East, West and medicine: Tutu adds healing touch
The spiritual leader was a part of the global healthcare meet in the city.
Bengaluru: The second day of ‘Global Health Futures — creating integrated solutions to the epidemic of long-term diseases’, was pleasantly punctuated by the arrival of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The Archbishop, who made an unscheduled appearance a day early, attended Professor Siam Griffith’s session on bridging eastern and western medical traditions at Soukya. An avid cricket fan, Archbishop Tutu departed soon after to watch the match. “I think Sachin is a remarkable young man,” he told Deccan Chronicle. “I hope he scores a century. After all this time and all that he has accomplished, his head has remained the same size!”
The Archbishop, whose spent his lifetime in the defence of human rights and the oppressed won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2007, has been very vocal about the situation in Sri Lanka.
The nation, which is hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting (CHOGM) scheduled to begin on Friday, has been met with a leaders opting to boycott the event, in protest of the thirty-year-long civil war.
“The actions of the world are important. When people decided to boycott South Africa, it brought apartheid to an end. You can't have a blanket condemnation and say any kind of intervention is wrong,” he said.
Although External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid will attend the CHOGM conference this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh changed his mind, in view of the strong opposition in Tamil Nadu. Are these measures really necessary? “I think what should rightly be done is to ask the Tamils in Sri Lanka what would be more helpful to them,” the Archbishop remarked.
He also seemed favourably inclined toward Karnataka’s Anti-Superstition Bill, saying, “Anything that can make a society more compassionate and more caring must be helpful,” he said, lapsing into his jovial laugh as he got into his car.