Kailash Satyarthi

How to make peace? Get angry!

            Kailash Satyarthi teaches us how he used Anger to create Peace.

When he was 11 years old his friends started dropping out of school because their parents couldn’t afford textbooks. This made Kailash angry. He witnessed, or experienced several events in his life that infuriated him. When Kailash was 15 years old he saw a slave father who’s daughter was taken from him and about to be sold to a brothel. He was angry and took action to save the girl and return her to her father. These events made Kailash angry. Gave him ideas. Drove him to action.

            Kailash explained that he gained some of his greatest ideas during his angriest moments.

            In India the people born in the lower segments of Cast are considered “Untouchables”. Kailash set an example by allowing Low Cast people to cook food for him. He invited political leaders to join. Each one of them agreed to join but none of them showed up. He was angry that no one showed up, and ate the food himself. When he got home the priests were waiting, they wanted to outcast Kailash and his whole family. He instead out casted his entire cast by changing his family name. Satyarthi means “seeker of truth”.

Kailash created a book bank at the age of 11 to get books to children who couldn’t afford it. At age 27 Kailash gave up his career as an Electrical Engineer and took up a more noble cause. He began to educate consumers to encourage them to not accept child labor products. Since then child labor has dropped by 85%.  He co-founded the worlds largest global education movement.

Kailash’s developed a method of using mans inherent compassion to care enough to become angry at injustice. Using that momentum and passion to develop an idea for change, then put that momentum and idea into action. Anger. Idea. Action

Kailash's selfless action to roll up his sleeve's, give up everything that was "socially important" and do the right thing to help those in need follows closely to the framework of Reich’s cultural parable of The Benevolent Community. 

He started a “raid and rescue” to liberate child slaves. He and his colleagues have personally rescued over 83,000 child slaves from slave labor and given them back to their mothers. They have organized an international convention to protect children against child labor. As a result the global number of child labor has been reduced by one third in the last fifteen years.

Kailash used the Process Premise of Emotion (Anger) effectively to persuade the audience to want to make a change.  He gives a model of how anger can be destructive, and explains how to avoid that through compassion and selflessness. Kailash drive the emotive that “Anger can be transformed into something great.”