North India, or at least the part of it that lies to the north of Agra, has invented many foods, especially after partition in 1947. Butter chicken. Kulcha a la aloo, ie stuffed kulchas. Chow mein avec tadka, which was our revenge against the Chinese for mauling us in the 1962 war. (Avec means ‘with’ in French, by the way). Dosas stuffed with kheema, which was a specialty of the Coffee House in Delhi. I think it reminded the Keralites who ran it of their kothu parottas back home. And in the 1980s a friend told me that Indian Airlines even tried putting kheema in idlis. Ouch!

The first of January should, in real terms, be another day. But it is happily not just that since we attach a special significance to it. As someone put it, we see it as a reset time when we start afresh, dream a new dream, and set new goals. The day serves as an opportunity to start on a clean slate, think anew and even seek inspiration from those who have successfully ventured into areas we haven’t and made a difference or achieved a measure of success.

As the Interactors from Utterbuniyadi ­Vidyalaya in Amalsadi, a tribal village near Surat, Gujarat, worked on their cleanliness drive, the wind seemed determined to make their job harder. “The moment we started sweeping, paper bags and plastic bottles flew right past us like they had grown feet,” says Sahil Rathod, the president of the newly installed Interact club. “We couldn’t stop laughing, it was as though the wind was playing games with us. One of us even chased down a plastic bag that had taken off with the breeze.”

The magic of Rotary doesn’t just happen among senior leaders. It happens where you are — in your clubs, in your communities, every time you act on an idea and change someone’s life. Thank you for all you do to create a better world,” RI President Stephanie Urchick said at the TRF seminar, prior to the Kochi Institute. Urging Rotarians to continue donating to TRF, she shared a couple of her experiences highlighting TRF’s role in transforming lives and communities.

The next Rotary peace centre could come up either at the Symbiosis University in Pune or in Seoul, TRF Trustee Martha Helman, a member of RC Boothbay Harbor, US, told Rotary News in an interview at the Kochi Institute. She has been instrumental in getting the huge funding of $15 million from the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation, which made possible TRF setting up its latest Rotary Peace Center in Istanbul, Turkey.

In a world where violence and conflicts are tearing apart nations and wars are being waged in different parts of the world, environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk left the participants of the Kochi Institute with a different thought when he said: “when we talk about world peace, today’s problem is not the huge war going on between nations but between man and nature. I believe that the World War III is already on between human beings and nature.”