TOAST TO PRESIDENT SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN
Mr. President, it is with great pleasure both for Us personally and for the entire Ethiopian nation, that We find you here with Us this evening. We, and all Ethiopians with Us, join in welcoming you to our country and in conveying to the Indian people, through you, renewed assurances of the respect and friendship which join us.
The community of interest which surrounds and permeates relations between Ethiopia and India is well founded and solidly based. Trade between our nations flourishes Indian skills and capital are participating in the development of Ethiopian industry, Indian merchants have been active in Ethiopia´s foreign and domestic commerce. Indian teachers are taking part in the vast educational programme which has been a corner-stone of Our policy for the accelerated development of Our nation, Indian officers staff Our country´s Military Academy at Harar, and others are assigned to military units elsewhere throughout Ethiopia, Indians of all levels are active in local philanthropy and community life. All Our relations with the people of India are not new but of long-standing...
...We have been, not unnaturally, saddened in recent weeks as two sister states, states whose peoples should be striving together to overcome the difficulties which beseet them, have been locked in bloody and deadly conflict. You know, Mr. President, that Ethiopians and Indians are dedicated to the same ideals and united in devotion to the same goals. We have stood together and proclaimed in union our common allegiance to the principles of Bandung, principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Orgaanization of African Unity. It has, therefore come as a source of much solace and hope to Us that India has heard and heeded the appeals which the United Nations ans world leaders, Ourself among them, have made that peace be restored. We are gratified that a ceasefire has been effected to the battlefields on which India and Pakistan have opposed one another and it is Our hope that the ceasefire would be lasting and permanent. We are confident that, in the same spirit in which strife and bloodshed have been halted, an acceptable and honourable solution can be found to the problems facing India and her neighbour...
...May we now propose this toast to the furtherance and growth of the existing warm friendship between the Indian and Ethiopian peoples; to the universal acceptance and enrichment of the principles of reason and conscience which upon Your Excellency the degree of Doctor Letters, to the long life and good health of Our honoured guest, President Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan.
Oct. 12, 1965
... Today more than ever before man realizes the bond of unity that exists within the race; he is endeavouring to employ the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the ages. He is employing modern science and technology; he is reaping the benefits, however limited, of political and economic unity; and to that extent, he is transcending the age-old barriers that have divided the race so long and is endeavouring to reflect on the welfare not only of himself and his immediate neighbour but also on the welfare of all the human race. This endeavour is in harmony with the spirit of the mystics of ages gone by "... in the mystic traditions of the different religions we have a remarkable unity of the spirit. Whatever religions they may profess they are spiritual kinsmen. While the different religions in their historic forms bind us to limited groups and militate against the development of loyalty to the world community, the mystics have always stood for the fellowship of humanity," so Your Excellency ( Radhakrishnan) has taught us. And in an effor to carry out this teaching to pursue truth - to promote those bonds common to the human race - Your Excellency has dedicated your whole life. To free the human race from superstition and fear that originate from ignorance; to enable him to transcend the apparent obstacles of race and religion; and to help him regognize the blood-ties of the whole human race, Your Excellency has laboured. To this generation, so tormented between modern knowledge and ancient faith, your scrupulous studies have pointed the way by which man may be saved from traditional superstition and modern scepticism.
Were the thoughts of Plato and Socrates, the beliefs of Christianity and Judaism not harmonized with Hindu philosophy; were Yoga and its various stages not exposed to Western thought; had Western religion and philosophy not been exposed to the philosophy and religion of the East through Your Excellency´s persistent endeavour, how much the poorer would human thought have been!
In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended the differences that divided them and had regognized in their membership in the human race a common bond. Your Excellency´s constant endeavour to challenge this generation to transcend its differences, to regognize its common bond and to work towards a common goal has doubtless made this age pregnant with greatness...
Like I man say before, there is only one God, the God of Hindu is no different than the God of Islam, or Christianity, its merely a different means to praise that same God.
Break down ALL barriors!
Haile I
Ras Zion I
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