Time for compassion: The Charter is unveiled today

Update:

The Charter for Compassion is being launched right now. You can read it via the widget below (and also affirm the Charter). More details to come.

In anticipation of the launch of The Charter for Compassion, R.AGE (the section within The Star that I work for) published some quotes from young college students about what compassion means to them, and got them to share an incident where someone had showed compassion. You can read the article here and watch the video below.

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I find got wind of The Charter of Compassion when I read a Tweet by Ija (@spicyguy) about the videoshoot they were making. Malaysians were invited to stop by a studio to record what compassion means to them to create a viral video to promote Nov 12 – today – when The Charter of Compassion will be unveiled.

More than 167 events are being organised across the world in conjunction with it. In Kuala Lumpur, former PM Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is launching the charter in Malaysia. Anas Zubedy, who is part of the committee I think, blogs about it here.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Charter of Compassion was the wish of renowned British author Karen Armstrong (a former nun who left the convent who has now written many books on religion). Read more about Karen here.

Karen made this wish during her TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk where she was one of the three winners of the TED talks in 2008. Each of the three is given $100,000 and help with fulfilling their wish.

Together with some partners, they compiled over 150,000 contributions from citizens of the world and sat down with an 18-person Council of Conscience to draft the charter based on the words of the contributions, which consist of such respected names as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sheikh Ali Gomaa and Malaysia’s own Chandra Muzaffar.

I personally thing that the time is apt for such a charter. I’m not sure what the content of it is – as it will only be unveiled today – but needless to say, anything that promotes compassion in the every man for himself dog-eats-dog world we now live in and war is rife.

Even in Malaysia itself, so much has happened.

I wasn’t able to go to be part of this video and won’t be able to attend the launch today, but I am all for the project. Here are the videos that were released.

If you’re on Twitter, follow @thecharter for updates. For more information about the Charter for Compassion, visit its website here.

9am Malaysian time (+8 GMT)

Tags: anas zubedy, archbishop desmond tutu, chandra muzaffar, charter for compassion, history of god, ija mohan, karen armstrong, sheikh ali gomaa, spicyguy, TED, tun abdullah ahmad badawi, Twitter