Staring at the corpus of knowledge & Wealth we now have, is our collective inability to reach this know-Wealth to all. Internationally bureaucratized and economically multinationalized systems are stymied by a macabre synergy of problems which has made Earth more anti-biotic, human-life upon it more robotic, marginalizing food, health and education away from 3/4ths of our kind.
The Brookings Institute says that the Global Disparity Ratio for 1998 is at an unsustainable 135:1. One way to rev-up our skills and capabilities is to rehearse them against a larger snarl of problems first; to simply change achieved goals into milestones on a longer journey. In the Rotary Club, humanity breathes in hope and breathes out purpose. When so many of us are getting sicker, poorer , mis-educated, we look to Rotarians to raise the voice which will be heard and heeded world wide. Shake out of your Complacent Fatiguapathitis, please!.
A commodified education which unrealistically fires up individual ambition, a learning which nurtures the homocentric hedonist, an attitude which looks out only for options, opportunities, entitlements, rights and freedoms, but disregards responsibility, relevance, service, duty and sacrifice cannot be supported. Rotarians are right to tourniquet such resource-exporting eduCommiments. In hyped up acadeMedia, postures masquerade as concepts, but ideas still upset ideologies. Confounding experience, the Reality of a thorn takes out the hurting one; and by sticking to the tree, the bitter fruit escapes into sweetness. For less than a world-around airline ticket, without leaving home & hearth or Mom's cooking for a single day, a deserving past/potential Rotary alumnus can today transform into Rotary's Conflict-Resolution-Supporting lifetime cyber-ambassador. My 1996-97 Walter Mitty had mused thus: "If I were re-doing my scholarship today, instead of my ticket to L.A., I'd ask Rotary to enable me with a multi-media, multi-lingual computer-station with all the Internet bells and whistles so that, if need be, I could drive the Mars Rover from Dehripaali, Sambalpur." RA-CAN, the Rotary Alumni Cyber Ambassadors' Network I've envisioned here, can become the synergizing link between the clubs, the Foundation, and the anywhere-on-Earth Community Programs of Health, Education, Hygiene, Nutrition, Sanitation, Conservation, Employment and Farming. For instance, by accessing and disseminating the knoWealth of specific processing, storage and marketing, RA-CAN, in India, alone, can help prevent the annual USD 7 billion "already-grown" food-loss.
It has taken Jeremy Rifkin to point out that markets, governments businesses--in flux & dissaray today--are creatures, not creators, of communities; that revitalizing them is what globalization if really about, something Rotary pioneered long before it became buzzword. Rotarians know we do not create order, but Order, divine and benign, created us.
HERO/MARTYR OPPORTUNISTS SEEK/CREATE CRISES.
Zillions of upstart NGOs are doing tons of humanitarian work in Dubiousdom, displaying their vested interest in keeping us dehumanized on their doles, subsidies, handouts, soupkitchens--and their good intentions which, one may've heard, pave the road to Hell. RA-CAN can become Rotary's Instrument of Relevence in the millenium now almost upon us."
- From Vyom's 1998 speech to Rotarians
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