Us against them KIRTHI JEYAKUMAR, 27
Kirthi Jeyakumar
is one of the most pacific lawyers you may come across in the city. She’s soft-spoken, talks with benevolence and waxes eloquent on transformation. But then, she’s also a catalyst of peace. After a degree in international law at the School of Excellence in Law, Chennai, Jeyakumar volunteered for over five years with the UN and missed her chance to go to Oxford “by a whisker.”“But fate took me to the University of Peace in Costa Rica, which is a UN mandated university,” she says.
Ambassador of peace
In the last seven years, Jeyakumar has gone to Libya as part of a deployment that associated itself with the Arab Spring; worked as an intern writer for an assignment based in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and most recently, got invited to be part of Michelle Obama’s conference, United State of Women in Washington DC, in which she participated virtually. “As a child, my dream was to work with survivors of war in any capacity,and possibly be able to stop war,” she says. Jeyakumar started The Red Elephant Foundation three years ago, to work on storytelling, civilian peace-building and activism.
She works with children to sensitise them on gender equality and deems this vertical to be her most crucial. “If my workshop with children is to make them critically evaluate the messages they receive about body image, gender equality and homosexuality, I try to tell them that they can’t judge men and women on their sexuality or look at them as two defined blocks,” she says.
Jeyakumar wants every NGO in the country to realise someday that they don’t have any more work left to do because so much has changed. Until then, she hopes to have trained at least 5,000 children in the next five years.