‘India’, a fast developing globalised India, is a land with variegated dimensions. Its hallmark diversity and plurality, generally construed in anthropogenic and cultural terms, are also manifest in every whit of the general social and economic fabric that weans its persona.

The second-most populous country with over 1.18 billion people; the most populous democracy in the world; one of the fastest growing major economies in the world; and the second most favourable outsourcing destination after the United States; India is still grappling with the largest concentration of poor people in the world! Although the Indian economy has picked up much-desired momentum in the preceding decades; its growth is ruefully still lop-sided when comparing different social and economic groups, geographical regions, and rural and urban areas. A country, celebrating its 64th Independence Day today, has still ‘miles to go ahead’ before it sleeps!

Education, food, shelter, basic health care, employment, potable drinking water, children and women welfare, still remain an elusive dream for the vast multitude of masses that lay at the heart and soul of an India of the new millennium. The existing squalor and abject poverty of these ‘amputated souls of India’ are woefully exacerbated by the skyrocketing price rise to the extent that even ‘hope becomes a dream’. Disasters, floods, droughts, earthquakes, visit this South Asian giant landmass as frequent as Hillary Clinton’s sojourn in West Asia and Afghanistan. The ‘real India’, the ‘poor India’, the ‘deprived India’ and the ‘aggrieved India’; is overshadowed, camouflaged and relegated into oblivion by the new ‘rejuvenated India’, ‘shining India’, the ‘smug India’ and the ‘well preened India’, typified by pockets of affluence with the perfunctory welfare state losing its avowed track mid-way and inadvertently relinquishing its commitment to deliver what was promised. An akratic sordid saga, of pain sans any prosthetic and stifled aspirations of a better life, lie beneath the veneer of ‘Mera Bharat Mahaan’ and ‘I Love My India’ campaigns.

Truth, as always, is seldom sweet or palatable, yet it makes sane minds cogitate. Understanding the casus belli and sincere admittance of reality is the first stride towards the realization of solution and resuscitate what has gone wrong or off the track. ‘DISHA ARAMBH (Initiation of new Direction) Towards Humanism’ is one such modicum step in this direction. It is a conflux where the best of minds and activists have pooled in with the subterranean zeitgeist to enable one and everyone realise dreams, however big or small they are! It is this that imparts us a precocious outlook. Our slogan, “I, We, Us” sums up best ‘what’ we are and ‘why’ we are. Its time our ‘individualism’ combines for ‘collective’ good. Let the ethos of ‘humanism’ with the props of human values and benevolent concerns permeate and prevail catalyzing lightened up faces and smiles emerging as spoors of our effort.