Voice for the Voiceless
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is such an honor for me to be here tonight in this iconic UN building celebrating UNICEF's seventieth anniversary. First of all, I wanna take a moment to celebrate every minute of these seventy years where UNICEF has worked selflessly for every child.
Today, we all stand here to renew that exact pledge. To every single person involved in UNICEF, keep doing what you're doing, because the world is a better place because of you. My involvement with UNICEF started ten years ago in India.
Today, I stand here humbled, enriched, committed because of that exact experience. I want to thank the India team who has worked tirelessly with me for over ten years now for the amazing journey so far, and I wanna thank UNICEF for giving me this opportunity to extend the work that I can do to the world.
Everywhere we look today, you can see the advancement of man, how the human mind has basically invented, created, and built a whole new world.
Yet strangely, every time that I have been on the field, I've wondered how that same human mind continues to allow the exploitation of children across the world, where girls are being denied to go to school, where children are living without clean water, medical care, protection, even food, where their bodies and minds are unprotected from violence, abuse, and exploitation, where they are targets of war.
Every day, horrifying images, fresh horrifying images flash across our screens. A ten-year-old girl dressed as a bride marrying a man twice her age. A boy sitting at the back of an ambulance trying to understand what just happened to him.
A girl watching her brother go to school as she prepares for another day of housework. A boy's lifeless body washing up on a beach far away from his home. Ladies and gentlemen, people of the world, I we ask you to join us today to become the collective voice of oppressed children across the world in our fight against the injustices that they have had to endure every day.
I thank you for being there today. I'm humbled, inspired even more as I look around and I listen to everyone here, not just to be a part of UNICEF, but to be involved with all of you individuals who have selflessly dedicated their voice, their time, their heart into helping the world see light, that we are seriously endangering our future, which is our children.
I recently read a quote somewhere that being human is given, but keeping our humanity is our choice. So let's choose humanity. Let's choose to act now, let's choose to fight now, and let's choose to ensure a better world for our children and their children and the generations to come.
My wish for children is freedom. The freedom to think, the freedom to live. Thank you very much.
