Friday, October 10, 2014

Malala Yousafzai,Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi, India win Nobel Peace Prize 2014

Indian children's right activist, Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistani teenager, Malala Yousafzai win Nobel Peace Prize 2014
Nobel Peace Prize 2014 winners - Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for advocating girls' right to education, and Indian children's right activist Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
Yousafzai, aged 17, becomes the youngest Nobel Prize winner by far.
Satyarthi, 60, and Yousafzai were picked for their struggle against the oppression of children and young people, and for the right of all children to education, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
The award was made at a time when hostilities have broken out between India and Pakistan along the border of the disputed, mainly Muslim region of Kashmir - the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed rivals in more than a decade.
"The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism," said Thorbjoern Jagland, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill

By Vishwanath Tondon



Most students of India’s fight for independence may only be aware of Churchill’s famous 1931 remarks on Gandhi, when he went to meet the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in his usual dress. Churchill had said: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle [Inner] Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”1
One may also be aware that while in London to attend the Round Table Conference, Gandhi wanted to meet Churchill but the latter had refused to see him, though his son Randolph met Gandhi. And then later in July 1944, Gandhi had written to Churchill a letter saying, “Dear Prime Minister, You are reported to have a desire to crush the simple ‘naked fakir’ as you are said to have described me. I have been long trying to be a fakir and that [too] naked - a more difficult task. I, therefore, regard the expression as a compliment though unintended. I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.”2

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