This acephalous world

What is common to Riken Patel, British/Canadian social entrepreneur, and Sharbat Gula, the Afghani girl, the photograph of whose face on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, launched a thousand emotions in the breast of the Western world?

Nothing barring the color of their eyes.

But something like globalization is common to them as well, though Sharbat has zero notion of globalization and hence can't take advantage of it, while Riken is awash in the art of making it big in the global world.

Globalization separates Sharbat and Riken by an infinite bandwidth of power, placing the Afghani girl in tatters at the receiving and the Western millionaire with a conscience at the giving ends of the bandwidth. 

Patel is the founder of Avaaz, an International human rights advocacy group that harnesses the power and reach of technology to help "organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want." 

Awaaz is the world's fastest growing (till date it has 25 million subscribers, though it was launched as recently as 2005) online activism forum. It's most likely to help women like Gula if they are the receiving end of the injustice spectrum.

I had a tough time tracing the organization back to its founder, and that's one of the other aspects of a global entity like Awaaz. 

I chanced upon the organization's name in a NY Times Op-Ed column by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who writes of the prospects of genocide looming large on the African horizon. The name struck me as non-Western and I surmised that the founders must be of South Asian origin.

These days, it's not easy to find out who the face behind the .org is, and I was reminded of the description of the networks of power within the circuitry of globalization as "acephalous" or headless. 

From whom does the fountain of grief originate? If somebody were to ask this of the ancient Greek world, the answer would be a pat, "Niobe," as we all know precisely which peg to hang the inconsolable tears that flowed in gushing currents as a result of the deaths of sons and grandsons in the Trojan war, on: the almost eyeball-less eyes of the maternal Niobe.

But were one to ask from whom the fountain of empathy and activism originates in the case of an organization like Awaaz, the answer would be hard to get to fast.

It took me a series of searches online to link Awaaz to Riken Patel.