SHANTANU GUHA RAY’s (Tehelka) article – The Philanthropy Conundrun – has an amazing take!:

The fab four are part of the Forbes top 10 list. Forbes notes that Ambani produces oil, gas, petrochemicals and textiles; younger sibling Anil runs a clutch of companies in sectors as diverse as telecom, power and financial services; Mittal owns the largest steel conglomerate in the world, Sunil Mittal controls India’s largest telecom company.

Philanthropy doesn’t exist in India. The IPL showed that Indian companies have the money (look at the amounts the Ambanis or liquor baron Vijay Mallya spent in acquiring stars for their respective teams) but would not spent on malnourished children,” says social commentator and author Jerry Pinto, who expects the divide between the rich and poor to grow manifold in India. “The poor have lived with it for long and do not expect anything. Perhaps that’s the reason why I do not see any resentment among the poor, no class wars,” he says.

Time magazine’s Africa bureau chief Alex Perry talks of the unjust distribution of wealth all over the world in Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization. The author finds out that while 1.63 million have found outsourcing jobs in India, there were 40 million unemployed, 900 million earned less than $2 a day and 380 million earned less than a dollar. This is the world without a middle class, says Perry, in which — he has 2006- 07 statistics to back him up — one percent of the world’s adults own 40 percent of all global assets. And those figures get even more rarefied as you climb the money pyramid: the richest 10 percent own 85 percent of the assets, while the poorest half own less than one percent.

But then, perhaps for the uber rich, charity really begins at home.

Amar Ali Jan’s words say it all according to me:

The job of the media is not to spread the elite’s version of patriotism. Its job is to educate the masses through objective facts and objectivity cannot change with one’s own association with a geographical location.

Just read this and it resonated a lot with my current state of mind

The appearance of things change according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves. – Khalil Gibran

Pope Benedict XVI’s comment

Those who think that “concrete things we can touch are the surest reality” are deceiving themselves

Made me wonder the profundity of virtual (online) stuff especially Second Life! I somehow feel The Pope is setting double standards. Thoughts like

those who seek “success, career or money are building on sand”

need to be taken with a pinch of salt or perspective shall we say?

Boing Boing points towards Obama supports “open debates”: remix, reuse, comment, re-distribute.

I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.”

Thumbs up from me. Words are coming from someone who understands open content and open technology! Ideally the finance bill being passed through should also have seen the light of the day in a similar fashion according to me, at least for the people from the financial corporate world.

Epeus’ epigone points to an amazing quote by David Foster Wallace that resonated in me completely:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

The blog post also takes inspiration from nature in terms of how applications can be viral. Something I personally subscribe to. We have a lot of learn simply by just observing nature!

Someone whom I know very closely, met Subroto Bagchi and has instantly become a fan of him. Mr Bagchi had a similar impact on me when I met him during my stint at ICICI. He had come as part of a presentation team for the consulting assignment Mindtree was involved with ICICI’s Rurual Initiative. My friend then mailed me one of his articles titled ‘Defining Success‘ – quotes from there:

It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Howard Cutler (read it in Buddhist Offerings 365 days)

To diminish the suffering of pain, we need to make a crucial distinction between the pain of the pain and the pain we create by our thoughts about the pain. Fear, anger, guilt, loneliness and hopelessness are all mental and emotional responses that can intensify pain.

Do check out Bill Gates’s speech (transcript) at his Harvard Commencement last year. Just came across it. Starts off very humourously . Some of the topics he talks about are finding solutions to make the most of our caring and also how one can cut through completexity to find solutions. Quoting for my reference.

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year… and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

But taking a serious look back… I do have one big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world—the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism—if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares—and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have—whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working—and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century—which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step—after seeing the problem and finding an approach—is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts. But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work—so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

Re-read these lines again with India in mind. With Telecom, Micro-finance, Health and Education in mind …

Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.