Dear Friend ,
Greetings !
A very Happy Women’s Day to all women across the world !
It’s a day I am especially grateful for the wonderful women I’ve been blessed with in my life, and from each of whom I’ve learnt important lessons.
My mother, Mabel: among the multitude of lessons I’ve learnt from her is her constantly learning attitude. She’s over seventy but is still enthusiastically improving on her excellent French. At a course she took at Alliance Francais in Singapore just before we left – she topped her class. She still spends over an hour a day studying and building up her French. She has taken up learning the piano and I watch, quite awestruck as she conquers one more tune. I often wish I could play the keyboard ! She has gone beyond ‘wishing’ to actually learning something completely new. For her the learning never ends !
My wife, Teresa, who takes care of the little things that make a big difference. One evening, the kids lost their last shuttlecock in the middle of a gigantically tall and thick bush. I took the easy way out – we’ll buy another one later. The kids faces fell as their evening of play came to an abrupt end. But a few minutes later there was Teresa standing on a stool , stick in hand vigorously disturbing the bush until she found the shuttlecock and restored the smiles to the children’s faces.She is willing to persevere even on something ‘small’ when she knows it will make a difference to somebody.
And then there’s the little woman in my life- my daughter, Marcela. She turned all of eight this week but still amazes me with her enormous belief in honesty. She is the naughtier of our two kids but no threat of disciplining has ever deterred her from confessing to a mischief or
acknowledging she has done something wrong. I recall a school Principal who was interviewing the two kids for admission, asking them who was the naughtier of the two. Wordlessly,but truthfully she jabbed her thumb in her own direction. She sticks with the truth even when it’s tough.
Constant learning, perseverance and caring, commitment to the truth-these are just some of the values we have been working on with our
Young Leaders at TalentEase. We have been spending the last few weeks with our first batch of 45 Young Leaders from Grades 8 and 9.
Every Saturday they have enthusiastically spent 3 hours discovering and developing future ready skills and values critical for real leadership.
Each week they focus on one Future ready skill and one important value. We call our Values programme, the VIP ( Values In Practice )
Programme for Children and Young Adults. We began with the Value of Courtesy and were thrilled when one of the kids came back to report
that he had started saying ‘thank you’ to his Mum for the meals she cooked him -something he had taken for granted until then.
It is with some pride, this Saturday, we will be introducing our Young Leaders to the Value of “Respect for Women”.
To introduce the value, we will be showing the Young Leaders that wonderful piece of meaningful advertising from Gillette that was released
in India in the soul-searching after the Delhi rape and killing of ‘Nirbhaya’.
Here’s the link if you’d like to watch the ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4aiso6pvRE
And here’s a link to the Nirbhaya Pledge that our Young Leaders will be taking this Saturday.Modified to be taken by children in India from
a pledge crafted by Dr.Astrid Lobo the Co-founder and Member of Satyashodhak, a Mumbai based feminist collective.
https://talentease.com/in/respect-for-women-the-pledge/
Once again let’s remember to say ‘thank you’ to all the special women in our lives and pay tribute to the enormous difference they make in our homes, our workplaces, in society and the world.
May Women’s Day be a reminder to celebrate women, not just on the day – but all year round.
Warm Regards,
Leo
