Thank you IJP. Thanks for not just providing euros to travel and live in beautiful places of Germany, but more effectively giving opportunities to experience the great nation and all its facets like polity, economy and the social life of Deutschland. Political spirit of Germany always fascinates me as do the literature, art and culture. I always admired German punctuality, sense of discipline and the tremendous urge of rebuilding nation. From even childhood all these good impressions melted in mind, and constructed a flowery figure of German virtues.

Being a journalist I had an opportunity to stay in Berlin, to cover General Election in 2005, and also 3 months for an online journalism course conducted by InWent. In those days I rechecked my notion about this great nation. And I fell in love with all good qualities of German people.

I am, neither, saying that all German people are saintly honest, never deceive, never peep into other’s bank account or email accounts, rather there are certain instances of these sorts of indiscipline to take place, but surely the level of honesty and transparency is notably high than other people I have encountered yet.

Regarding this I was seriously talking to Christian Bartolf of Gandhi Zentrum in Berlin, and he, the peace activist, humbly refused to take this generalized complement. His explanation for my short cut generalization has some socio psychological value.

According to him, the people of this great nation has encountered several fatal blows of history, heinous untruth of Third Reich haunting the psyche of the nation, generations after generation people of Germany is sentimentally shocked and ignited to stand against all untruth and violence. From general schools children gets inspiration to grow acceptance about foreigners. They are taught to hate all vices, Hitler had.

However that is not all, not all people of Germany is out of racism, few Indian friends of mine who live in Magdeburg says that sometime they have faced violent attacks from neo Nazis. So, racist violence and hatred are not obliterated from the land. They are still dangerous disease. Forces to destroy green serenity of Deutschland exist like lethal virus. However, the Merkel administration and civil society agencies are trying hard to wipe them out or rectify them.

The best way they find, which I must appreciate, to cope with all historical stigmas is exhibiting the fact as it is. I find it as honesty the best policy.

In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar or in other countries of south East Asia we saw organized effort to hide historical facts and distort the history, some time this is done by political people, some time the power itself does the crime. During this fellowship we came across two Chinese journalist friends, they explained the Chinese art of hush-hush governance.

Shi feike, one of fellow IJPians from China described how democracy is denied, free speech chocked in China, as we all knew, but when he tries to describe, overcoming the linguistic barrier, the political injustice to the people of China, it became vivid and evoked reminiscence of all injustices to the humanity, I have seen in countries like Tunisia, Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe. The trouble to tell the truth is more difficult than to live in those countries and do business. Journalists are threatened to death. Newspaper houses are forced to down shutter, and people undoubtedly denied justice.

In almost all cases in South East Asia the freedom for media are farces. Even India, which is known and admired for providing the solemn right like freedom of speech as fundamental right and carries honor of being the largest democracy, media is also under scanner, Government itself supervises the media, there is the ministerial berth to scrutinize it. Not only that, political bias is the other hazard for Indian journalism.