Nobel Peace Laurate Kailash Satyarthi had initiated a COVID-19 Support Center for rural India and urban slums to support orphaned children, medical care, missing child complaints, reporting child sexual abuse cases to the authorities.
“But we must also be talking about those who no one is thinking about,” his office called me up in the thick of the Covid19 pandemic. The challenge to distribute food, protective gear and medical kits was multi-fold amidst restrictions of a lockdown and social distancing. On my part, I made sure a special feature on this concern and effort was run on prime time at the news channel I was working at. It was a lesson about never losing your ‘karuna’ (compassion) in the face of extreme difficulty.
For example, when Satyarthi rescued 11 years old Mithun from the begging mafia, he could not recall which village or city he belonged to. That’s when his colleague, Chirag, at the rehabilitation centre decided to use Google Earth with satellite imagery to help identify Mithun’s home. After many months of Chirag’s compassionate use of technology, he finally relocated Mithun’s family and the young boy managed to reunite with them. His organisation, the Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion (SMGC) explains the calculation method on the basis of four parameters – awareness of suffering, connectedness with suffering, feeling of responding to the suffering and action to remove the suffering. Unlike IQ and EQ which is an internal measure of an individual, CQ extends to family and society at large. The SMGC is collaborating with the best of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, neuroscientists and technologists from across the world in order to scientifically establish the CQ.