Our world is conflict-ridden. The Global Peace Index showed a 45 percent increase in incidents of violence across the world even before the Ukraine war started. Some 100,000 such deaths took place in 2021 alone. There has been a 40 percent increase in the number of drones used as instruments of war. "Internationalised conflicts have increased nine-fold since 2004 to 27. Internationalised intra-state conflicts are now just as common as interstate conflicts, reflecting a trend where over 80 percent of intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2017 saw external support,” says the Institute of Economics and Peace. When the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, there was hope that it would bring about lasting peace.
These hopes have now been belied and it is clear as crystal that the global political leadership thrives on division and discord, supported by the burgeoning armaments industry. Perhaps the answer lies in an international effort led by the UN and other agencies to create peace through the people, using a model of participation and development similar to a civil society organisation which I recently visited, called kanthari (with a small k), headed by Sabriye Tenberken, a blind but spunky German lady, and a lively Dutchman, Paul Kronenberg, under the aegis of the Bharat Sevak Samaj.
The story of Sabriye did not, however, begin with kanthari. Her eyesight slowly declined and she tried to conceal this by memorising the ophthalmologist's eye chart. Until she was blind by the age of twelve, she was an energetic, outgoing girl with many friends. When her friends began to drop off one by one, she went into a state of depression for a couple of years. Encouraged by her understanding parents, she worked her way out of it. She may be blind, but she had many advantages too: complete focus on what she was doing, no teenage distractions, an almost infinite capacity to solve problems as and when they arose, great skills of communication and the ability to use the "myriad sensory signals" she learnt to recognise, as she mentions in her fascinating and highly readable book, My Path Leads to Tibet.
Tibet bewitched her even at school. She took Tibetology as one of her courses at the University of Bonn. Her professors discouraged her. She was advised to learn classical Tibetan, a subject on which many Braille books were available. She had by then decided not only to learn Tibetan but to go there and set up a school for the blind. That is why she had to create the Tibetan Braille system based both on Tibetan syllables and the six-dot Braille system. Her journey to Tibet was fraught with peril as she was alone and had no contacts, only a burning ambition to help blind children in that region. "I couldn't imagine anything more worthwhile than introducing and teaching my reading and writing method to the blind of Tibet,” she writes.
Her adventure on horseback to the district of Drigung with the friends she had made in Lhasa, Dolma and Biria is an account of sheer courage and determination. Travelling through villages, finding hutments to stay in, befriending villagers, surviving on tsampa, finding blind children in abysmal conditions, persuading their guardians to give them a chance to be educated, even living in a village said to be populated by demonic ghosts of slain soldiers, she finally found light at the end of the tunnel when an orphanage near Lhasa got interested in her concept and offered her space to set up her school.
Parents of blind children were persuaded to give their blind offspring a chance for a better life. The children enjoyed themselves in their new environment and learnt fast. She encountered obstacles galore, but she learnt to overcome them. In Tibet she found Paul, who was enamoured of her work and helped her with accounts and office management and, being an engineer, helped with the construction of a school and a farm. Major parts of the school are run now with the help of former students, most of whom have done well, running physiotherapy units, cheese- and bread-making units and even carpets.
Paul and Sabriye had decided to move on and spread their learnings to a wider audience across the world. They chose Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala to resettle and build a new kind of institution. They found a stretch of idyllic land near the Vellayani lake to set up their facilities in an environment-friendly manner, using the ideas of the famed British-born architect Laurie Baker, who had chosen this city as his home. As I entered the premises of kanthari, the building on my left was where the participants lived, two to a room. Ajith Kumar, their Malayali associate, told me they would take care to put people from different continents and different religions and cultures together to create harmony and cultural fusion.
Kanthari, the word for birds' eye chillies in Malayalam, teaches people from all over the world how to set up organisations that can benefit marginalised people. Participants are selected after a rigorous six-step process conducted online, with psychologists participating. It is not academic excellence that they look for, but seriousness of purpose, creativity, the quality of empathy and firm faith in non-violence as a creed of life. Their classes are in an auditorium and also outdoors in scenic splendour, at times even on the lake. They eat simple food and learn to appreciate and value the environment.
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I met two of their participants: Frank, who has now set up a unit in Ghana for the benefit of women making shea butter, and Johnny, who is a doctor who works to eliminate leprosy in Indonesia. Past participants have set up organic farming in Nigeria and Papua, kindergarten for disabled children in Meghalaya, and STEM education for the blind in Cambodia.
The founders and the kanthari team train the participants on project planning, financial management, policies, agreements, fundraising and overcoming personal barriers to change. Besides, they have fifty subject matter specialists from across the world. It is a tough course, 12 months long, and the participants often fail and thus acquire the determination to transcend failure. They have trained 258 change-makers so far from 53 countries who have set up more than 160 organisations benefiting 25,000 to 30,000 people daily. They would like to work with universities and researchers to extend their reach.
Those who wish to know more about kanthari may contact Sabriye and Paul at founders@kanthari.org.
Former Cabinet Secretary and author of As Good as My Word: A Memoir
kmchandrasekhar@gmail.com