Sustainable Peace with Mandar Apte
The Hardy Boys and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
So the first trigger was when I was in eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade. I used to read the Hardy Boys.
Deep Love with the Hardy boys, Frank and Joe Hardy. And I swear to God, I really had the idea that I want to go to the United States and meet the Hardy Boys. I want to be like them, I want to solve crime, I want to be dynamic, I want to help people get over their trauma, bring justice. The third trigger for me was meeting my spiritual teacher. I met him 21 years ago in Houston, Texas. His name is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. He’s a no-nonsense guru, according to me. And he’s kind of a rebel in that guru land himself. Instead of waiting for people to come to him at the age of 20 or 21, he decided to travel and take the wisdom of India across the world. And so, when I met him, I was touched by his innocence and intellectual capacity.
Game Changers at Shell and Martin Luther King
I started as a petroleum engineer, but then got inducted into Shell’s scenarios and innovation program called GameChanger. And that is where I felt… Innovation is, anybody can do it, but nobody does it. We always think of Steve Jobs as the innovator or the iPhone as the innovation product, but it requires a mindset. It requires a mindset for being innovative and creative. And that is what was the boon in my life, is to be part of that ecosystem of innovation, within the belly of the beast. And there is a speech that Dr. King gave 65 years ago on national radio in India that touched my heart. So the book and this online research, and an idea came in my head that something happened there for him, something has happened in India for him, because he became the torchbearer for nonviolence in the civil rights movement.
Perpetrators and Victims of Violence Together
I want to take people from both sides of the gun, the perpetrator, and the survivor, so that my work is not about the gun. And I want people from all different backgrounds, all different skin color, all different races, etc., etc. And I spoke to about 35 individuals who were on these two domains, the perpetrators as well as the victims, and within 10 days, these six people that you see in the film said yes, they would like to come. I took my film for screenings in the gangs of Chicago, South Side of Chicago, in prisons, in juvenile halls, and in communities where you can say there is a lot of darkness. Yeah, there’s a lot of darkness. When these film screenings happen, people used to ask me, “When is my next trip?”
So I brought four trips to India before the pandemic, and this time I mindfully chose the pilgrims, right? So now it has to be a leader of some influence so that when they come back, they can do some implementation work. So mayors of the United States came with me, police chiefs came with me, leaders of gangs came with me, school leaders came with me. So it was my way of looking at my country through the eyes of these pilgrims.
Air Cover from the Chief of Police
You need that AirCover so that you can play without being worried about your job. Because when you are playing, when you’re doing innovative work, because it’s bold, nobody has done it. There can be mistakes, right? There can be errors, sometimes even blunders, so if you don’t have that AirCover, we will not put the risk in doing that experiment because, at the end of the year, you don’t need a slap on your wrist and say, “Hey, you made a mistake,” right? So that’s what I call AirCover. You need that protection to go do something, so that is what I felt in this chief of police. And we did this premiere screening, 450 people showed up in that screening at Paramount Studios. I made the cops and the community members hold hands and pray for each other. At the end of the screening, I led a meditation and it was just an amazing unfolding.
Trauma Stops With Me
It’s a perpetuating impact of trauma. And somebody has to say, “Trauma stops with me, it doesn’t go beyond me.” So that is the program that I offered to the community members and, without their knowledge, I actually did the same pitch to the Los Angeles Police Department in the precinct. And I said to the officers that policing in these neighborhoods cannot be easy. It is involving a lot of trauma, secondary trauma maybe, it has many ripple effects on the life of an officer. So would you like to join a workshop on healing yourself? And so I brought these two different groups, and then I brought the third group. I went to a local school, I went to the elementary school in South Central, Los Angeles, and I told the principal of the school that, “Your community has trauma, the kids that come to your school have to have trauma. Can you allow me to host this workshop in your school and allow six or seven parents and teachers to join?” So yeah, she said yes. So that is where this first unfolding happened.
Can You Sell Peace?
We created an eight-week program, and at the end of six weeks, after doing a lot of this breath work, meditation work, mural paintings, discussions, at the end of six weeks, nobody had missed a class, not a single person missed a class. So I asked them, “Was it a good use of your time?” And yes, everybody said it was a good use of their time. I said, “Who has sold drugs?” So many people raised their hand. So I said, “Guys, that means the art of selling. Can you help me sell peace? Whatever I’ve shared with you, if this was part of your elementary school knowledge, wisdom, teachings, life would’ve been different, wouldn’t it? Can you now become a teacher? Can you become an ambassador?” So that was the next two weeks of training, a certification where I trained. Again, everybody came to those two weeks, and that’s the video that we gave medals of honor to these people, certificates. The chief of police came. We got some primetime media coverage that day.
Culture of Peace Ingrained in Education
I won’t forget that day. The day changed my life. I did not come to the United States for doing that. I came for graduate school as a petroleum engineer. But yeah, the universe takes you places where you are needed. It’s not just peace building is valuable in conflict regions in the world, but perhaps in every home. I think that is where the rewiring needs to start off, looking at violence that we create even in our own mind, thinking bad about somebody. So that is where I feel like as a futurist, which I put you in that bucket of the futurist. This is the future we need to co-create.
Yes.
Imagination Allows Freedom in the Mind
Which has the culture of peace ingrained in the education of every human being. Imagination is a beautiful word by itself because it allows you freedom, and that freedom starts in your mind, and it can be associated with two types of freedom, “Does the external word allow me to think out of the box?” But the second type of freedom is, “Do I allow myself to think out of the box or do I judge myself every time,” and I judge myself because other people don’t get my idea, and I also have a doubt. “Maybe they’re right, maybe I’m thinking stupid things,” right? So that is the permission you need to give yourself to be… It’s okay to fail, it’s okay to think big even if you can’t achieve it.
From a Question Mark to an Exclamation Point
My teacher, my spiritual teacher, my guru, he told me once that question mark is often about the negative side of things, the negative things that happen to us. We ask, “Why is this happening to me? Why do I have to go through this turbulent phase?” Wisdom is to turn the question mark into an exclamation mark and that requires you to have that raised consciousness to go into the space of wonder. W-O-N-D-E-R. That is where questions go away and wonder comes, imagination is activated. When you smell a rose, “Why the hell is the rose smelling so good today?” We don’t ask that. So, that ability in a leader to turn a question mark into an exclamation mark shows the maturity of that leader, shows the maturity of that person, because there are so many things that you can ask questions about. So I will leave you with this wonder mark.
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