Are you Vivek?

It was an unreported event.

A woman came out of one little home … and looked him over wonderingly. The boy and the woman gazed at each other for a long moment, and then the woman finally said in astonishment: “Are you Vivek?”

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The woman had been trying get her children out of a brothel for years: ever since she had escape the brothel that had enslaved her and her children (a boy and a girl) who were born in the brothel.

“Journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day.”  — Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

meena_and_vivek

This event where Vivek, her boy, and Meena, the woman who escaped from a brothel were able to reunite was not in news, but only by the their own individual Herculean efforts did this reunion happen.  Vivek escaped from the brothel and searching for his real mother, not the mother the brothel owners tried to trick Vivek in believing.  Vivek had spent his only money he had ever had on a train ticket to the likely city of a lady who had screamed outside the brothel for the her kids, before the owners chased her away, again and again.  The government authorities would do nothing and the local news organizations ignored her pleas, even though prostitution and slavery are against the law in her country.  The reuniting of the determined Meena with her young son, however, was finally chronicled in book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the authors.

half-the-sky-cover

The Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, husband and wife, have formed quite a powerful dyad.

 “I’m not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists.”

Kristof has Championed the reporting of human right abuses and social injustices.  WuDunn has used her business and financial background to Mastermind the Strategic analysis of what works or doesn’t work in trying to help societies improve.

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From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.  Half The Sky is a carefully reasoned but also compassionately told set of stories and analyses of the problems of modern slavery of women and children in all human societies, especially in the developing world, but not exclusively.  The book examines the past and traditional approaches of governments, media, and NGOs to the problems and finds them lacking, for a good reason. Moreover, the book carefully examines the actions that could better effect the problems of world wide human trafficking, spousal abuse, drugs and prostitution, organized criminal activity, and suggests new approaches to the problems.

A balanced team approach that includes the energetic advocating of Kristof and the clear eyed reasoning of WuDunn.

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Sheryl WuDunn, Mastermind Rational, ( November 16, 1959) is a Chinese American business executive, author, lecturer, and the first Asian American to win a Pulitzer Prize.

A senior banker focusing on growth companies in technology, new media and the emerging markets, WuDunn also works with double bottom line firms, alternative energy issues, and women entrepreneurs. She has also been a private wealth adviser with Goldman Sachs and was previously a journalist and business executive for The New York Times. She is now senior managing director at Mid-Market Securities, a boutique investment banking firm in New York serving small and medium companies.

At the Times, WuDunn ran coverage of global energy, global markets, foreign technology and foreign industry. She oversaw international business topics ranging from China’s economic growth to technology in Japan, from oil and gas in Russia to alternative energy in Brazil. She was also anchor of The New York Times Page One, a nightly program of the next day’s stories in the Times. She also worked in the Times’s Strategic Planning Department and in the Circulation Department, where she ran the effort to build the next generation of readers for the newspaper. She was one of the few people at the Times who went back and forth between the news and business sides of the organization.

She was the first Asian-American reporter hired at the Times and was a foreign correspondent in The New York Times Beijing and Tokyo bureaus. She speaks Chinese and some Japanese. While in Asia, she also reported from other areas, including North Korea, Australia, Burma and the Philippines. [Wikipedia, revised]

Masterminds are the best in Strategic Analysis.

… they are thoroughgoing pragmatists, seeing reality as nothing more than a chess board for working out and refining their strategies. When planning, the Mastermind is completely open-minded and will entertain any idea holding promise of utility. Fruitful theories are quickly applied, all else discarded.  To the Mastermind, order is never arbitrary, set in concrete, but can be improved. Thus authority based on degrees, credentials, title, or celebrity does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. They will adopt ideas only if they are useful, which is to say if they work efficiently toward accomplishing well-defined goals. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don’t, aren’t, no matter who the author is. [Please Understand Me II]

Her husband, Nicholas Kristof is also a noted reporter.

kristof

Nicholas Donabet Kristof, Champion Idealist, (born April 27, 1959) is an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He has written an op-ed column for The New York Times since November 2001 and The Washington Post says that he “rewrote opinion journalism” with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has described Kristof as an “honorary African” for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts.

Champions are always leading the charge in their cause.

Champions have a wide range and variety of emotions, and a great passion for novelty. They see life as an exciting drama, pregnant with possibilities for both good and evil, and they want to experience all the meaningful events and fascinating people in the world. The most outgoing of the Idealists, Champions often can’t wait to tell others of their extraordinary experiences. Champions can be tireless in talking with others, like fountains that bubble and splash, spilling over their own words to get it all out. And usually this is not simple storytelling; Champions often speak (or write) in the hope of revealing some truth about human experience, or of motivating others with their powerful convictions. Their strong drive to speak out on issues and events, along with their boundless enthusiasm and natural talent with language, makes them the most vivacious and inspiring of all the types. [Please Understand Me II]

Women Hold Up Half the Sky — Chinese Proverb

4 thoughts on “Are you Vivek?”

  1. Half the sky was quite good at exposing abuse to women and girls around the world. However, in an over 300-page book, only a few paragraphs cover abuses in the US. My 12-years of torture-level abuse happened in America. The US is in abject denial of its having the worst child maltreatment record in the industrialized world. Time for this country to heal its wounds – not police the world!

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