Peace is liberty in tranquility

When I first heard the word Social Responsibility, I said to myself – man as an adult how many responsibilities can one have 😉 ? I kind of ignored this word and somehow developed an attitude to ignore the topic altogether. And then Katrina happened in 2005. The devastation it caused to the state of Louisiana especially city of New Orleans was heartbreaking.

I saw a lot of colleagues in my organization volunteering to go to New Orleans to help and I again heard people talking about Social Responsibility. This time I decided to really focus and spend sometime understanding what social responsibility is. In simple worlds what I gathered was – to stop being too self absorbed and figure out how I can help out. So I started by asking around what options does one have to be socially responsible.

Over past 15 years I have evolved in my understanding of what it takes to be a socially responsible citizen of this world. One might think it is hard, but come to think about it – really not that hard. It is all that our parents would have taught all of us while we were growing up. Be nice, being fair, being truthful, helping others etc. Now I still cannot claim myself to be an expert socially responsible citizen and I DO NOT claim to be a best one out there. I am way down the food chain, but I feel very strongly that everyone of us who is born in this world need to be socially responsible and do their own part of making this world more beautiful and safe.

While reading and researching about Social Responsibility I found this wonderful chart that very simplistically provides examples of what Individual Social responsibilities can be (click on the image links the original website). This in my mind is just a representation but it gives an idea what those responsibilities are and if one spends enough time in looking at these examples, we would realize why these are important.