Oprah’s positivity enthralls audience

DHNS

Jaipur, 23 Jan 2012: Television talk show queen Oprah Winfray believes the only way to remove poverty is education and especially of girls, and leadership is the key to change.  She was talking at the Jaipur Literature Festival session named ’O’: Oprah in Jaipur with Burkha Dutt on Sunday.

“For me, education is the most important thing. I have been from village to village in Africa looking for girls like myself and families desperate for education. I was raised by my grandmother in poverty. My grandmother did not live to see me become an educated woman,” Oprah said.

Clad in a mustard silk ’salwar-kameez’ with a pink chiffon dupatta and sporting golden bangles, Oprah said her trip to the city to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival was made possible by  guru Deepak Chopra.

 The venue was packed with thousands of festival goers on a  Sunday morning, and Dutt began the session by saying, “We all love, admire and respect Oprah Winfrey so immensely,  she is easily the most loved person on television, anywhere.” Oprah said, “I held it as my vision to come to India for the last three years.” She told the audience that she loved ‘the sense of calmness,’ ‘a sense of karma: people don’t just talk religion here, they live it,’ and ‘the sense of family tradition’ so evident in this country. This was met by tremendous appreciation.

Oprah said she saw herself primarily as ‘a connector,’ both between people, and for people to their own hearts, which she said is our common humanity. She talked movingly about her work with children and women, talking of how profoundly she was affected by the situation of widows in India, and how she hoped there would be a shift in consciousness towards them, “since it is so important that people get to decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives, and are not made second class citizens because their husbands have died”.

She said, “I have not just had my mind opened but an expanded heart.”
 She promised the festival audience that she would come back again, as there was more to see and understand. Known as a champion of rights for the underdog, Oprah who was born into poverty in Mississippi, overcame many challenges to reach the helm.

 She said, “We are the product of everything that has ever happened to us, and her background had influenced her lifelong passion for racial, economic and gender justice.”

She credits her grandmother for allowing her to develop a personal relationship with God as a child, which has always enabled her to hold out for something greater because ‘you became what you believe. I have never believed there was a ceiling, so I acted like I could do it, and then I did.’

They discussed Oprah’s campaigning for victims of sexual abuse, and how she had come out about her own childhood sexual abuse on her show in order to let other women know they were not alone. She emphasised that it was ‘the shame’ more than ‘the act’ that was so damaging after abuse, and the lasting damaging impact of that.

 She talked of realising the power of her position, saying “in all of my shows, I am always looking for what is the thread of truth.”

She had come to realise it was a platform for energy exchange and she needed to be responsible for putting out positive energy into the world.

She talked of the value of education so that people have choices, and her work in building a Leadership Academy for girls in Africa, saying how important it is to give whatever you have, so that the energy of yourself goes out into the world.

Oprah also talked of her continuing support to Barack Obama.  Dutt observed that one of Oprah’s greatest influences has been on literature, since ‘her book club has revived a love of reading in an age of diminishing attention spans.’

She said the Book Club, which promotes both modern literature and the classics that Oprah personally recommends, had the power ‘to make or break’ an author.

She also talked of marriage, since ‘I am not the marrying kind.’ She said she had ‘great great respect and admiration’ for marriage in India, but she was not suited to it personally, and that had she married her long-term partner, “we probably would have got divorced by now” because “I really am my own woman.”