One of my office colleagues wondered the effectiveness of
running a month-long nationwide campaign to protect the girl child.
To give you a little background, the Girl Pledge Campaign was
launched on Dec. 01, 2013 by the humanitarian organization, Art of Living (AOL)
with the support of UNICEF and MTV. The mission behind starting this event is to
inspire people to pledge support to the girl child and influence
decision-makers who can impact policy related to girls and women. The campaign,
thus, aims to protect the girl child through awareness and commitment.
Coming back to my office conversation. My colleague
questioned the benefits of giving pledge to people. She quickly remarked that (during
the course of time) people will forget not only the words of the pledge but its
significance too thereby bringing the situation back to square one. According
to her, this is just a show-off kind of an event that will not bring any
positive impact on the people. And she quoted the growing atrocities on women
and girl child (as published almost daily in newspapers) to support her
argument.
I was speechless at that time. It’s not because I was unable
to find words to give her a reply, it’s because I want to give her a ‘fitting’
and a ‘logical’ reply. And for that, I decided to research a bit on the “Science
Behind the Pledge.”
This led me to get in touch with a very passionate educationist
- Muralidhar Koteshwar (@mkoteshwar). Below are his answers to my questions:-
Q.1) What is the
psychology that works behind taking a pledge/oath?
The memory locations in the brain can only recall extreme
inputs to the senses. Since a pledge or an oath taking ceremony has a lot of
experiences with a sense of sacredness, it tends to get lodged in the memory.
Q.2) Why we expect
people to follow/remember their pledge points?
It automatically gets lodged in the memory due to reason 1
above.
Q.3) What is the
'MAGIC' in a pledge?
So the memory periodically brings this back and pricks the
conscience if the person tends to move away or has done nothing about it.
With the above answers I now realized the gravity of the
pledge and why it is said that nations have transformed and revolutions have
happened because of the 'PLEDGE'.
In fact, the work done by Martin Luther King in the United States is a fitting example of the significance of pledge. It’s amazing to note that around 250,000 people joined Martin Luther King in his pledge to improve civil rights in the United States. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, King pledged to combat the racial inequality (prevalent in the United States at that time) through non-violence.
Similarly, the Art of Living launched the “Billion Tree
Campaign” in coordination with the United Nation's Environment Programme (UNEP)
in Bangladesh in 2010. With the support of Marico Bangladesh, the Billion Tree
Campaign had pledged 32,000 coconut trees in 64 districts of Bangladesh in the
first phase.
The campaign raised awareness on the inter-dependence
between humankind and the planet's ecosystems, as well as the linkages between
tree planting and climate change mitigation, the restoration of biodiversity,
air and soil quality and food security.
AOL started many more such events like Mission Green Earth.
Now, let us know the key points of this Girl Child Pledge 2013.
I Pledge that:
- I will marry only after the legal age, which is 21 for boys and 18 for girls.
- I will not participate in the marriage ceremony of anyone who is below the legal age of marriage. I will also persuade and inform my relatives and community not to do so.
- I will not take dowry.
- I will not allow sex determination tests to be carried out in my family. I will work as a community leader along with other members to stop sex determination tests from being carried out by my community members.
- I will uphold and honour the rights of girls and support every action in my family for better education, nutrition and protection of girls and also ensure that she gets her legal share of property or inheritance.
- I will always respect women and girls and never behave in an inappropriate manner with them whether at home, on the streets, at my workplace or anywhere else.
- I will do everything in my power to protect all children from violence and child abuse physical, emotional or neglect of any other manner.
What do you feel about the above pledge? Do let me know your
thoughts and comments on the same.
