Kicking off RC Pune Sports City’s 30th birthday celebrations, just on the eve of the inauguration of Rotary’s eighth Peace Center at the Symbiosis International University (SIU), RI President Francesco Arezzo said the completion of “30 years of a Rotary club is a wonderful moment to reflect what was done in these 30 years, even though 30 for a Rotary club is not a great age. Yours is still a very young club!”
But this “young club” already had two district governors and one RI director, “so it’s clearly a club that has grown very quickly and very well.”
While congratulating them for the great work already done, he said, “we have to always look to the future. What we have already done might be wonderful, but more important is what we will do in the future.” He said it was a “wonderful coincidence” that the club’s 30th anniversary came just a day before the setting up of Rotary’s new Peace Center in Pune. “This means that in the future of this club there will be peace. And another coincidence is what PRID (Mahesh) Kotbagi said that today our world is broken by a lot of wars. And peace at this moment is one of the great challenges of our world.”
Even though he had a short time… all of two weeks… to plan for his presidential year, Arezzo said he had zeroed in on peace as one of his main goals. Because the world around us was changing so rapidly, Rotary clubs would also have to change too, he said. “To guide this change, we need young people, we need the Rotaractors. Because, the changes in society are a mystery for people like us. We are too old to see, feel and understand where society is going. But they, the youth can feel the change. They see the change when it is just beginning. They smell the change of society, and know how to change our clubs. They know where we have to go to be relevant and an important part of our society.”
Along with peace, evolving and elevating Rotaract, and integrating it into Rotary were important features going ahead, he added. “I also believe that this cooperation between our Peace Center and Symbiosis University will bring a lot of wonderful results to Rotary.”
He urged the club members to do more work on peace and to integrate Rotaract into Rotary in order to remain relevant to their community.
Both Arezzo and TRF trustee chair Holger Knaack were present at the event during which a Rotary Peace Pole was put up at one of SIU’s campuses in Pune city.
Knaack congratulated the club for its 30 years of service and said he was delighted to note how it was supporting so many programmes for the youth as well as Rotaract. Addressing the large number of Rotaractors in the hall, he said even though Rotary had adopted ‘elevate Rotaract’ 10 years ago, “there is a lot more we need to do to bring Rotaract to the level we all want to see it. We need you and you need us; we need you Rotaractors, because we want to know how the future Rotarians and donors to the TRF would look like, and why they donate to the Foundation.”
He told RC Pune Sports City members that he was delighted to know that “you are celebrating diversity, equity and inclusion in your club. We all know how important this is to show the world where Rotary is headed. And we all know that clubs and societies, who are open, will be the most successful societies in the future.”
Coming to giving to TRF, he said while both the small and the big donors were very important to the organisation, money is just one part. Projects is the other part, and along with big donors, we are also looking at bigger projects because we’ve learnt that bigger projects are more successful, and make more impact and can be measured better. That’s important. TRF really puts emphasis on measurement because we want to know how our projects work and if they work.”
Knaack added that it didn’t make any sense to put money into something that didn’t work. He was aware that sometimes the application process for GGs were “complicated, but there is a good reason for that. We want to ensure that we are doing the best projects ever, and measure their impact after 5 and even 10 years, because we don’t want to waste Rotarians’ money.”
It was a miracle that “we found Symbiosis as a partner for this first Peace Center in South Asia, because our values fit so well. And also because we want to integrate our Peace Fellows more and more into Rotary. We need your (Rotarians in Pune) commitment to make sure that our Peace Fellows are integrated into Rotary, because there are so many opportunities to do so.”
He urged the assembled Rotary family to not only celebrate the new Peace Pole which had been put up at that campus, but also remember the pledges they had all put on the white board beside it. “A Peace Pole is a wonderful thing, but a Peace Pole just alone is nothing. A Peace Pole should always be a reminder to us to do even more for peace.”
The trustee chair urged all Rotarians to imbibe the spirit of past RI President Sakuji Tanaka’s theme Peace through Service in 2012. “Because every single service project we do is a commitment to peace. I love these colourful cranes, which have been put up in the hall as they symbolised peace in the Japanese PRIP’s theme.”
But he cautioned them that just “talking about peace is not enough. We have to work for peace, and the service projects, supported by TRF, are definitely a pathway to peace.”
TRF trustee Bharat Pandya said that it was a privilege and pleasure for Indian Rotarians that a Rotary Peace Center was being established in India, and that too in a prestigious institution like the Symbiosis International University. Out of 17 institutions in 6 countries invited to submit expressions of interest by TRF in Feb 2024, there were 2 finalists; a university in South Korea and this one in Pune. After a lot of evaluation and consideration, SIU was chosen to host this Peace Center.
He congratulated Rotarians of RI districts 3131 and 3141 which would host and co-host this centre. As the institution was in Pune, RID 3131, “it will be the primary responsibility of the district’s Rotarians to make the Peace scholars who come from across Asia feel both welcome, wanted and at home, with the spirit of cooperation, friendliness and tolerance.”
Referring to Symbiosis founder Dr Mujumdar’s comment that earlier he had found foreign students in the city facing conflict, intolerance and so many other problems, he said this proved that “the real way to peace is to have a spirit of live and let live.”
He complimented members of RC Pune Sports City for completing 30 years of service, and DG Santosh Marathe for the “tremendous work your district has done in the last seven months.”
PRID Mahesh Kotbagi, who is a member of RC Pune Sports City, said that we all live in extremely troubled times and “today, I see so much instability, polarisation. Whether it’s Ukraine and Russia, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, or Venezuela, all of it makes one feel very sad.”
The ubiquitous image of a little Syrian boy drowned in the sea while trying to escape with his family from his country, had stirred the conscience of world some years ago. “These are not geopolitical problems. They are failures of trust, harmony and opportunity.”
As his club celebrated 30 years of its existence, “we honour the legacy that we have always had a dialogue on all kinds of issues.”
Founder of Symbiosis S B Mujumdar said “we at SIU are inspired by the values Rotary stands for, and grateful to Rotary in Pune which always came to Symbiosis’s rescue when we were facing teething problems. We are grateful to Rotarians in the world that they thought it fit that SIU gets their new Peace Center.” He was confident this Peace Center would turn out scholars who would work effectively on conflict resolution.
Giving an overview of RI District 3131, its DG Santosh Marathe said this was one of the topmost performing districts, “whether it is in the growth of Rotaract and Interact membership or service projects. Right now, our clubs are doing 3,000 different service projects, and the number of global grants we do every year keeps going up. It’s not so much about the number or the value of the grants; our endeavour is to see that 100 per cent of our clubs get involved in the GGs… whether in finding funding or implementing partners or playing a role in the execution of the projects. We are also working on peace.”
Addressing the meet, DRR Dwijesh Nashikkar said Rotaractors of the district had been “performing consistently in Zone 7. We have 111 Rotaract clubs and over 2,300 Rotaractors.” This year, their primary focus was on professional development; they were also doing a big CPR training which could save many lives. Their Drishti project was portrayed in Rotaract News, a matter of pride for them, and they would be signing an MoU to become a community partner of Amazon.
Dr Rajiv Yeravdekar, dean and faculty of Health and Biomedical Sciences, SIU, thanked Rotary and PRID Kotbagi for always supporting the health services offered by SIU, particularly to poor patients, specially its dialysis centre. The 900-bed SIU Hospital and Research Centre provided top quality clinical services free of cost to the neighbouring villages.
Dr Vidya Yeravdekar, Pro Chancellor of SIU, welcomed the university partnership with Rotary. Club president Sushrut Sardesai said for the club members, the completion of 30 years were more moments of “reflection, gratitude and pride, not just a celebration.”
Pictures by Rasheeda Bhagat