Most of us live our life for our self and our family that is the boundary we have set. Our aims and goals in life are all about accumulation. With prosperity come a bigger car and a bigger home and all the gadgets that are a sign of a cool lifestyle.  We forget to see that in our community there are many who do not even have the basics, that there are many who are suffering. We fail to see the injustice and the poverty from the glitz of our homes. Day by day the divide between the rich...Read the full article »

This seems to be a strange question to any urbanite. Yet check the quality of life in any urban city of India. We consume pesticide stuffed vegetables and fruits, chlorine and pesticide contaminated water and breathe heavily polluted air. Fast food and junk food that contains little or no nutrition is rapidly becoming an addiction in our cities. Driven by greed of the builders and nexus of politicians concrete jungles are taking over every patch of available free space. Money is what drives the...Read the full article »

“40 billionaires pledge to give away half their wealth”. Recent headline.
Warren Buffet made news a few years back when he pledged over 90% of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, supporting causes that will improve quality of life for humanity. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have now gone a step further – enrolling 40 billionaires to pledge at least half their wealth to charitable causes. The pledges...Read the full article »

“You know, our cells just might be smarter than we are”. Swami Beyondananda
“How can 50 trillion cells live in harmony and peace while a mere 7 billion people are on the verge of annihilating themselves?”  
This is one of questions explored in the very interesting book I’m reading: ‘Spontaneous Evolution’ by Lipton and Bhaerman. They talk about the organizing principles responsible for the evolution of multi-cellular...Read the full article »

Ashok Kalbagh, commenting on my last post on just-in-time, bite-sized education, pointed me to Khan Academy as a good example of what I had in mind. And indeed it is. A few years ago, Salman Khan, an MIT graduate who was working as an analyst for a hedge fund, started tutoring his young cousins in math over the phone.  
He began using YouTube to post videos of his lectures on different topics – math, science, history and more. His technique was to talk while the video focused...Read the full article »

The drug dealer in the favelas of Brazil was tough and smart. His drug business was bringing in $200,000 a week. And he was only 16 years old. Yet this shrewd, ambitious young criminal – already a leader in his local underworld – voluntarily gave it all up. Why? He wanted to resume his education.   This example is one of many innovations in education discussed by Charles Leadbeater in a must-read Ted Talk that was pointed out to me by a New Constructs community member:...Read the full article »

  Free-market capitalism has done a great deal to make the world the place it is today – both good and bad. But now capitalism is in for a major overhaul. Most proponents of the current form of capitalism justify it by comparing it with communism. This assumes that human ingenuity is so limited that we have to rely on only two philosophies of managing production and consumption. Unless we take the dialog to a higher plane and generate alternatives, we will remain stuck in a system...Read the full article »

In 1958, an American named John Bissell came to India as a consultant to the Ford Foundation. He fell in love with the country, and decided to make it his home. Bissell was especially taken with the richness of traditional Indian handicrafts, and set up a company he called Fabindia that began exporting handmade home furnishings 50 years ago.   Today Fabindia has more than 200 well turned out and successful retail stores in India and the UK, selling not only home furnishings but also...Read the full article »

  “I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it”. Mark Cuban.  
Here’s a deliberately controversial and provocative perspective: There are good reasons why equity markets, in their current form, need to be eliminated. Some of these are:  
• Less than 1% of the world’s population actually owns...Read the full article »