Kailash Satyarthi, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize along with Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, lost a page of his speech on Wednesday and wondered whether this had happened before to any other Nobel laureate.
"Solutions are not found only in the deliberations in conferences and prescriptions from a distance...Friends what is missing now of course is my (speech) paper," he said to peels of laughter in the Oslo City Hall where he received the the coveted prize. "But, no problem, I will continue without that," the 60-year-old said, quickly regaining composure.
Minutes later a Norwegian official came on stage with the missing page of his lecture and Satyarthi once again had the audience in splits saying, "Thank You so much! I don't know whether it has happened to some Nobel Laureate before or not." "But many things are happening today and the best thing that happened is that a young and courageous Pakistani girl has met an Indian father and the Indian father met the Pakistani daughter," he said.
Delivering the speech, Satyarthi said, "Friends, the Nobel Committee generously invited me to deliver a 'lecture'. Respectfully, I am unable to do that. I represent here the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility. I have come here to share the voices and dreams of our children, our children, because they are all our children." He started off his speech by reciting a mantra from the Vedas.
Satyarthi also invoked other religions to impress upon the importance of child rights, saying "all the great religions tell us to care for children." "Jesus said 'Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to them.' The Holy Quran says: "Kill not your children because of poverty," he said.
In his concluding remarks, Satyarthi said "I call upon you in this room, and all across the world. I call for a march from exploitation to education, from poverty to shared prosperity, a march from slavery to liberty, and a march from violence to peace. Let us march from darkness to light. Let us march from mortality to divinity." "Let us march!" he signed off.
Satyarthi's NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) prides itself on liberating over 80,000 children from bonded labour in factories and workshops across India.
Malala, who was nominated in the peace prize category last year also, became the youngest ever Nobel laureate.
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