and her helplessness increased over the years. Her persistent woeful condition left a lasting impression on young Edhi. The course of his life took a different turn from other persons of his age. His studies were also seriously affected and he could not complete his high school level. For him the world of suffering became his tutor and source of wisdom.
Edhi's mother died when he was 19. His personal experience made him concerned about the millions who were suffering like his mother, around with nobody to look after them. He felt that he had a "call" to help these people. He had a vision of chains of welfare centers and hospitals that could be opened to alleviate the pain of those suffering from illness and neglect. He also thought of the in-human treatment meted out to the mentally ill, the insane and the disabled persons. Even at this early age, he felt personally responsible for taking on the challenge of developing a system of sevices to reduce human miseries. The task was huge he had no resources. But it was something that he had to do even if he had to walk to the streets with a cap in hand to beg for this purpose. From the very beginning he made the four principles his guiding force and light: simplicity, hardwork. punctuality and truth.
Edhi and his family migrated to Pakistan in 1947. In order to earn his living, He started as a peddler, later becoming a commission agent selling cloth in the wholesale market in Karachi. After a couple of years, he left this occupation and with the support of some members of his community decided to establish a free dispensary. He became involved in this charity work. However, soon his personal ambition to establish a welfare trust of his own and named it "Edhi Trust". An appeal was made to the public for funds. The response was good, and Rs. 20,000 were collected. The range and scope of work of Edhi Trust expanded with remarkable speed under the driving spirit of the man behind it. A maternity home was established and emergency ambulance service was started. More donations were received as people's confidence in the activities of the trust grew. With the passage of time, masses gave him the title of the "Angel of mercy".
Abdul Sattat Edhi was married in 1965 to Bilquis, a nurse who worked at the Edhi dispensary. The couple have four children, two daughters and two sons. Bilquis runs the free maternity home at the Headquarter in Karachi and organizes the adoption of illegitimate and abandoned babies. The husband-wife team has come to share the common vision of single minded devotion to the cause of alleviation of human sufferings and a sense of personal responsibility to respond to each call for help, regardless of race, creed or status.
Despite his enormous fame and the vast sums of money that passes through his hands, Edhi adheres to a very modest and austere lifestyle. He and his family live in a two room apartment adjacent to the premises of Foundation's headquarter. Neither Edhi nor Bilquis receives any salary, The live on the income from government securities that Edhi bought many years ago to take care of their personal needs for the rest of their lives, thereby freeing them to devote single mindedly to their missionary work is above religion, cast and creed... only for humanity. He says "I am Muslim but I am a Humanitarian above all, because the basic principles of all religions are rooted in humanity.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing -- Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Bookers Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God Of Small Things.
Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.
The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enrons activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.
In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.
Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.
In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.
