The 1963 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

RESPONSE of Tribhuvandas K. Patel

It gives me great pleasure, of a personal and lasting nature, to be able to be present here to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I feel that my country is being honored here even more than I myself: that is a measure of the excellence of the Award and of the excellence of the aims that inspired it. Many of you will perhaps remember that the very first recipient of the Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership was a distinguished countryman of mine, Acharya Vinoba Bhave. That great soul continues, in his own unique and unobtrusive way, to represent real India in his humility, simplicity, and service—qualities which characterized your own great President Ramon Magsaysay.

President Magsaysay was a simple, humble and great man, a symbol of the hopes of poor men, a thoroughgoing democrat, an Asian with vision. Your late great President strove hard to build a nation which was freshly launched into responsibility and full freedom, to build out of it a nation in which freedom would belong to everybody, in name and in spirit, and in which man could live with man in amity, peace and dignity. These are noble qualities, noble aspirations, eternally uplifting the stature of all mankind.

We, too, in our country had been blessed with one of the greatest of men, whose very name is a venerated watchword in every Indian hamlet and on every Indian's lips. Mahatma Gandhi, whose humanity has already become an inspiring legend throughout the world, taught us to be proud of our heritage, to cast off the shackles of the body and the mind, so that we may mold ourselves in a pattern of thought and action in which the poor are the salt of the earth and the common man is the most important person in the world.

Today there is an additional awareness, a new bond, which binds all Asians together. We go deep into the very basis of life when we examine the humanitarian concepts and principles that inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Ramon Magsaysay alike. The bond that unites us, as fellow humans, as people working hard for a better morrow, and as fellow Asians, is a bond that cannot ever be broken. I am happy that a little additional strength has been now given to that bond of amity and understanding by the Magsaysay Award, with which I have been honored today.