OUR BIG WORLD AND THIS PUNY WEBSITE

Heat in political rhetoric seemed to rise globally even as millions in the U.S. faced dangerously cold weather. In country after country, the far right appeared to gain ground by promising “toughness” towards a disliked minority – a set of migrants, perhaps, or a particular racial or religious group. This age-old formula for immediate political success has always produced disillusionment or disaster in the end. At some time or the other, however, any of us may be lured by a road’s beginning, only to regret its later stretches.

By now viewers of this website know it to be a voice that stands for both equality and goodwill. It is for democracy and against supremacy. It believes in justice but also in what India’s tradition calls maitri and kshama, the former meaning friendship and the latter forgiveness. Other traditions have similarly beautiful words.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

In this first column that I’m writing in the year 2025, let me emphasize that We Are One Humanity values its viewers and looks forward to a closer association with them. Let me also state, with delight, that from January 6 the WAOH team has been strengthened by the joining of Faisal Lalani, who has been appointed the website’s executive editor.

If you click on the “About” button on this site and select “Website” (or click here), you will find Faisal’s picture and bio. Please read that very short bio. One of the things it won’t tell you is that Faisal and his parents are Americans with origins in southern India’s great city of Hyderabad.

Since Faisal and the rest of us on the editorial board want our viewers’ collaboration, let me put down some of my wishes for the website’s growth. Ideas and comment from viewers would be welcome.

One: “Know Thyself” is a precious thought found in most traditions. However, “Know Thy Neighbour” is not less important. In the year 2025, every country anywhere in the world is each country’s neighbour. Which is why when WAOH’s website opened on October 2 last year, with an undoubted emphasis on the U.S. and on India, it also featured important articles on other countries, e.g. on Nigeria by Kingsley Moghalu, on Bangladesh by Salim Rashid, and on South Africa by Letlapa Mphahlele. These articles, as well as the other pieces contributed by thoughtful writers, remain easily accessible on this site.

TESTING TIME FOR CANADA

Going forward, we will look for informative and clarifying articles about, among other countries, Canada, which Trump has likened, not very politely, to a state of the U.S., and which has entered a volatile phase. While Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister and as the Liberal Party’s leader is not likely to calm Canada’s politics, a victory in elections later this year of the pro-Trump Conservative Party, which is being widely predicted, would test the world’s image of Canada as a land that celebrates diversity and welcomes hard-working migrants.

Other influential countries such as Japan and South Korea in Asia and Italy in Europe also need to be understood more clearly. This little website will try to help.

Two, if, as seems likely, struggles for protecting freedom of expression and other human rights become harder in some crucial countries, this website will attempt to throw light on those struggles.

Three, WAOH wishes that the peoples of South Asia – Afghans, Bangladeshis, Bhutanese, Indians, Nepalis, Pakistanis, Nepalis and Sri Lankans, to name them in alphabetical order – become more cordial with, and more knowledgeable about, one another. At the present time, constructive interaction is hard within the South Asian geography. Visas are difficult to obtain.

However, people of South Asian origin who live in countries such as the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand can utilize the visa-free opportunities that these places offer for meeting one another. Following the success of the South Asia webinar that was organized on December 4, WAOH will explore possibilities of organizing other webinars, podcasts or conversations among people “from” South Asia but residing elsewhere.

MORE THAN SOUTH ASIA

Four, WAOH knows that every corner of the world can profit from such conversations. If South Asia appears more often on this site than other geographies, that is because accidents of birth or circumstance have linked many of the site’s viewers, and some of its writers, to South Asia. The truth is that WAOH covets friendships and partnerships among different communities anywhere and everywhere.

Keen to remain vigilant over human rights, including the right to life, we’ve steadily sought, on this website, to remember the smashed people of Gaza, the rest of Palestine, and much of Lebanon, and Yemen, and also the Syrians who have freed themselves from a long oppression from the top and are longing for an understanding among people on the ground.

I ask to be allowed to express a desire I cherish for a dialogue that would involve Arabs, Turks, and Iranians. Some years ago, I heard of a French scholar’s advice to someone desiring to understand “the Muslim world”. “First learn the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages,” the French professor evidently said, adding, “and then come to me for further advice.”

However, knowledge of these rich languages is not needed for arriving at one simple conclusion. If the Middle East’s Turks, Persians and Arabs continue to refuse to converse with one another, all their talk of “fellow feeling” for Palestine’s children, women and men would remain mere noise. WAOH would like to see a beginning, however small, of conversations held anywhere, within the Middle East or quite far from there, among people of Persian, Arabic or Turkish blood for assisting a Palestine that is being squeezed to death and towards erasure. Such support from Palestine’s Muslim neighbours would be a preliminary for a relationship of dignity and equality between Palestine and Israel, which much of the world has long wanted to see.

WHAT ABOUT UKRAINE?

In a few weeks, the Russia-Ukraine war will enter its fourth year! On both sides, the loss of life, limbs, property, and treasure has been astronomical, but the world’s powerful states have shown little keenness to put an end to the madness. Posterity will not easily excuse the world of 2025 for having allowed the destruction to last this long. Nor will it spare Putin. The parents, siblings, and children of the Russian dead will insist on answers.

I must return to the website. As some viewers are aware, among other things it offers space for poems that capture the joys of solidarity or the hunger for it. A click on the button TO LINGER WITH will reveal poems that do this. Those who haven’t looked at, for example, the verses written by Zarin Virjee, Navin Doshi, and Letlapa Mphahlele are missing something.

We would welcome more poems, for where rhetoric fails to stir people, poetry can. Which is also true of course of music, as anyone can discover by clicking on our MUSIC button and experiencing an elevated world.

Little WAOH is precisely that. Little. With the collaboration of viewers, it can become something.