BPP 2014 - Lets Learn!

All excited to be a part of the Building Peace Project 2014 by The Red Elephant Foundation. Its a great time for me to on this project and connect with Sehr Nisar, my partner for the project. I am sure it is going to be a wonderful journey of exchange and interaction, building new friendships and learning about new cultures. A cumulative exercise for peace-building! Most importantly, it is a learning opportunity - to learn from people who are like you, but have been stereotyped and labelled for years of existence dominated by hate filled narratives. It comes across as an opportunity to exchange views on most pertinent issues and in some ways also unlearn what you had learnt about the 'other'. I am indeed looking forward to this wholesome journey with Sehr. Contributing, exchanging, interacting and facilitating dialogues is the idea way for peace since peace is a partnered initiative - possible only through collaborations. I am at this time reminded about a virtual classroom project for global understanding that I was a part of in 2009 in my University here at Baroda, whereby we established virtual connections with students from three different countries. We engaged in discussions about culture, rituals, beliefs and understandings of the 'other'. It was an enriching experience for me because similar to what BPP has proposed, we undertook extensive and deep interactions with our counterparts in different countries through video-conferencing and email chats and in the end came up with a beautiful documentation of what we had learnt from each other. It was my first exposure to such a process - the memories and learnings still afresh! In the end it was all enlightening - we were all the same in so many ways - but so different also - and we reveled in this knowledge - accepting the 'other' as he/she was. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process and wish for the same here too. I believe this a holistic journey not just for learning, but also for 'unlearning', shattering myths that we harbour, creating everlasting friendships and strengthening human bonds. This is our humble attempt. Because peace belongs to everyone!

Nidhi