Although avant-garde Western painting and drama penetrated China quickly in the early twentieth century, modern dance was slow to find a foothold. Indeed, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, founded by LIN HWAI-MIN in 1973, may well be the first such company in any Chinese community anywhere. Yet under LIN’s direction, Cloud Gate’s brilliantly original dance compositions and stunning performances now rival the best in the world.

Born in Taiwan in 1947, LIN HWAI-MIN first felt the seductive pull of dance at the age of five while watching a film, The Red Shoes. Later, as a teenager, he thrilled to his first glimpse of modern dance and was hooked. Discouraged by his parents, however, he studied journalism instead and published two novels by age twenty-two. While in the United States to attend the International Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, LIN sought out modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham in New York and became a student in her school. Returning home, he established Cloud Gate in 1973.

In Taiwan, modern dance was little known to the public. Yet LIN’s first production filled the house, a harbinger of successes to come. For his fledgling company, LIN created dances that reflected Graham’s influence but that also drew upon familiar acrobatic and pantomime conventions of Chinese opera. He choreographed modern-dance versions of Chinese classics and also created wholly original pieces such as Legacy, which depicted the trials of Chinese pioneers in Taiwan, set to traditional Taiwanese music.

LIN trained his young dancers in Asian classical dance forms and in Tai Chi and meditation, as well as in modern dance and ballet. Over time, he perfected the unique fusion of styles and forms for which he is now famous, lifting traditional dance from its indigenous roots to the full flower of modern art. In Nine Songs, LIN combines dance techniques from India and Java with modern dance and incorporates ancient Chinese poems, aboriginal Taiwanese village songs, and stage lighting inspired by a trip to Bali. In his Songs of Wanderers, Georgian folk songs accompany LIN’s Zen-flavored interpretation of Herman Hesse’s novel of religious searching, Siddartha. And in Moon Water, LIN’s dancers glide in Tai Chi-like movements across the stage to the Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach.

While addressing universal themes of struggle, freedom, and spiritual enlightenment, LIN’s dance compositions often depict or allude to real historical events, such as, in Nine Songs, the Taiwan massacres of 1947 and the 1989 tragedy at Tiananmen.

Viewing LIN’s work in the course of more than thirty-five international tours, critics the world round have hailed its poetic vision and breathtaking technical perfection, calling it “electrifying” and “irresistible.” In Taiwan, Cloud Gate performs to sold-out audiences in venues as disparate as the lavish National Theater and rural high school auditoriums. Several times a year, crowds of sixty thousand or more gather for the company’s free outdoor performances. LIN is happy to count many young people among his fans and promotes dance among them through community outreach programs and youth camps. For formal training, he founded the dance department of Taiwan’s National Institute of Arts in 1983 and later became founding dean of its graduate program.

Slight and bespectacled, fifty-two-year-old LIN moves with the gait and grace of the dancer that he is. His modern dance compositions cannot be understood in the way stories are understood, he says. They must be experienced. It is enough if people simply enjoy them. His true subject is not Taiwan or Asia or myth or history, he says, but “the landscape of the human heart.”

In electing LIN HWAI-MIN to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his revitalizing the theatrical arts in Taiwan with modern dance that is at once eloquently universal and authentically Chinese.

It is a great honor for me to follow in the footsteps of so many of the giants of Asia in accepting this prestigious award.

Tzung Tze, the great Chinese philosopher, once told the story of a tree. People were complaining that the tree was twisted and gnarled, unsuitable for building a house or making furniture with. Tzung Tze said, why not leave that tree alone in the wild field, to give shade and comfort to tired travelers? As dancers, we are unable to stop a war, influence the stock market, or even improve the living conditions of the poor. We provide spiritual space with the holy instrument that is our body. I identify with that twisted and useless tree.

If I were given an opportunity to make one wish for the next millennium, it would be thus: At the end of the next century, despite all the new technological developments, I hope that all the beautiful folk songs and folk dances from around the world will remain intact and alive. As we are entering the new millennium, the internet has enabled people on different continents to communicate with great convenience. But people are hooked to their computers; neighbors can be living as people on different continents. Dance should become more important, as people need to switch off and come to the dance gatherings, to share body warmth, energy and spirit with others. With further developments that are sure to come, however, people will be able to see scores of dance performances at home on internet theatre. This will make it even harder for professional dancers to survive.

The encouragement of the Magsaysay Award came at a moment when I was full of anxiety and self-doubt. It came as a reaffirmation and as a big push.

Respected trustees, thank you very much for recognizing this useless tree. It will grow stronger and better. It has to. Thank you.

The free press of the Philippines is a national glory. Yet it is often troubled. The dictator Marcos suppressed it for years. And, every day, a variety of insidious pressures undermines its integrity. Newspaper owners bend the news to serve private interests. Reporters sell their pens. Editors succumb to market forces that favor sensational stories over sober facts, all the more so the sorts of sober economic facts RAUL L. LOCSIN specializes in. In his career of four decades, LOCSIN has withstood these pressures. In doing so, he has nurtured business reporting in the Philippines from infancy to robust maturity.

RAUL LOCSIN received his early schooling at his mother’s knee in wartime Negros Occidental, where his father published a Spanish-language newspaper. In a youthful venture with his brother, LOCSIN also published a local newspaper. Then, for eleven years, he became a salesman. He hated it, he says. Taking a huge cut in pay, he joined the Manila Chronicle and gravitated to the business section.

It was the early 1960s. Economic development was the watchword of the era; GNP measured a country’s success or failure. LOCSIN knew that few people understood what “GNP” meant, not to mention other terms favored by the region’s rising technocrats: current account, deficit spending, aggregate demand. Discerning the need to make complex economic information comprehensible to the public, in 1967 he founded Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily newspaper devoted to business.

Credibility was the key to his success. LOCSIN made a pact with his readers that Business Day would be fair and accurate, that it would strive for balance, that it would report the truth. He recruited bright, young graduates and molded them into insightful economic reporters and analysts. He sharpened them in free-wheeling office discussions and formed them into research teams to undertake exhaustive investigations. He forbade them to keep the bribes routinely offered by Manila’s influence seekers. LOCSIN also warned advertisers that only advertising space was for sale at Business Day, not “editorial space.” And he instructed his editors, on a sign at the office door, to “remove your biases and leave them here.”

Under martial law, Business Day survived as the capital’s sole independent newspaper. In a climate of disinformation, it became the gold standard for accuracy. LOCSIN tested the limits of press freedom and, in 1983, denounced the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr., in an impassioned editorial. Afterwards, Business Day contributed importantly to the rising chorus of dissent leading to the People Power Revolution of 1986. LOCSIN then led in reestablishing press freedom. Characteristically, he opposed the seizure of Marcos-friendly newspapers by the new government and reminded his readers that gross national inequalities still remained, along with “corrupt patronage politics thriving on the arrogant exercise of power and public plunder.”

Following a labor dispute in 1987, LOCSIN closed Business Day and contemplated a self-indulgent retirement. But when former employees pressed him to start up again, he did so, with one crucial change. The employees now became owners. Enhanced by computerized technology, Business World flourished from the start. Circulating today to fifty-four thousand subscribers and also “on line,” it remains a benchmark of quality.

LOCSIN led in rebuilding the Philippine Press Institute after the ravages of martial law and also the press council. He has devoted himself to strengthening the country’s hundreds of community newspapers. It matters to do so, he believes. Although a free press is only one component of democracy, it is a basic one. “All the freedoms in our Bill of Rights,” he says, “are of no use without the right to speak freely.”

In electing RAUL L. LOCSIN to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his enlightened commitment to the principle that, above all, a newspaper is a public trust.

It is for me an honor to be here tonight and be among those acknowledged as one of those who have contributed a share to the endeavors of the community; albeit, in some small measure when put side by side with those who have made really deep changes in the milieu they live in. It is also with humility that I accept this award, not only for myself, but also, in behalf of the countless men and women of who have left footprints across time and space to hurriedly tell the story of mankind as the events took place in his sweep across history. As long as man exists, there will always be someone called the journalist to tell his story, his challenges and his dreams; even his shame and failures.

In today’s world it is now a largely respectable profession of chronicle events, it was not so in the past when it was almost fatal to be the bearer of bad news though it still is sometimes lethal especially in societies where an enlightened environment in the exercise of free thought and free expression has not yet come into its own.

Freedom of the press and expression in the Philippines is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in her Constitution by a provision not unlike that in the First Amendment of the American Charter from where the Philippine organic law drew a lot of its substance during the establishment of what was then the Philippine Commonwealth.

Unlike in the other countries in the rest of Asia, our newspapers, took their roots from the practices of American journalism oftentimes with mimicry far surpassing that of the original model.

Subsequent amendments to our organic law may have altered our political structures but have kept intact the intent of the provision on press freedom which makes the press in this country the only organized business accorded constitutional protection.

The rationale behind this particular provision is that all other freedoms in the citizen’s bill of rights become defenseless if freedom of expression is abridged. It is not therefore strange that those that who would be dictators or who would seek to impose authoritarian rule first assault the press to eventually silence the citizen.

In a sense therefore journalism becomes a commitment for those who exercise it. I am proud to be part of it. Thank you.

Volunteers. What school, church, or charity could function without them? What business, government agency, or NGO could carry on effectively without the willingness of its members, sometimes, to volunteer for something extra? So it is a rare person who does not do so, from time to time. But it is a rare person indeed who volunteers with the zeal and single-minded purpose that ROSA ROSAL does, and has done for fifty years, at the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC).

Born Florence Lansang Danon in 1931, ROSA ROSAL enjoyed a simple and happy childhood in Manila. She began working early, first as a radio announcer during the war and afterwards as a doctor’s secretary. A beauty at sixteen, she was spotted by a movie producer. Kamagong in 1947 was her first film and the beginning of a stunning career. (Prudently, she also earned a diploma in commerce at night school.) At first a femme fatale, she became a fine dramatic actress. In 1955 she was named Best Actress for Sonny Boy. And just a year later she starred in the award-winning classic, Anak Dalita.

As a teenager, ROSAL formed the habit of volunteering at the hospital. One night, a young girl was brought in who had fallen from a five-story building. She was in a coma. Through the Red Cross, ROSAL managed to find blood for a transfusion and then watched as the girl’s eyes fluttered open again, to life. The wonder of it led her, in 1950, to register as an official volunteer for the Blood Program of the Philippine National Red Cross. Through all the years of stardom that followed—and all the years, too, of quiet personal tribulation—this became her lasting commitment.

As a Red Cross volunteer, ROSAL pioneered in mass blood-donating campaigns and persuaded other celebrities to join in. She mobilized the armed forces and citizen cadets for annual blood drives. She urged the Red Cross to establish regional blood centers and to operate laboratories where anyone, rich or poor, could have their blood tested. She led in procuring the Philippines’ first refrigerated centrifuge and the equipment needed to screen blood for the AIDS virus. With her own money, she refurbished the blood-giving room at Red Cross headquarters, prompting other donors to renovate the laboratory and blood bank. Indeed, she has been a tireless fund-raiser. During the bloody coup of 1989, ROSAL appealed for blood over the radio and courted danger by personally delivering emergency supplies to city hospitals.

Today, ROSA ROSAL is a PNRC governor and chair of the Red Cross Blood Program, which she has long since come to personify.

ROSAL long ago abandoned the sensation-driven world of movies for family-oriented roles on television. She pioneered in public service programs such as Damayan, through which many thousands of people have received urgently needed assistance. In this and in myriad other and often personal ways, ROSAL’s good deeds have spread far beyond the Red Cross. Today, her legions of beneficiaries include victims of illness and catastrophe; abused overseas contract workers; disadvantaged youth and women; and victims of rape, incest, and family violence—not to mention the young people she has educated at her own expense and the many babies, once unwanted, who now have loving adoptive parents, thanks to her.

ROSAL admits she is relentless when moved to act. “I am a doer and a fighter,” she says, “but without stepping on anybody’s toes.” She has found fulfillment in her life of service. To her grandchildren, she says, she has only her good name to bequeath. “Pass it on,” she tells them.

In electing ROSA ROSAL to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes her lifetime of unstinting voluntary service, inspiring Filipinos to put the needs of others before their own

I would like to thank the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, for giving me this year’s Public Service Award.

Red Cross came into my life, at the time when I was restless and craving to do something meaningful to consume me. I am a very intense person, and when I do something, I put my heart
and soul into it.

The one magic moment that attracted me to the Red Cross, was the sight of a dying child, badly in need of blood. Realizing that the family had no one to turn to, I immediately ran to the Red Cross. Hours after the blood transfusion, the child moved, as she struggled for a new breath of life.

I was deeply touched. That very moment, I knew in my heart that the rest of my life would be dedicated to the Red Cross. I found the answer to my restlessness. That first blood brought me completely under the spell of the Red Cross. And now, after almost 50 years, my heart still beats as strongly for this
organization.

Since then, public service became a part of me. For when we do something for the less fortunate, without expecting any personal gain or recognition, we are doing public service.

True service is working quietly, without counting the cost, without expecting fanfare, nor praises nor applause from anyone. True service chooses no time or place. Very often the urgent call comes at the least expected moment, at the
most unlikely places.

The awards and recognition I have received may serve as a symbol of my accomplishments. But to me, what I consider most precious is the memory of a dying patient, whose life was saved because of the blood he received on time. The tearful eyes of an overseas contract worker, who was raped and jailed, thanking me for successfully facilitating her return to the Philippines. The happy face of a disabled, whose self-respect and dignity were restored, because of the training skills that were patiently given him.

The award that I keep most dearly in my heart, is the joy of being able to share whatever I have with others. I thank God for using me as a vessel, to manifest His love for His people.

The slums of modern Karachi, known as katchi abadis, began as the shanty towns of Muslim Indian refugees to Pakistan at the time of Partition. They swelled in the 1950s as rural folk sought jobs in Karachi’s burgeoning industries and swelled again when civil war overtook East Pakistan in 1971.

These spontaneous settlements of the uprooted poor grew with such speed that they wholly outstripped the government’s attempts to control them, flooding the city center and forming hundreds of illegal “colonies” on its periphery. In them, the striving poor lived in squalor, without titles, without services, without sewers and drains and water mains. They still do, in more than five hundred katchi abadis. In them live 40 percent of Karachi’s population: four million people!

Addressing this reality in 1972, the government of Pakistan declared that katchi abadis should be legally acknowledged (or “regularized”) and integrated into the city proper with infrastructure and services. But for many years thereafter little was accomplished. Urban councils failed at the task and so, too, did the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority, or SKAA, which the government established in 1987 to address the squatter problem in Sindh Province. But when TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI became director general of SKAA in 1991, things changed.

As a trainee at Pakistan’s prestigious Civil Service Academy, SIDDIQUI met Akhter Hameed Khan. The young SIDDIQUI imbibed the formidable Khan’s moral passion to alleviate poverty and also his community-building approach to doing so. Later, as director general of the Hyderabad Development Authority, SIDDIQUI designed Khuda-ki-Basti, a housing project for the urban poor that imitated the way illegal squatters actually build their neighborhoods. Rejecting the stereotype of the poor as freeloaders and criminals, he saw the katchi abadis as centers of dynamism whose occupants were both industrious and resourceful. Projects like Khuda-ki-Basti succeed, he says, because they tap the “poor’s huge potential for finding solutions to their own problems.”

At SKAA, SIDDIQUI cut boldly through mounds of red tape to make it easier for katchi abadis to be regularized. He wrested control of the lease-assigning process from sluggish local councils and streamlined it, thereby giving slum residents swift security of tenure and making SKAA self-financing. He utilized practical low-cost technologies for SKAA infrastructure projects, weeding out corrupt contractors and reducing costs. He worked closely with the Orangi Pilot Project and NGOs to improve SKAA’s engagement with the communities and to enhance social services such as health care, family planning, credit, and education. Critically, SIDDIQUI and his staff established a working rapport with the katchi abadi dwellers themselves. They now install and pay for their own water and sewerage systems, maintain SKAA-built storm drains, coordinate the neighborhood leasing process, and collaborate with SKAA and NGOs to introduce the social services they most need. As active partners in upgrading their own neighborhoods, they are the key to the program’s sustainability.

Despite SIDDIQUI’s fast-track approach, the process is painstaking and slow. Many katchi abadis remain beyond the benevolent reach of SKAA’s small staff of 175. SIDDIQUI himself has been transferred in and out of the agency. Still, in hundreds of Karachi’s poorest neighborhoods, a quiet transformation has been set in motion.

For someone who likes to shake up the system, fifty-nine-year-old SIDDIQUI is a man of mild manners and considerate ways. He is famously accessible. He returns phone calls. Yet, as a reformer, he has been stung by smear campaigns and bureaucratic reprisals. About this and about the magnitude of the task his agency faces daily, he says, “I am a realist.” And adds, “And an optimist.”

In electing TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his demonstrating that a committed government agency working in partnership with NGOs and with the poor themselves can turn the tide against Pakistan’s crippling shelter crisis.

It is a great honour for me to accept this prestigious award. I feel particularly privileged because my election for this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, while recognizing that third world societies are in transition, supports the view that good government is possible if the method of governance were to be redefined and government decision-making made more participatory.

33 years ago when I joined the Civil Service of Pakistan, I was a young idealist. In my work I saw a great opportunity and potential to do good work for the country, particularly for the down-trodden and the under privileged.

Halfway through my career, the changing society in Pakistan changed more rapidly than the government could keep pace with. As a result, the writ of the government ran thin, and many of my colleagues fell victims to despair or opportunism. Apathy, indecisiveness and compromise became the hallmark of government service in Pakistan.

Against this discouraging background, I resolved to persist in my endeavor to understand the dynamics of change from the perspective of a civil servant. It was my observation that in spite of the government’s many weaknesses, there was sufficient space for organizing people and testing new concepts for achieving the prescribed objectives. What it needed was perseverance, a clear vision and commitment.

Once an outcast from the coveted Civil Service of Pakistan, my work gradually came to be recognized as a real option for reestablishing effective government. However, I must confess that I have not done anything great. I have only done what a good civil servant is expected to do.

Briefly, a few points need highlighting:

1. At a philosophical level, one can state the obvious: that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. At a practical level, as government functionaries, rather than losing heart, it is our responsibility to search for options for maintaining social stability and economic development.

2. Rather than trying to replace government functions with non-government organizations, the government should use NGOs for research and demonstration so that its own functioning may be upgraded. It is the responsibility and mandate of the government to provide basic services to its people, especially the low-income communities.

3. The only way we can achieve effective government is by reforming it—not through slogan-mongering but through professional and persistent efforts on the part of the enlightened government functionaries, committed professionals and concerned citizens. Governments have also to discard conventional approaches and evolve pro-people processes of planning and implementation, based on structured partnerships with all relevant groups.

I hope the recognition of my work can help the cause of good governance in Pakistan. I also hope my younger colleagues in government will recognize the need for change, and find inspiration and direction in the work we have been doing in different facets of public life.

I thank you once again for the honor you have done me. I would also like to thank the many people who have and are continuing to work with me. I particularly wish to thank my wife and my children who have stood steadfast through difficult times, without whose encouragement and support I could not have pursued my professional compulsions so single-mindedly.

In the village world of Bangladesh, a cruel code governs the lives of women. In a society already poor, women are poorer than men. A woman who is widowed, or who is divorced, or whose husband has abandoned her, is often left to fend for herself. When a woman lodges charges of desertion, assault, or rape against a man, those who determine her fate are men. In every way, a woman is less than a man. A great number of Bangladeshi women accept this as the natural order of things. ANGELA GOMES, founder of Banchte Shekha, does not.

A Christian in largely Muslim Bangladesh, GOMES was raised in a small village near Dhaka. Resisting an early marriage, she became a teacher at Sacred Heart School in Jessore and was there drawn into Catholic charity work in the city slums. The destitute women she met there—abandoned and abused women cast off from neighboring villages—deeply disturbed her. She decided to do something.

Walking from village to village in the outskirts of Jessore, GOMES began talking to women and learning from them. In 1977, she began forming women into small groups and teaching them how to make jute crafts and other products to sell. Then she taught them how to raise chickens and how to make fishponds and how to grow mulberry trees—having to learn all these things beforehand herself. Word of each small success spread from village to village. And soon, says GOMES, “Thousands of helpless women seemed to beckon me to them.”

As she worked alongside village women, GOMES also spoke about the problems they faced as women. “Eventually,” she says, “they were able to see the thread connecting food, work, education, and rights.”

GOMES studied the Koran and comported herself in proper Muslim fashion. And gradually, she won the support of open-minded Muslim clerics who understood, as she did, that the Koran was not the source of local practices demeaning to women. But she was not welcome everywhere. As an outsider who stirred women to action, she was harassed and pelted with rocks and excrement. To protect her little movement, in 1981 GOMES registered it as a foundation: Banchte Shekha, or Learn to Survive.

GOMES gained financial backing from international NGOs and guided Banchte Shekha into new endeavors. Its members formed village credit societies and became birth attendants, barefoot veterinarians, and community organizers, as well as sources of practical knowledge about health care, family planning, and nutrition.

In 1987, GOMES began training a team of paralegals in Muslim law and relevant legal procedures. As a result, in many villages today, cases involving domestic violence, dowry abuses, child support, and other gender-related conflicts are deliberated in public by arbitration panels convened and trained by Banchte Shekha’s paralegals, instead of by traditional all-male mediation councils.

Banchte Shekha now operates from a 1.5-hectare training complex in Jessore, which accommodates two hundred live-in trainees and also serves as a women’s shelter. Twenty-five thousand women in 750 village-based organizations are active members. GOMES estimates that over two hundred thousand people benefit indirectly from Banchte Shekha’s comprehensive interventions in village life. Through its gender-awareness training and legal innovations, women and men alike are making their way slowly to a new era of gender equality.

This is her great hope. Known for her dogged persistence and hearty laughter, ANGELA GOMES reminds us, “The problems of poor women in Bangladesh have been centuries in the making.” But Banchte Shekha’s successes are hopeful. And, she says, “Every day is a new day.”

In electing ANGELA GOMES to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her helping rural Bangladeshi women assert their rights to better livelihoods and to gender equality, under the law and in everyday life.

It is a great honor and privilege for me to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. But I must share the credit with the women of Banchte Shekha (‘Learn to Survive”), the organization I founded to help rural women stand on their own two feet.

When I started teaching in school after college I began to travel in the villages of Jessore District. I saw the tears of suffering women who were victims of dowry abuse. I met women beaten up by their husbands or in-laws, mothers deprived of their motherhood because of the husbands’ insistence on ligation, women who were cast aside through illegal divorce. I saw women treated not as human beings but as commodities, less dignified than animals. I felt compassion for them and from late 1975 began to do something to help them.

I started work 23 years ago among rural women who were oppressed, destitute, depressed, dominated, exploited, neglected and backward. They were not educated, not aware, not capable of taking decisions—only a hostile environment prevailed around them. I had to face criminal cases lodged against me by troublemaker people of the villages. They claimed that I am destroying the social system by bringing the women out of their homes. They did it because it was against their own interest in controlling the women. They did not want women to become educated, to come out of their homes, to take up income generating work, to become conscious of their situation and try to do something to correct it.

There are few bad people in our society but most are good, honest and truthful. They are willing to help support the struggle against injustices when they learn the facts and when they are organized to give help as a group. The Honorable Prime Minister has quoted “you have worked tirelessly to give smiles to the deprived and oppressed women of Bangladesh risking your own life.”

I wish that everyone would have the faith to be the source of power, moral strength and courage. I have been so taken up with women’s issues that I have never thought of having any family life. The people with whom I am working are my family and the children for whom I tried to do something for their education, they are my children.

The great leader who is remembered with honour and dignity by the people of Asia along with Filipinos who keep the memory unfaded. I extend my heartful felicitations and deep respect on behalf of the backward rural women of Bangladesh.

Today’s awarding ceremony added a new chapter to my experience which is full of both sorrow and happiness and this will inspire and energize me for my future activities.

With the news of this award, the destitute, depressed, dominated, exploited, neglected, and backward rural women deprived of their rights and for whom I had been working for the last 23 years flashed before my eyes. I can’t but remember their faces while I am receiving this award. I am dedicating this award in their memory.

I thank everyone who has helped me in any way to achieve this honour and wish to have the blessing to continue my work until I reach my last. I would like to conclude with a little poem of mine, translated from the original Bengali:

Tell me, friend
For what does life and youth pass away?
With a heavy load on the heart let life find a way.
In the next moment my mind said:
Only after the slow decaying of the seed
Does the new fruit and the beautiful tree breed.
For ages humanity will breathe fresh air
And all will enjoy that fruit of my labor
Millions of human beings with the fruit enjoy
Let me sow the seeds of the future in pure joy.