![]() The train halted, we all quietly jumped off the train, and calmly walked to the next station. I remember once, I was probably 21 or 22, I was on a train and there was a bomb blast in another compartment. Rukmini: It’s all about context, right? When I was growing up, Mumbai was filled with gang wars and there was a lot of violence. How did that translate into action for you? Seeds of Peace: It seems you were thinking about peace and conflict from an early age. She spoke recently about The Samvaad Project and how educators can play a key role in providing safe spaces for youth to explore their beliefs through dialogue, just as she did as a student. “In the world we live in, I don’t think it’s an option any longer,” she said of dialogue. She has seen what happens when people have safe spaces to explore their beliefs and differences, and sees dialogue, particularly for young people, as a critical ingredient in building peace. Having built a career in peacebuilding and corporate leadership development, Rukmini has actively practiced dialogue for most of the past decade-including as a Seeds of Peace Delegation Leader and Educator, and this spring, she’ll be one of four trainers leading The Samvaad Project, a new Seeds of Peace interfaith-dialogue facilitation training program for university educators in Western India. “So to me, it was such a relief to learn that these spaces can exist that can allow for processing and talking about my own faith (or lack thereof).” “I came from a family where my parents are extremely religious and caste-ist, and I knew I wanted to fight that but didn’t know how to in terms of having the emotional and psychological safety to voice that at home,” she said. What she experienced there, she said, left her “awestruck.” Her personal inquiry deepened with time, leading her through several peacebuilding programs in high school and, eventually, to college where she attended an interfaith dialogue session hosted by a Buddhist group. When Rukmini was a young girl growing up in Mumbai, she mostly thought of the word “peace” in the context of beauty queens and would-be saints: Miss Universe talked about the need for it, Mother Teresa gave up everything for it, but what, Rukmini wondered, “did that mean for someone like me, a lay person who has conflict at home?”
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