Postcard to Delhi, a year after Global Reconciliation Network04

GRN, a meta-network coordinated by Australian Professor of Medicine and Ethics Paul Komesaroff forms annual gatherings London (o3), Delhi (04), Sarajevo (o5), Palestine-Israel(06)

My visit to Delhi was the first time in nearly 20 years, and I hope never to leave it so long again, especially as at GRN's conference announcement was made of a worldwide centenary celebration of Mahatma Gandhi in 2007.

India is the most remarkable of the handful of countries that have been on a successful exponential over the last 2 decades because it is by far the most collaborative, multicultured space on earth- and an antidote to uniformity of globalisation which our 1984 forecasts suggested a networked world must guard against. Humanity needs in our view to network around 2 million global viallge communities not one top down Orwellian power.

We celebrate with every opinioin leader around the world who calls India a First Class model. My dad studied economics at cambridge University about 4 years before Prime Minister Singh, and there's no deeper voice in global economics today thatn Singh's lifetime study of why the world can no longer afford any nation that compounds underclasses be these within its geographical borders or on thye other side of the globe through the vicious compound impacts of the economics of externalities. It was honotr to be GRN, whose 2 local hosts were:

the Chair of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Culture, also one of India's senior civil servants who has spent the last 20 years helping with reparation of Bhopal -one of the greatest victims of economics of externalities the world can map

the Chair of Bhasha research into the rights of Nomads

These and many other local reconciliation issues are vividly implanted on my mind, more alive now than when I first witnessed them a year ago. We must be their change.

Internationally GRN04 was also an eyeopenr to many other deeply human networking needs:
support for communities decimated by HIV, where Africa has ben particularly hit

The extraordinary cross-cultural bridging work that youth movements started by Paul's daughter are percolating as you can see from the write-up below

In the last 12 months, nature and man have continued to display teriifying imnpacts making ot necessary for those who believe in reconciliation and humanity to redouble our efforts. In Paul's case he led an expert visit to Tsunami-afflicted regions in India and Sri Lanka, details of which I will also try to add.

Delhi and London have both suffered terror attacks. In London, we accept this as a test of whether any multicultural city has a future. I have to look at it that way in nmemory of a close friend and arguably number 1 reconcilaition agent around London- Colin Morley lost in 7/7's Underground bombing. My own presentation in Delhi was titled the coming wars between goodwill and badwill networks. As we map 1 2 the future's exponentials, it is time for peoples everywhere to actively and simultaneously stand up for the goodwill, or see badwill wave over all of us. We need to see project30000 up and running by 2010, an idea that we firsttijmelined as the number 1 intercitizen challenge of this decade back in 1984. We are behind the timeline, but being in Delhi has rekindled every energy drive I can muster towards this realisation.

2006 is the 30th anniversary of my father's Entrepreneurial Revolution survey in The Economist; we invite everyone who believes in reconciliation to co-script with us why Reconciliation preneurs are now the most valuable facilitators in the world. Peoples around the world should not demand advances in any industry sectors unless they can help bring communal sustainbility, inter-communal harmony, and indeed a world of peaceful chnage befitting next year's centenary of the greatest 20th C leaders humankind has been honored to see among Women's Mother's Theresa's and men's Mahatma Gandhi.


Extract from Pugwash Youth Peace Conference paper 2005, Hiroshima
by Frida Komesaroff & Victoria Baldwin

The struggle for peace requires community based
action in support of reconciliation at both the local
and global levels


...Reconciliation only has meaning, however, if it is realised at the local level where
individuals come together in face to face interactions. We have therefore been involved in
establishing and supporting groups and individuals active in a variety or areas, including
health care, indigenous issues and youth.

Locally based initiatives can operate on many levels and make use of a wide range of
possible forms of social and cultural action. For example, these may include:
Community based discussions around global and local reconciliation. These
discussions address: the causes and consequences of war, violent conflict and
terrorism, and alternatives to it; strategies to rebuild the structures of the organisations
and processes devoted to establishing and maintaining peace; the nature and
importance of health; and the sources of, and different perspectives on, ethics and
human values.
Cultural and artistic exchanges between and within communities, regions and nations
and programs supporting exchanges of scholars between different countries and to
allow children of school age to visit and experience cultures different from their own
and to bring together young people from around the world to facilitate increasing
contacts, dialogues, and understanding
Practical initiatives to support action around areas of common interest to
participating members, including in the field of health and welfare, where the
challenge of developing culturally appropriate ways to confront disease and its
effects provides an opportunity to build new communities and to empower people
traditionally excluded from important decision making processes.

“Global Youth” (GloYo) is a branch of the Global Reconciliation Network. It is being
devised by a group of young people concerned at the lack of public space available for
them to express, develop and contribute their perspectives on the possibilities for crosscultural dialogues. GY aims to unite young people of all cultures and backgrounds by focusing on positive energies, freedom of expression and the appreciation of the
expression of others through the sharing of practices, cultural experience and awareness
of the opportunities to be found in diversity. It seeks to contribute to the building of a
stronger sense of national identity and cultural unity within diversity.2
Global Youth includes a number of programs that aim to promote reconciliation among
diverse and potentially hostile groups both locally and in the region by fostering
communication around topics of common interest. Music workshops, community
gardening, cooking and cross-culture participation in games linking with local schools
and other regional exchanges are undertaken or planned. Overseas, we are developing an
ongoing connection between youth groups around the world. Currently there are three
groups involved in Kenya, India and Australia. Activities will include regular e-mails and
web-cam meetings.

Other projects associated with the Global Reconciliation Network include support for self
help groups that faciliatiate community based dialgues around the needs generated by the
HIV/AIDS epidemenic, trauma counselling and other health care programs in response to
the Indian ocean tsunami and cultural exchanges on the local and international levels.
Reconciliation is not a program. It is not limited to or directed towards a single endpoint,
or set of endpoints. It aims at a diverse communication, a proliferation of social and
cultural discourses. It refers to a process, of engagement, of disputation, of social
practice, that is consistent with many coexisting endpoints. It seeks to assist and support
other action for peace, disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, sustainable development,
environmental preservation etc, in their individual quests, and to help them coordinate
their activities and broaden their scope.

In summary, there is a need for a rigorous and systematic process whereby dialogues and
other forms of community engagement are fostered at the core of all programs directed at
the preservation of peace and progressive social change. Such dialogues provide the
possibility both of grounding initiatives arising out of academic, scientific, legal,
diplomatic, legislative and administrative practices and of realising their key objectives
through direct, democratic communication with those who ultimately will be most
affected. In this sense, reconciliation must be built into the structure of society, not as an
additional or extraneous feature but as one of its essential presuppositions and premises.