The 1966 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

RESPONSE of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

I feel very deeply honored by the distinction conferred on me by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. I am fully aware that it is indeed a rare privilege to be selected for this Award. In fact, when I was first told of it by a pressman, I exclaimed quite involuntarily that it could not possibly be, it must be some mistake, for it is given only to "great people."

I am, however, glad for one reason, that the quiet, unobtrusive type of community service that fails normally to attract public attention does get recognition sometimes. I do not claim it in a personal sense. I am only too conscious that it is the job which is accomplished that calls for attention, not the individual who is but an instrument employed in the achievement.

In my opinion leadership is a burden It makes one only too community of one's limitations and smallness. In the context of community service, it may even be somewhat of a handicap and create a barrier, a false image of a personality away from the crowd. My own conviction is that really to serve one should put oneself last among our fellow beings. What fortifies and ensures long and effective service is the capacity to win and sustain love and confidence and the ability to penetrate into the remotest crevices of the minds of those we work with. What one has to hunt for is not prestige but conquest of human hearts. Projects are nurtured into growth not through personal projections but tender affection. I consider myself but a weak aspirant, ever failing, ever trying, my failures making me ever more vigilant, my trials but intensifying my faith. Service is an obligation, not a reward, for one owes it to others to share with them what one may have and they have not or to unfold one's own talents and gifts in communion with others, which otherwise would merely languish and perish. In Indian tradition this is defined as self realisation because one can really find oneself only by serving one's fellow-beings.

I cannot close this address without acknowledging my deep debt of gratitude to my great leader Gandhiji, under whose inspiration and guidance it was my rare good fortune to work. "I hate privilege and monopoly" he said. "Whatever cannot be shared with the masses is taboo to me. . . .I cannot imagine anything nobler than to identify ourselves with the masses and through them all mankind. I cannot imagine a better worship of God than that in His name I should labor for the poor even as they labor."

Today, we are finding ourselves increasingly in the predicament of having to adjust ourselves to the rising velocity of a rocket spinning nuclear age. We seem at times to be almost overcome by a sense of defeat, a moral coarsening and a sense of being lost. Old usages and pointers fail us when old social patterns crack up and call for new values and guidelines that are related to this complex world of the present. A new creative flame needs to be lit even as Gandhiji and other seers did whenever twilight descended on this world. A new ark has to be built to save the spiritual heritage of man from the menacing flood of moral crisis threatening mankind. I will quote what Gandhiji had to offer to mankind at this zero hour: "Having flung aside the sword there is nothing but the cup of love I can offer. It is by offering that cup that I expect to draw them (fellow-beings) closer to me. I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man. Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet is the humblest."