Got Gandhi?
Brittany Gadbury sure does. The 2002 graduate of Vancouver School of Arts and Academics is living in Manipal, Karnataka, India, and studying Peace and Gandhian Studies. She’s been there since July, pursuing a post-graduate degree and preparing for a career in mediation, conflict resolution and arbitration.
And apparently that’s so unusual, the 27-year-old Gadbury has become something of a celebrity with recent interviews appearing on national television and on the front page of The Times of India. In the Times article, Gadbury talked about learning from Gandhi’s example of cross-cultural mediation and non-Western ideas about conflict resolution.
“It’s important to me that I understand why he was so successful in mediating and how that exercise might inform and improve my own processes,” she said.
Gandhi “strove to mediate between seemingly irreconcilable parties,” she told The Columbian by email. “These were the English and India, within the Hindu caste system, and between Muslims and Indians as tensions grew into the partition of India and the establishment of Pakistan.”
She added that times have changed in India; much of the world may admire Mohandas K. Gandhi as the peaceful revolutionary who liberated India from English rule and inspired other nonviolent activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but young Indians don’t much care.
“As it was put to me today in a television news interview, ‘People today do not want to study Gandhi. The young people do not see the point,’” she said in the Vancouver Public Schools newsletter.
‘Part of its fabric’
Gadbury is not just an aspiring peacemaker she’s also a dancer. After graduating from VSAA, she double-majored in Modern Dance and English Literature at the University of Utah, where she was the commencement speaker.
You can see Brittany and her Indian cohorts dancing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imZupd-se84&feature=share. “India LOVES the arts, which along with religion is an inextricable part of its fabric,” she said.
Toward the end of Gadbury’s college career she started volunteering at a Salt Lake City residential rehabilitation facility, the Odyssey Center for Women and Children. That’s where she got interested in mediation and post-trauma reconciliation as a career track, she said. Her study in India was made possible via a $25,000 Goodwill Ambassadorial Scholarship from the Rotary Foundation.
“There’s a reason India produces so many doctors and engineers,” Gadbury told the VSD newsletter. “It is extremely competitive; students work hard.”
Gadbury plans to attend the 2012 Rotary International Peace Symposium in Bangkok, Thailand, in May.Scott Hewitt
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