Dear AIPC Fellows

With a sense of pride and purposefulness we bring to you the first edition of Inspire!, our very own instrument for progress. Inspire! has been conceptualized after a lot of thought and deliberation. It highlights our ideology and values and shares our initiatives with broader audience. But most importantly, Inspire! is here to turn the spotlight on our Fellows. This platform is here for all of us to connect and converge, introspect and ideate, frame and formulate. It will be our collective Voice for Progress.

For our inaugural issue we share with you good wishes conveyed to us by INC President, Smt Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, and former INC President, Shri Rahul Gandhi. In this, and in our forthcoming issues, we shall have the Chairman and Deputy Chairman sharing their thoughts with us while we also bring to you communications from other seniors leaders of the Congress party, thought leaders and experts. This will include interviews, articles, views and opinions. Inspire! will bring to you glimpses of our achievements of the past 70 years, and will present accurate facts and figures from India’s history.

It shall also be our endeavour to showcase the work being done by our Fellows in different parts of the country. Development initiatives, start−up ideas, acts of philanthropy or any positive contribution for making the social fabric more robust − our attempt will be to share it all. We are confident that cross linking of ideas coupled with peer validation shall lead to collective creativity and infuse vigour. Do share with us your core competencies and help us understand your skill sets for us to be able to utilize these while compiling this periodical. Remember, Inspire! belongs to each and every one of us and with our collective effort we would make it worthy of its name!

As we take the first step in this journey towards carving a better tomorrow it will be useful to remember that difficult situations hardly ever have easy solutions. And so our task is cut out for us. It ight seem like an uphill journey but taking measured, steady steps with our eyes to the ground, and never losing touch with the reality around us, will certainly bear fruit.

Together, we will be working, at removing rigid and redundant mindsets, at restoring sisterhood and brotherhood, at redefining progress and development, at restoring order to our beloved country which is suffering under chaotic governance, at re−establishing unity in diversity, and at making the world a better place. We shall work with vision and humility, with courage and conviction, with magnanimity and the spirit of inclusiveness.

We also need to understand that every initiative must now be taken forward with a sense of urgency, lest it be forgotten that there is a political ideology in this fast imploding country that unites rather than divides, one that respects every person’s right to her beliefs and does not marginalize people on the basis of caste, religion or region.

Through Inspire! we must aim to suggest action−oriented strategies because whether it is the collarless workers desperately walking home or the white collared professionals working from home, every Indian today is experiencing a deepening sense of despondency and despair. Be it the self−employed or the unemployed, shop keepers or mall owners, small and medium entrepreneurs or large financial institutions, it is time to sensitize each and every Indian that there is an ideology, espoused by the Congress, that is empathetic of their concerns. That this is the anchor they can depend on, an organization that gives the people their due, has vision and experience, stands for solution−based approach to situations and has a vision to make India truly a great nation.

I once again urge each and every one of you to view Inspire! with a sense of ownership and participation. Let us feel inspired by our objectives as we work towards our goals. Let us also spread the word around and help in expanding the AIPC family with our outreach.

I would like to share with you a mail ID where you can send your submissions or any other appropriate information you may like to share with the editorial team. Do feel free to share your thoughts and mail these to inspire@profcongress.com.

My heartfelt thanks to the Dr Tharoor, Chairman AIPC and Dy. Chairman Mr Soz, for making Inspire! happen. We hope to make this into a must−read experience for all our readers. Many thanks to Aalim Javeri, COO, for his presence and support in conceptualizing the inaugural issue of Inspire!. My personal thanks to Rachna, Managing Editor, for her perseverance and support, as well as to the entire Inspire! editorial team for the work put in for making this journal possible.

Jai Hind.