Today as the world is under the terror of many crisis, like economic, political and many other we must take a moment to reflect upon the roots of global crisis. Most global crisis find their roots in cultural nonacceptance
and appreciation for diversity among cultures. Today as the world gets closer, it is the need of the hour to give importance to learn to accept diverse cultures. For this purposes, in December 2002, the UN general assembly passed a resolution for World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development to be celebrated on the 21st of May.
This resolution mainly aimed at supporting sustainable governing systems that promote culture and at the same time make it possible to integrate such promotion of culture in traditional sustainable development frameworks. Another major aim of this resolution is to support the mobility of culture specific goods and services along with cultural artists and art professionals in order to enhance the intercultural appreciation, understanding and acceptance.
This resolution passed by the UN is extremely relative in the contemporary society. As a 16 year old living in Italy by myself, belonging to India, with 200 other people from 75 different nationalities in the same place, I have understood the importance of cultural understanding. Different cultures, affected by their geography, history, political situation and religion, have at times extremely similar ideas or at times completely contrasting ideas. However, the only way to explore these similarities and differences is by accepting them and trying to dig deeper to understand where these contrasting or similar ideas have sprouted from.
This cultural understanding results into knowledge of unexpected common ideals and appreciation for contrasting beliefs. However, this is only possible if we allow for a dialogue among these cultures and allow for an open mind to have unbiased opinions. In the contemporary world this is what we need. We need understanding of different ideals and principles and the acknowledgement of the fact that the baseline of humanity remains constant throughout cultures and that is what unites us in the world. This is what is going to promote sustainable development for the world against wars for land territories, promotion of terrorist ideals to fulfill ‘pious religious duties’ or even nonacceptance of particular racial groups due to the historical stigma or rather propaganda associated with them
So today let us all come together to celebrate this dialogue for intercultural understanding and acceptance to promote sustainable cultural development for our world!
