“Unless every member of our global family is peaceful, our peace is incomplete.”
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on International Peace Day, September 21, 2008
Building peace among nations and individuals for 29 years, Gurudev is committed to his vision of stress-free minds and a violence-free society. Armed with the tools of Gandhian philosophy, Gurudev has gone to the flavellas of Brazil, red zones in Iraq, LTTE headquarters in Sri Lanka and trauma-hit areas of Jammu and Kashmir. His message is peace and non-violence. By facilitating dialogue between opposing factions and urging people towards reconciliation, Gurudev continues to bridge religious and communal divides. In 2004 alone, he traveled to 175 cities as part of his ‘Love Moves the World’ Tour. His travels open up doors to three levels of peace: at the individual level, communal and global.
Many of his tours have translated into significant peace-building developments. His travel to Iraq in 2007 as a peace ambassador brought to focus the possibilities of combating violence in non-violent ways, even in a war-torn country. As a result, the Iraqi government sent 55 men and women to be trained as peace angels. Gurudev played a major role in finding an amicable solution to the Amarnath land row that had engulfed the entire state in a vortex of violence.
Gurudev travels to strife-torn places not only to heal the wounds of victims and clam the aggressors, but also to galvanize the local population to work towards peaceful co-existence. Following his visit to Israel in 2003, peacemaking initiatives were started in places along the wall that separates Israel from Palestine.
