Generation Global is an online education program accepted globally that encourages dialogue amongst students from different countries. When I initially signed up for the program, I was introduced to what a ‘dialogue’ is at its essence – a sharing and understanding of each other’s viewpoints and a further reevaluation of your own point. Generation Global enhances the skills one needs to posses to have free and intellectual dialogue by providing activities and forums where you must respond to probing questions by either reflecting on the topic, questioning the crowd further on the topic, contesting a point you don’t agree with whilst still listening to another’s reasoning behind their own opinions and finally by sharing your own experiences with your peers.
Once I had completed a required number of activities, I was free to register and attend Global conferences. Global Conferences are quite literally what the name suggests – an online conference of students from schools located in different countries. The conference I attended was based on ‘Wealth and Poverty’.
Let me start by saying that it is both hilarious and quite possibly the most ‘first-world’ topic that we could have spoken on seeing as no one who attended the conference had ever come close to experiencing true poverty. Despite such an obvious wide angled outlook on the topic, a riveting discussion was held on the true meaning of wealth and we explained the economies of our respective countries to each other. With students attending from Egypt, India and Italy, I was exposed to different cultural backgrounds.
Wealth can be defined in both materialistic and incorporeal manners where it can refer to the material wealth one amasses or the relationships, knowledge and mental wellbeing of a person. Such contrasts in the definition of wealth aside, we did agreed to the fact that one’s welfare is directly related to his/her material wealth seeing as the knowledge one has is gleaned through textbooks and teachers, both utilities that are paid for, Physical and Mental Wellbeing are both related to the monetary sums that a person has and though familial relationships are not forged though material goods, they are maintained via these materialistic goods. For example, the mental wellbeing of each member of the family may be nurtured by the family itself, but the physical health of each member must be accounted for in fiscal terms.
As a further continuation of the starter activity we were given wherein we discussed the true meaning of Wealth, the floor (or in this case, the ability to unmute seeing as it was online) was left to the students by the moderator and we both asked and replied to questions whilst also sharing our opinions on statements made by others. From meritocracies making economies richer, to Capitalism resulting in sectored growth – mainly the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and if such growth is truly beneficial to not only an economy but also a community, a vast range of sub-topics under the umbrella of ‘Wealth and Poverty’ were discussed.
The conference educated and humbled me as I saw ‘Wealth and Poverty’ from a global perspective. Generation Global is an incredibly interesting experience that brings together people of opposing views and diverse backgrounds on an equal platform that gives everyone a chance to voice an opinion that might not be voiced often. My greatest learning from this experience was that we must ‘listen to understand, to comprehend and to appreciate; not listen to reply or to argue’. In our Modern Age, we often listen only to reply, to put forth our opinion, we emulate sympathy not empathy. As such, Generation Global taught me an essential lesson – When we only listen to speak, no one is truly listening. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
– Svasti Bhaskar & Sharanya Sanyal (10J)
