Articles

Contemplating International Affairs

By Joya Rajadhyaksha

A fleeting comment I heard on CNN a few nights ago has been stuck in my head ever since. "It can't be a globalized city without being involved with the globe," the speaker was saying of New York, hypothesizing that one reason the city was unprepared for last year's attacks on Sept. 11th was its dissociation from the rest of the world.

While this is undoubtedly a simplistic explanation for a very complicated tragedy, it does highlight the need for all of us to be more connected to the international community today, and to develop a social consciousness that is global rather than just local.

Two years ago, when I was filling out my application to an international affairs program at Columbia University, I had grandiose ideas about what those words meant. "International Affairs." I thought then that they entailed comparative politics, sociology and economics, as well as the study of various 'isms' - Liberalism, Pluralism, Realism etc. But I have realized now that beyond theory, international affairs means something much more basic; something I had actually started to learn at a much earlier age - an understanding of how different people come together and what it takes to hold them together.

I was five years old when I first traveled abroad, to London with my mother. My memories of that trip are fuzzy, but the one thing I do remember distinctly is riding on the subway, 'the tube'. On those trips my mother - a sari-clad Indian woman with hair down to her waist - would invariably end up chatting to young punks in leather and chains with hair up to the ceiling. I was too young at the time to wonder what it was they could possibly have in common, but am happy to say that her gregariousness is a trait I seem to have inherited. On subsequent train (and bus and airplane) rides, both at home and abroad, I have also befriended unlikely traveling companions: toothless Italian nonnas who could withstand the onslaught of my broken Italian long enough to divulge some of their culinary secrets, Midwestern American farmers who had barely ventured outside their home states and wanted to know what it was that had brought me across oceans, Japanese tourists who ended up taking my photo when I offered to take theirs.

These conversations were neither deep, nor even lengthy, but they taught me a lot about international affairs; about what different people think, and how they live. This is the kind of knowledge (in addition to the theories and 'isms') that we need to introduce younger generations to. And the most practical and feasible way to do this for as many youth as possible is by educating them about issues such as poverty, sustainable development, and racism. Not only do we need to raise their awareness about these matters, but also to give them hands-on opportunities to affect social change. It is not enough for us to tell them of the need for clean water in rural Tanzania, for instance. We should enable them to raise funds for tube-well projects there or facilitate volunteer opportunities, and above all, ensure that they can respect and abide by tribal Masai customs should they find themselves in that unfamiliar milieu. Only then will today's youth grow up to be the global citizens we so desperately need to run our world tomorrow.

Joya is a graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and currently works for the United Nations Bureau of the New York Times.