S: Is for shedding light

I have spent the whole week talking about war, corruption and fighting for freedom. Today's column I want to highlight two people from each side who have not torn down society but contributed to it.

I start with the Persians: Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, human rights activist and founder of Children's Rights Support Association in Iran. On December 10, 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women and children rights. She's the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive this prize. Ebadi lectures law at the University of Tehran and is a campaigner for the strengthening the legal status of children and women, the latter of which played a key role in the May 1997 landslide presidential election. As a lawyer, she's known for taking up cases others refuse. She represented the family of Dariush Forouhar, a dissident intellectual and politician who was found stabbed to death at his home. His wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, was also killed at the same time. The couple were among several dissidents who died in a spate of grisly murders that terrorized Iran's "intellectual community". She also represented the family of Ezzat Ebrahimnezhad, the only officially accepted case of murder in the Iranian student protests of July 1999. This case brought increased focus on Iran from human rights groups abroad. Ebadi has also defended various cases of child abuse cases and has also established two non-governmental organizations in Iran, the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) and the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC). She drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children, which was passed by the Iranian parliament in 2002. She has always come to the forefront and has never heeded the threat to her own safety.

I was introduced to the poet Rumi years ago and forgot about him until someone I once believed in re-introduced me. Though that person was a disappointment, finding Rumi again was not! Able to verbalize the highly personal and often confusing world of personal/spiritual growth and mysticism, he offends none, and includes everyone. The world of Rumi is neither exclusively the world of a Sufi, nor the world of a Hindu, nor a Jew, nor a Christian; it is the highest state of a human being — a fully evolved human. A complete human is not bound by cultural limitations; he touches every one of us.

by The drum of the realization of the promise is beating,
we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night,
Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
Oh! joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color!
For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Oh! joy for this soul and this heart who have escaped
the earth of water and clay,
Although this water and this clay contain the hearth of the
philosophical stone.


For the Greeks Odysseas Elytis' poetry ranges a broad spectrum marked with over forty years. He does not rely on Ancient Greece or Byzantium but devotes himself exclusively to today's Hellenism. His main endeavour has been to rid his people's conscience from unjustifiable remorse, to complement natural elements through ethical powers, to achieve the highest possible transparency in expression and finally,to succeed in approaching the mystery of light, the metaphysics of the sun of which he was an idolater —according to his own definition.In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I know that all this is worthless and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet

Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison and
held responsible

To a crowd of foreign Powers always through
the intervention of your own

As it happens for the disasters

But let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
which might be in an apartment-complex children
are playing and whoever loses

Should, according to the rules, tell the others
and give them a truth

Then everyone ends up holding in his
hand a small
Gift, silver poem


Dimitri Nanopoulos is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and holder of the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics at Texas A&M University, head of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) Astroparticle Physics Group, and fellow and chair of Theoretical Physics, Academy of Athens in Greece. He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology. He works in string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and quantum-inspired models of brain function. He is author of more than 525 refereed articles, with an excess of 28,000 citations, placing him as the fourth most cited High Energy Physicist of all time. He has given more than 250 invited presentations at international conferences. With his disciples John Hagelin, a former U.S presidential candidate, and the British John Ellis he invented the flipped SU(5) model of the unification of forces. On 17th October 2006 he was awarded the Onassis International prize by the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine studies in Venice.

We all have something to contribute to society and we all have the ability to step outside ourselves and make a difference. The question is will we. I make a F.A.C.T to try and do this in my life and in this column. I wish you all peace!