La Marche des Gueux (film) and SERPAJ

To me it's strange that I learn so much about the rest of the world up here in this relatively isolated northern region, things I probably would not have learned elsewhere. Quebec society has a strong drive to be better, to be more multi-cultural, to be more conscious, and so there are more opportunities to hear about what's happening in the rest of the world.

By merest chance, I attended a (free) film about a Mahatma Gandhi-based movement called Ekta Parishad. The film, La Marche des gueux, la force libératrice de la non-violence by Louis Campana and François Verlet, is about how 25,000 walked along the main highway of India to Delhi, a journey of many days, eating one meal a day that they cooked each night, to ask the government (again) for a way to stay on the land rather than be herded into city slums (so that multi-national corporations could conveniently take over their homelands). A man from India spoke after the film, in English; and a man from France spoke. The man from India -- forgive me not noting his name -- said that they have decided that one-day marches and protests aren't very effective, but that long marches are better, following serious non-violent effort beforehand, so that everyone knows what's involved, and that the effort is really against globializing neoliberal corporations, not local governments. The preliminary work is now being done for long marches in the year 2012. Asked about our continent, if anything was planned, he said that the coordinating group for Latin America is SERPAJ. I did not know of this organization, but now I've made a link to their website on the left.

SERPAJ stands for Servicio Paz y Justicia en América Latina. The site is in Spanish but you can click for English.

Hope you will visit their website. I think if you see La Marche des Gueux, you will want to. Since Indians speak English, not French, most of what is said is in English -- with French subtitles.

And there's a Wikipedia entry for Ekta Parishad, at least in French there is:

Ekta Parishad - WikipédiaEkta Parishad [1](forum de l’unité en hindi) est un mouvement populaire en Inde qui agit selon le principe Gandhien d’action non-violente, avec pour but ...
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekta_Parishad - 33k - En cache - Pages similaires