Bowing Humbly to Readers: Introducing CCV Team Workers
(In the picture: Shri. Zac, CCV Associate Editor, talking on the elements of success, with some poor students hailing from his village).
By CCV Staff Writer
Church Citizens’ Voice (CCV) is not a one-man show, but the result of a team work for service, not profit, propelled by a vision for unity, fraternity, equality and liberty in an environment of total transparency called for by Jesus, Pope Francis and philosopher Voltaire.
A three-member team has been planning and working together for long. They launched the CCV project seven months ago on Nov.6th 2014. There was always the belief, there still is, that anything started by Church Citizens (laity) without the active support and blessing of the clergy will never succeed. Team CCV instead believes that nothing started with divisive mentalities like, Clergy, Laity, Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, religious, agnostic, atheistic can never ever succeed for the simple reason: none of them have the substance of permanence due to internal feuds and competition for supremacy.
That may be why Pope Francis said: ‘My God is not a Catholic God.’ Only a humanely human and all embracing “Son of Man” vision of Jesus eloquently expressed also by Sri Narayana Guru: “One God, one religion, for one all-embracing humanity” alone can sail gloriously and peacefully above all man-made divisions. Recall here also Vayalar Rama Varma’s prophetic poem: “Man created religions and religions created Gods. Then humans, religions and Gods held the marathon conference and divided this mother earth, divided the minds of humans among themselves.” These divisions should be wiped out of the face of the earth. With this conviction in mind the team worked silently and anonymously for the last seven months as a testing time to see how readers respond, that is to see how many daily visitors (or ‘daily hits’ technically) the new website could attract. Of course CCV started very low, as low as 500, then it shot up to 1000, 5000 etc and to the organisers surprise daily hits crossed 13000 according to our technical expert, Joseph Mattappally. That was a day of jubilation and James Kottoor announced it in one of his articles.
That was the time when the organisers decided to go public and announced the names in the Triumvir in CCV on 15-6-’15, as Zach, Jose and James, imitating distantly in their own way, the mysterious Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all equal but purposely reversing the order here, imitating Peter who got crucified head down and legs up to register his unworthiness to be like Jesus even in death. Thus team CCV also is registering its inability to grasp both the hierarchy and equality in a mysterious Godhead, but at the same time trying to stress and proclaim their equality in CCV team, even when one is called the Chief (or cheap) Editor and the other two as Associate editors.
However readers of CCV must now know who is who in the CCV. The first rung operators are the three already announced. Its second rung workers are the Contributors, Collaborators, Counsellors and Correspondents (CCCC) around the world. We shall introduce them one by one as we go, for easy digestion.
Sri Zach Nedunkanal
So we now start with introducing one of our Associate Editors Sri Zach Nedunkanal. He is a person who hates to launch himself as a journalist or a writer on matters pertaining to Church renewal. Still he goes on writing. Why? He does it, firstly because at least his upbringing in his early youth was church related and therefore when some powerful idea about it germinates, grows and ripens he allows it to explode, that is, to get incarnated, like the Word made flesh. Every honest Word conceived must be let out or be allowed to be born. Suppressing it forcefully is equivalent to artificial termination of a pregnancy. Whenever he expressed himself thus, there was a loud applause and hearty reception, which alone prompts him to go on writing with double vigour. That is his version.
But the fact is he has had his higher studies in universities outside Kerala, including three years in Sussex England, deepening his knowledge at the same time in English, German and French. Being linguistically versatile brought him in contact with many of the renowned and radical thinkers and writers of Europe like Hans Küng, Eugen Drewermann and philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, sociologists like Erich Fromm etc.
He also kept notes on what he read and liked. As for his formal regular education in his youthful years, he says he profited practically nothing, except gaining elementary knowledge in maths and the two languages, English and Malayalam. Hence he sets no value at all on his formal education and hates to look at even his post graduate certificates in philosophy and sociology and hesitates to formulate a formal curriculum vitae.
He started his career in Mumbai as social worker and then as a trainee in Photo-typesetting at the firm SPADS at Worli, the very first firm in India to introduce computerized typesetting. He then moved to Canada and from there to Switzerland working for about 25 years in the field of Desk Top Publishing (DTP) and printing. He dedicated his ample leisure time to avid reading and study of languages. Zach was born on 28th January 1943 and lives at: Peringulam post, via Poonjar, Kottayam Dt. – 686582.Tel. 04822271922 / 9961544169, email: znperingulam@gmail.com. He is married with two children, both well employed in Switzerland.
What is important for Zach, as he is called by friends, is that he hates to promise big – A BIG ACHE DIN – and produce little. This interviewer also agrees with that view. So let us wait and see. We shall interview him after one or two years later.
