Kiran Bedi: How i remade one of india’s toughest prisons

Now I'm going to give you a story. It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey. Let me begin
with my parents. I'm a product of a visionary mother and father. I followed two things which they gave me.
One, they said, "Life is on an incline. You either go up, or you come down." And the second thing, which has
stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in
your life, good or bad. Out of 100, 90 are your creation. They're good. They're your creation. Enjoy it. If they're
bad, they're your creation. Learn from it. Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing. You've got to
just respond to the situation. But that response comes out of those 90 points. Since I'm a product of these
philosophies, that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got. I'm a product of opportunities, rare
opportunities in the '50s and the '60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my
parents were giving me was something unique.

And what comes next is I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable
stamina, because of my experience as a tennis player. it was a new pattern of policing. For me policing stood
for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect. This is something like a new definition ever given
in policing in India -- the power to prevent. Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it,
or power to punish. But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was
growing up. How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10? So this was how it came into my
service. I redefined policing concepts in India. Me being sensitive,compassionate, my sensitivity to injustice,
where what made me different from these men, they were what made the difference

This is about tough policing, equal policing. Now I was known as "here's a woman that's not going to listen."
So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no. I now went to a prison
assignment as a police officer. Normally police officers don't want to do prison. They sent me to prison to lock
me up. This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals. Obviously, it was. But 10,000 men,
of which only 400 were women. Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters -- some of them I'd sent to jail as a
police officer outside. And then how did I deal with them? The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to
look at them. And I said, "Do you pray?" They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit. I said,
"Do you pray?" And they didn't say anything. I said, "Do you pray? Do you want to pray?" They said, "Yes." I
said, "All right, let's pray." I prayed for them, and things started to change.

visualise education inside the prison.where everybody in the prison studies. I started this with community
support. Government had no budget. It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world.
This was initiated in Delhi prison. You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class. These are hundreds of
classes. Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program -- the same den in which they thought
they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten. We converted this into an ashram -- from a
prison to an ashram through education. I think that's the bigger change. It was the beginning of a change.
Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers. Books came from donated school books. Stationery was
donated. Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison. Now if I'd not
done that, it would have been a hellhole.

Let me wrap it up. I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which
is thousands -- India is all about thousands. Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India. That's a
big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India. That's
the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life.
That's the second landmark. I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you
would never ever get to see anywhere in the world. One, the numbers you'll never get to see. Secondly, this
concept. There was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners. One thousand prisoners
who sat in meditation. This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor.. I took the
same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison? Because crime is a
product of a distorted mind. It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control. Not by
preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind. I took the same thing to the police,
because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was "we" and "they," and that the
people don't cooperate. This worked.

Acceptance speech 18 oct 2006 Washington State Book Awards, Seattle

Thank you all for the honor given, through me, to Literature by this award. It makes me happy, of course,
because writers live on praise; and because it is regional, and I love the Pacific Northwest. But I feel
above all that I’m here as a proxy, a stand-in, for Literature. Literature is too busy to come collect her
prize, and she’s too big to get into the building, even this building which was built for her. Literature is
huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English. She
is very big, very polyglot, very old, even older than I am by about 3000 years, and she weighs a lot.
When we come to judge civilisations we see how heavy Literature weighs in the balance. Whole peoples
are dismissed as ’savage’ or ’primitive’, meaning they didn’t write things down, while others are seen as
supreme because they left a literature. Take the Ancient Greeks. If it weren’t for Homer and Sophocles
and Thucycides, all we’d know of them is that they were awfully good with marble. We wouldn’t know that
they invented tragedy and democracy. We might not even know that democracy had been invented.

There have been governments that celebrated literature, but most governments dislike it, justly
suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal
in the basement is writing it down. Of course they do their best to police the basement, but it’s hard,
because Government and Literature, even when they share a palace, exist on different moral planes.
Each is the ghost in the other’s bedroom. A government can silence writers easily, yet Literature always
escapes its control. Literature cannot control a government; poets, as poets, do not legislate. What they
can do is set minds free of the control of any tyrant or demagogue and his lies and disinformation.

The Greek Socrates wrote: “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” Evil government relies on
deliberate misuse of language. Because literary skill is the rigorous use of language in the pursuit of
truth, the habit of literature, of serious reading, is the best defense against believing the half-truths of
ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

The poet Shelley wrote: “The imagination is the great instrument of moral good.” Believing that, I see a
public library as the toolshed, the warehouse, concert hall, temple, Capitol of imagination — of moral
good. So here — right here where we are, right now — is where America stands or falls. Can we still
imagine ourselves as free? If not, we have lost our freedom.

Thank you for celebrating, through this honor to my work, the invaluable unruliness of literature, the
essential liberty of the imagination.