Mamoon Akhtar was a lowly librarian in the slums of Calcutta. But he had a dream: to build a new school for neglected street children. He founded a nonprofit, Samaritan Help Mission, and began using his own meager funds to build a one-room schoolhouse. He ran out of money before he could finish installing the floor and windows. A reporter for Asian Age heard about him, and wrote a story.  
The entrepreneur and philanthropist Ramesh Kacholia read the story and got in touch with...Read the full article »

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 »

“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 »

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 »

  “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 »

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all”. Michelangelo   When I started in the Indian IT industry more than 25 years ago, there were hardly any software services companies. Software was something that you gave away free with hardware. Our first programmers were math or physics graduates who received a few weeks of training in COBOL programming and were put on the job.   They advanced their own...Read the full article »

A few weeks back, I blogged about meeting a Dutchman whose 8-year-old daughter wanted a computer. He urged her to find ways to make money and buy the computer for herself. I relayed the story to my daughter, Samvitha, who liked the idea – so much that she decided she’d like to start and run a business of her own over the four years of high school. I agreed to help in any way I could; the issues and problems of starting and running a business could offer real-life lessons she could...Read the full article »