Letter from the Secretary General
Dear Delegates,
It is with overwhelming pride and an immense sense of gratitude that I, Inaya Vora, Secretary-General, extend to each of you a most heartfelt welcome to the 30th Edition of Cathedral Model United Nations, CMUN 2026. Thirty years is a considerable milestone for any institution, but it is a particularly meaningful one for a conference whose founding purpose, to imbue the skill of diplomacy amongst young people, has never been more relevant than it is today. The world that greeted the delegates of CMUN 1996 bears almost no resemblance to the one you all inhabit at present, and it is worth understanding what it means that this conference has endured through all of it.
When CMUN first convened in 1996 as a single-committee conference, India’s GDP stood at approximately $400 billion. It approaches $4 trillion today. Fewer than 14 million Indians had access to the internet; that number now exceeds 900 million. India’s government was so fractured that it had three different prime ministers within a single year. Today, it is the world’s largest democracy by population. Concurrently, a post Cold War consensus had settled on liberal democracy as the direction of global politics; that conviction has since unravelled entirely. Artificial intelligence, once mere academic inquiry, is presently restructuring every institution on earth. Above all, the number of active conflicts, roughly 25 in 1996, is now at its highest since the Second World War. And yet, despite the plethora of seismic upheavals that have occurred in the last three decades, CMUN opened its doors every August, greeting zealous students from various corners of the world to debate, listen, and lead.
This is the embodiment of something far greater and far older than CMUN itself. Diplomacy, as a practice, has withstood every conflict that has tested it. In fact, it rests on a simple yet remarkable premise: parties in disagreement are better served by dialogue than by its absence. As Sun Tzu famously writes, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. This conviction has preceded the United Nations, the League of Nations, and any similar organisation that humanity has created. And now, with global unanimity growing more elusive, the practice of diplomacy is an essential one.
CMUN has championed this pursuit of diplomacy for thirty years. Generation after generation of students have passed through CMUN’s committee rooms and emerged, in ways both measurable and imperceptible, changed. Some have discovered a facility for debate they did not know they possessed; some have learnt the discipline of defending a position with unyielding conviction; and some have found a passion for public policy, international law, or history that would go on to define the course of their lives. Even so, few delegates leave MUN conferences realising what it has given to them. Rather, that understanding comes later, incrementally, until the day a delegate looks back and recognises how much of who they are was shaped in committee rooms not unlike the ones you will enter in August.
I count myself among that number. Over five years of participating in Model UN, the greatest lesson the experience has offered was not the mechanics of MUN procedure or the architecture of a well-drafted resolution; it was the gradual, sometimes uncomfortable, process of learning to trust my own judgment in the presence of other competing ones.
I recall at CMUN 2022, my first CMUN, I delivered exactly one speech across all three days of the conference. The prospect of standing before nearly one hundred delegates for a second time was not one I was willing to entertain, plagued by the worry of how my arguments, and by extension I, would be perceived. In Boston this past February, I gave what I knew would be my final MUN speech. Yet, what occupied me afterwards was not how it had been received, but the realisation of the role that MUN played in moulding the person I am today. Where I once hesitated to put forward a view for fear of how it would be grasped, I now do so with the knowledge that a well-reasoned argument is worth making regardless of the reception it is afforded.
That, however, is only one of the many ways in which Model UN leaves its mark. The friendships formed at conferences are built quickly, under the duress of shared deadlines and long lobbying sessions, and often more lasting than those formed under more ordinary circumstances. The losses you will inevitably face are just as enlightening as the victories. A resolution that fails to pass or a conference that falls short of expectation always teaches something that a successful one cannot. Most importantly, the skills honed over years of participation, of negotiating, persuading, and conducting oneself with composure under pressure, can be applied well beyond the parameters of the committee room. What MUN rewards a person, however, hinges on what that person brings to it. A delegate who arrives underprepared, engages only when required, and treats the conference as a formality will leave with very little learnt.
Hence, as CMUN 2026 approaches I implore each of you to keep this in mind. Thirty years of CMUN represent thirty years of young people choosing to deliberate upon the world’s most consequential questions at an age when they are not yet required to. That choice is what this conference has been built on, and it is what makes its thirtieth edition as purposeful as its first. Remember, the world does not lack opinions. It lacks people who have trained themselves to hold an opinion, subject it to scrutiny, and revise it when the evidence demands it.
The three days of CMUN is a brevity that is difficult to appreciate until it has passed. So, immerse yourselves completely in this conference. After all, CMUN’s legacy is not the product of the Secretariat’s work alone; it is the product of every delegate who submitted a rather unhinged communique, who audaciously participated in a moderated caucus, and who tirelessly negotiated during a spirited lobbying session. Should you see me darting across Trident’s corridors, I am always eager to chew over anything from the labyrinthine genius of the movie Se7en to the musical brilliance of Fleetwood Mac. For the time being, please feel free to reach out to me at secgen.cmun@cajcs.in if you have any questions.
In medias res,
Until August,
Inaya Vora,
Secretary General,
Cathedral Model United Nations, 2026
Inaya Vora,
Secretary General
Letter from the Deputy Secretary General
Aditya Merchant,
Deputy Secretary General
Dear Delegates,
Every generation believes that it will be the last. Ours has very impressive graphics to support our claim.
Opening your feed will, rather efficiently, inform you about: rapidly rising death tolls in at least 3 simultaneous conflicts; glaciers, which have taken ten thousand years to form, disintegrating in real time, spelling devastating consequences for the environment; artificial intelligence, not only replacing entire sectors of the workforce, but being used to control drone and missile strikes, effectively streamlining ‘killing’; along with any number of famines, floods, and natural disasters, all supplemented by neat graphs, and aesthetically organized to fit your 5 inch screen. In the face of this, it seems natural to forgive oneself for believing that we are all cogs in a terrible terrible machine, driving itself towards a scary collapse.
However, and this is a big ‘however’… In the year 1800, people just like you and me, did not feel all that different. 43% of all people born did not survive to celebrate their fifth birthday. 90% of the population lived in what we would now classify as extreme poverty. Fewer than 1 in 8 could read a sentence. And to top it off, your likelihood of being murdered was somewhere between 30 to 50 times higher than it is in modern India. Travelling quite a bit further back in time, a cave-teenager would be lucky to live if he or she got their hands on some bone marrow from the spoils of some more-notable predator who was kind enough to get bored of its prey.
The zoomed-out perspective plainly proves to us that the arc of time is kind to us homo sapiens, and favors our progress, albeit, not without significant setbacks. This begs the question – why are we destined for success?
The answer I believe in is obscured by a modern myth about the driver of constant improvement. The myth says that ‘self-improvement’ is to be achieved by sheer will, motivational podcasts, cold showers, and a habit-tracking journal. This version didn’t make sense to me though: a burly medieval knight had no ‘fitbit’ on his wrist, and a caveman would probably suffer a stroke trying to conceptualize a podcast.
Instead, I think human progress is driven by the aggregate output of thousands, then millions, now billions, and eventually trillions of beings who are genetically engineered to improve. We are simply wired to make ourselves, our surroundings, and the systems that control the two, better.
What I find particularly awe-inspiring, is the result of the innate drive in every single one of us, compounding and building off each other. And this happens whether it is intended or not. Consider the eradication of smallpox, perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of public health. Edward Jenner, after having observed milkmaids in the 1790’s, theorized inoculation. Decades later, Louis Pasteur, built upon this to posit the germ theory of disease. Thousands of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers later, potential billions have been saved from the scourge of smallpox. I seriously doubt that Mr. Jenner, or the milkmaids he observed, would have believed the eventual impact of this contribution. But that is how I think progress works – through an accumulation of instinctive efforts.
This brings me to CMUN. In August, you will be in the Trident, in an expensive suit, debating, to the best of your ability, the affairs of nations. You have the education to enable you to do this, the family to allow it, the financial background to afford it, all while the registration fee is about 26 times the average daily wage in India. I bring this up not to induce guilt, which is rather unproductive. Instead – I wish to convey two messages to you.
Firstly, I urge you to take a moment to understand your place in this conference. CMUN, although special in many many ways that I can, and will speak about for hours on end, is just yet another exercise in collective self-improvement. Every speech, draft resolution, negotiation during an unmod, and the hundreds of points and motions that will be raised, are all your contributions towards human progress. It sounds silly, but I believe that very genuinely. You showing up to this conference, inspiring in each other, ideas of solutions of all sorts, could very well end up making the real world a better place, maybe even through the modelled UN and not a model UN. CMUN, and MUN as a practice, shapes the way one analyzes, approaches, negotiates, compromises, and solves. And these skills are translatable across medicine, engineering, logistics, art, and of course, diplomacy. Helping students like you to hone these skills, is precisely why events like CMUN are so crucial. Thus, I encourage you to make the most of this 30th edition by contributing as much as you possibly can.
Secondly, do your best to feel grateful. Not for the sake of it, or because it makes you feel warm inside, but because you have a moral obligation to do so, to all those who wish to be in your place but cannot. Additionally, it will probably make you far more effective. Realizing the sheer improbability, and blind luck of your good fortune, can act as a powerful motivator for you to put in every last bit of effort into the opportunity that you have been presented with. It also doesn’t hurt that this exercise will probably make you less likely to complain about any slips or mistakes that we at Cathedral might make during the conference.
Apart from this, here is what I leave you with. Don’t lose sleep about how you are letting slip your destiny to change the world. Your ability to improve yourself, your thinking, and the systems around you, is quite literally wired into you – have faith in that ability. Outside of making the most of these abilities in August, it’s always heartwarming to see you extend good faith to other delegates whose position you may find downright indefensible, or who may be in direct competition with you. Build something at CMUN that you would be unable to build alone and carry forward with you the skills that you sharpen while doing it. The arc of time favors human progress, but only because people like you decide to show up, and work for it.
Until August,
Aditya Merchant,
Director of the Occult Temple of Iscariot,
Deputy Secretary General,
Cathedral Model United Nations, 2026