Smrikva Bowl… a Cosmopolite experience… founded on sport, children culture and music…
Smrikva Bowl is a small but real Cosmopolite experience.
In 1996 I founded Smrikva Bowl that has grown in one of the most important under 10 tennis tournaments in the World. Over the years top players from over 100 countries and all continents gathered.
Smrikva Bowl experience made me think that Children and Sport could be considered Cosmopolitan pillars, later on I added Music as a pillar. While writing this book and learning more about Monet I decided to add Culture as another important pillar.
You have to bear in your mind that each of these pillars can be seen in the opposites. You can view at sport like Nelson Mandela when he said: ”Sport has the power to change the world, the power to inspire and the power to unite people in a way little else can – it is an instrument of peace”. On the other side a Balkan Nationalist leader once said: “Sport is the continuation of war”.
40 years before I founded Smrikva Bowl, few kilometres from my home, on Brioni Islands , on July 19th 1956, Josip Broz Tito (former Yugoslavia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) and Jawaharlai Nehru (India) signed Brioni Declaration and created the Non-Aligned Movement.
Non-Aligned Movement have reached 118 developing countries members and was probably the largest World organization in the men kind history after the United Nations. Indira Gandhi described the rational of the movement as a commingling of many historical, spiritual and cultural streams.
As I said Cosmopolitan Democracy should be imagined as an incomplete painting…
At the end of the book I compare the Cosmopolitan Democracy to an incomplete painting that should inspire the future generations… Many things I do usually develop over time and it takes time from the moment when I get the idea to the time I find the way to give it a form or to present it…
People will hardly see even the same thing in the same way because we all have different experiences, but many people are able to feel empathy and love and they both help people to create the civil society… for the improvements and conservation of wealth an effort of many sincere and honest people is required….
I heard that the American Indians where taking decision evaluating the impact of each decision on seven future generations. This might be a legend but it is a nice to think about it and to get inspired from this idea…
Children as future…
When I wrote the book I had in my mind the young tennis players I gather during the Smrikva Bowl, especially in the first chapter. This children are the future and I decided that I would gave them one day my Book as a gift thus they can understand more in depth the rationale of the tournament they played. With the book on internet they have access to it.
There are different ways to look at the sport. There are different ways to look at the music, to the culture and also to the children.
The vision of the sport preferred for the Smrikva Bowl that can be extended to: culture music and children is the one above mentioned by Nelson Mandela – Madiba’s: “Sport (or Children, or Music, or Culture) has the power to change the world, the power to inspire and the power to unite people in a way little else can – it is an instrument of peace”
I like also this variation: “Culture has the power to change the world, the power to inspire and the power to unite people in a way little else can – it is an instrument of civilisation”
Shimon Peres, another Nobel Prize for Peace, was a guest speaker to one of Ambrosetti’s Young Leader Group meetings. It is tradition that every guest speaker dedicate few words to the Group and he wrote down the following: “The future is always in a minority. Yet the history of the future is more important than the history of the past. It is for the old to remember the past. It is for the young to build the world of tomorrow.
Do it! You can build a world without wars. You can build a new humanity.”
I use to repeat to Smrikva Bowl Ambassadors when we plant the century Old Olive Tree the story that everything around us lives in a delicate equilibrium and with intelligence we should try to understand it and respect it. It is true that every generation face new challenges but there are many examples in the past how the old generations managed and solved particular problems and thus the knowledge, the human curiosity, and will to learn are important.
