Meet the Indo-Canadian who will be honoured with top US peace award

An Indo-Canadian specialist on cross cultural family mediation will be honored with the prestigious Gandhi King Ikeda Award for Peace at a ceremony in the US for promoting peace and human rights education.

Dr Mohamed Keshavjee, a South Africa-born specialist will be conferred the award in Atlanta on April 5 at the 2016 edition of the Annual Peace Fair and Interfaith Assembly hosted by the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Keshavjee will make a keynote address that will highlight the roles of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela at the event commemorating the 48th death anniversary of Dr King. His address is entitled Gandhi, King and Mandela- Precursors to Transformative Mediation in the twentieth Century.

One of the organizers in a statement said that,

Dr Mohamed Keshavjee will be honored with the Gandhi King Ikeda Award for Peace in recognition of his ongoing dedication to emphasizing the role that cosmopolitan ethics and transformative mediation play in promoting peace and human rights education. The Award signifies the values practiced and preached by Mohandas K Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Dr Daisaku Ikeda, celebrating the three great leaders’ commitment to humanitarianism and non-violence.

“Keshavjee articulates and embodies the principles. Most of the characteristic of these exemplars and their contributions advance the human capacity to realise Dr King’s vision of a world distinguished by the dignity of nature with rights in the order of the law,” said Dr Lawrence Edward Carter Sr, Dean of King Chapel.

He has spent three decades working with the secretariat of the Aga Khan in France on programmes aimed at improving the quality of life of people in some of the poorest areas of the world through the Ismaili Imamat and the Aga Khan Development Network. His recently published memoir ‘Into that Heaven of Freedom’ has been hailed in a number of countries which launches in India and South Africa later this year.

Delving into his ancestral connections in Gujarat and other areas of India; the migration of some of them to South Africa and then to East Africa, and the Ismaili community finally settling across the globe; the book chronicles the history of South Asians in Africa with a particular focus on the role played by Mahatma Gandhi in the evolution of African political consciousness.

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Keshavjee now lives in the UK with his wife Dr Amina Jindani, a world-renowned specialist on tuberculosis who works at the St George’s University Hospital in London.