Sonakshi Sinha speaks on UN Right to Education at Born Free & Equal podcast
Born Free & Equal, an initiative printing the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has managed to bring an impressive line-up of artistes from Hindi Cinema with an aim to create awareness about basic rights and equality. In order to promote the universal declaration of Human Rights and Indian Constitution, 30 biggest names from the film industry have been chosen to talk about different human rights. Some of these names include actors and directors like R Balki, Sonakshi Sinha, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Nandita Das, Shonali Bose, and many more.
United for Human Rights, the world’s biggest non-governmental human rights education program, through the Born Free & Equal initiative’s podcast will consist of well-known artists giving motivational stories about their struggles and successes to do with the human right they feel is most important as well as their ideas concerning bringing it to life. And one of the important human rights that was talked about by Sonakshi Sinha was Right to Education.
In the podcast, Sonakshi talks about this human right in-depth, from giving her opinion about education in general to the importance of educating girls. Sonakshi says, “This is a right that has the solution to a lot of our problems. If you educate a person, most of the other human rights will be taken care of – you won’t have to fight for them because if you’re educating a person, they know that as human beings, this is what we deserve. It’s very, very important to me. To live better, to feel better, to be good to others, to have people be good to you. And I think just to create a better world, whether it’s taking care of the environment, taking care of your country, taking care of the people around you, all this comes with being educated. So I think just to create a better world for all of us, education is the most important thing in the world.”
Talking about educating girls the actress says, “Education is just the most basic right. I think that’s why it’s so important to me because if you educate a person you’re empowering a person, especially women. And you notice in the recent past, I’ve been also kind of fighting for the education of young girls because they are the ones who are deprived of it. Why should they be deprived from it? If people were educated enough, they would know how not to discriminate between a man and a woman. Education takes care of unemployment. It takes care of the environment. It takes care of equality. It takes care of so many other problems. So it definitely should be a number one on everybody’s life.”
She further adds, “When I see a child on the street begging, it just breaks my heart because that child should be in school right now, getting the education that they deserve, to make sure that they don’t have to do this for the rest of their lives. So I think creating awareness around education is very, very important – a must.”
The podcast provides information about the right from both the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Indian Constitution – giving practical information about what the right is, what the laws regarding it are, what are the major issues surrounding it and how it relates to everyday life.
The initiative and podcast, Born Free and Equal have been created by South Asia Ambassador for United for Human Rights, Sheena Chohan, who was awarded the Hero Award at the United Nations in New York last year and Fraser Scott, International Ambassador for United for Human Rights.