Erindia

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

Amen.

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
— Mary Oliver

As I just climbed through my parents attic to find my copy of Paul Collier’s, The Bottom Billion, I realized it may be a good time to brush up on all the reading I’ve wanted to do related to my work.

Acumen Fund put out their Acumen Fund Fellows reading list several years ago which I found buried in my emails from back in 2010 when they first sent it out to chapter leaders. 

Note: some of the links may not be active so let me know @teetertother if they do/do not work!

Acumen Fellows Reading List

Rights and Responsibilities

• “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew” by Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994)
• “Empowerment for a Culture of Peace and Development” by Aung San Suu Kyi (address to World Commission on Culture and Development, November 21, 1994)
• “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. (April 16, 1963)
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948)

Liberty and Social Order

• “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by Wendell Berry in Farming: A Hand Book (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich)
• “Democracy” by Langston Hughes
• Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
• “Message to the Congress of Angostura, 1819” by Simón Bolívar
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• “Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin (address before University of Oxford, October 31, 1958)

Equality and the Quest for Social Justice

• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
• Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown and Company)
• “O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle (Random House)
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Community and the Search for Humanity

• The Book of Genesis
• The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
• “How to Write about Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Winter 2005)
• On Identity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Panther)
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin)
• “Speech upon Receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994) Property and Productivity
• Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
• Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur M. Okun (The Brookings Institution)
• The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldūn (Princeton University Press)
• The Republic by Plato

Leadership Readings

• “Because We Can, We Must” by Bono (commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004)
• A Confession by Leo Tolstoy
• Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (W.W. Norton)
• “A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Walcott in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W.W. Norton)
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (HarperCollins)
• “Great Expectations” by Bill Gates (commencement address at Harvard University, June 7, 2007)
• Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky (Harvard Business School Press)
• Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner (Jossey-Bass)
• Letter to Daniel: Dispatches from the Heart by Fergal Keane (Penguin Books)
• The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin (Harvard Business School Press)
• “Rebellion” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov
• Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner (HarperCollins)
• Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert K. Greenleaf (Paulist Press)

Fiction

• Black Boy by Richard Wright (HarperPerennial)
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (Vintage International)
• A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Heinemann)
• Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Vintage International)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Penguin Books)
• The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (Creative Education)
• Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor)
• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Classics)
• Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (Mariner Books)
• Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell (Penguin Books)
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heinemann)
• Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (Grove Press)

Books on Innovative Solutions to Poverty Alleviation

• “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” [pdf] by Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir (American Economic Review 94, no. 2)
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press)
• Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathon Porritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earthscan Publications)
• Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin Press)
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing)
• Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz W.W. Norton)
• Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf)
• The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (Basic Books)
• Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (University of California Press)
• Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press)
• Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton)
• Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven (Princeton University Press)
• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by Williams Russell Easterly (Penguin Books)
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio Hardcover)
• The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press)

When I was in university, I got obsessed with the movie the Namesake thanks to my dear friend Chetan. The whole movie centers around the story of a second generation Indian-American son coming to terms with his existence with maintaining a dual identity. It’s an everyman story- the concept that the journey that takes us home is often the most painful. It’s my story in many ways.

If you asked me a year ago when I was in Chicago to move back to my parents, I would have laughed in your face. Now that’s exactly what I am doing. Yes, I am living with my parents at 26 years old until I can get things with Sucre Blue legal, funded, and organized before returning to India.

I don’t have a phone.

I don’t have a car and I live in the suburbs.

And I pretty much have flashbacks daily of being an angsty 16 year old trapped in suburban splendor.

But I love every minute of it.

There’s a lot of sacrifice that comes when you leave your home. There’s guilt that surfaces when you miss everything and are always gone. It’s like being the workaholic father who never attends his daughters ballet; or the mother than misses the son’s basketball games. I’ve been gone for over a year from Kansas City, and I haven’t lived here since I was 18. With the exception of short visits, and lots and lots of phone calls- I haven’t been able to spend significant time with my loved with in almost 10 years. Wow. 

I returned home to Kansas City, and was saddened to hear one of my friends from my punk days had passed away in his sleep (what seems to be a severe allergic reaction). Ryan Beye was an important member of the music community in Kansas City, and his print shop employed several of my close friends. Although I wasn’t close to him by any means, I’ve known him since I was 13 when I started attending Underdog Conspiracy shows at local venues.

The memorial service was like a flashback to my youth, and the closest thing to a high school reunion for the music community I’ll ever see. It’s easy to forget where you come from, and how important your roots are to influencing the person you are today. Ryan was the kind of guy you were proud to know, and his generosity and giving spirit were indicative of the culture in Kansas City that makes it so special. 

India has helped me refocus a lot of my efforts and remove a lot of elements that don’t really matter. I’m happy to be with my family. I’m happy to sit all day in my parents house, work on my pilot, and wait for homecooked food or the sounds of Patches barking to my father’s truck. It’s really boring. But India gave me a peace about being boring that I never had before. One year ago if you asked me to sit still for two minutes or stop being social I probably wouldn’t have been able to. I was addicted to being busy, and not in the productive way. But now all the questions have hit me like a ton of bricks.

How will I raise $100,000 for my pilot?

How will I legally raise this money?

Who will support me?

Am I ready to do this?

I am anxious and excited to see how the next few months will go for me, as time moves differently here than it did in India. There are no smiling watchmen or vegetablewallas screaming at me to get out of the way of their cart. The cows, noise, and colors are gone. It’s quiet, and almost placid here at my parents bright blue house with acres of farmland surrounding me. And now that I’m living at home, in many ways I feel like I’ve returned to my village, and many of the reasons I always identified with Indian culture- whether its my mom’s food, the gossiping church culture, overwhelming sense of belonging and community, and the delicate balance between finding independence from but duty to your family. 

I am ready to do this.