Samjho Toh – Samvidhan LIVE! Dialogues
ComMutiny – The Youth Collective, Pravah and vartaLeap launched ‘Samjho Toh – Samvidhan LIVE! Dialogues’, today across 16 states and 30 locations in the country. The public initiative aims at bringing together polarized young people and creating an experience for them to dialogue and create a common idea of India. Samjho Toh is premised on creating a culture of dialoguing by listening and understanding another’s perspective.
The week-long social media launch between March 1 and March 7 will see engagement by thousands of young people and youth workers through social media posters, videos, announcements and knowledge partners hosting multiple Facebook and Instagram LIVE events across many locations. The launch will also see the unveiling of the official Samjho Toh album, comprising two songs in the beginning, under ComMutiny’s banner. It will be made available across all music streaming platforms like Amazon, Spotify, iTunes and YouTube.
“10 years ago, we lamented that people don’t have a point of view. Now, we are bothered when everyone seems to have an opinion. Why does that trouble us? Young people with their conflicting viewpoints must have spaces to interact with each other so that they don’t get stuck in their own echo-chambers of single stories. An imaginative world of very diverse viewing points – ‘plutory i.e., plural stories’ – where there is a new way of thinking is what the world needs right now. To stay in a non-conflict space or just not addressing these conflicts is like an ostrich hiding their head in the sand.” says Arjun Shekhar, Co-Founder, ComMutiny – The Youth Collective, Pravah and vartaLeap, shedding light on need for Samjho Toh.
The initiative that will bring together over 15 lakh young people directly and indirectly across Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Nagaland, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, was announced on the occasion of ‘Zero Discrimination’ day to emphasize the need to respect India’s diversity and understand and practice the value of Fraternity, as enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution of India.
Talking about the initiative, Biraj Patnaik, Executive Director, National Foundation for India and Advisory member to vartaLeap, said “Samjho Toh aims to reach out to young people with differing ideological perspectives and hopes to bring them together to dialogue and understand each other. People come with different perspectives and this initiative aims to create an environment where we are not talking at people but enabling youth to talk to each other and create a space for everyone to see a different perspective from what they closely hold”.
As a part of this public initiative, thousands of young people will come together to set up ‘Fraternity labs’ where they identify fake news around different fault lines, assess and re-create authentic narratives to bring alive the value of ‘Fraternity’. Through the labs they will reach out to their peers and others in their communities using various media creating a ripple effect to restructure the DNA of hate to the DNA of fraternity.
27 knowledge partners, CSOs from different parts of the country are supporting this initiative by creating opportunities for young people to experience Samjho Toh journeys. More than 60 diverse facilitators have joined the Samjho Toh team to implement the journey on ground with young people from different locations with voluntary support from the knowledge partners.
