This month, the world observes the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly UNGA. The annual event will take place at the UN headquarters in New York City and as always, representatives of virtually all countries of the world will congregate, make speeches, hold meetings and participate in hundreds of side-events.
This annual event, during which earnest-looking people clutching briefcases will be dashing about hither and thither, and the media packs will quickly establish the global pecking order by crowding some delegates and ignoring others, has become so ritualised that it has been taken for granted and mostly ignored by the majority of the world's population, who have their own pressing problems to focus on.
But perhaps the world - the ordinary people - should be paying more attention because the UN itself has been coming under increasing threat. Over the past few years - indeed as the very conditions that led to its creation at the end of the Second World War now again manifest themselves and threaten to run out of control - powerful nations have been sidelining and even ignoring the institution. There are attempts to render it irrelevant.