Erindia

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)

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like this: 

The village would have 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 people from the Western 

Hemisphere (North & South), and 8 would be Africans 

› 70 would be non-white; 30 white 

› 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian 

› 30 would be 0-14 years old; 63 would be 15-64 years old; 7 would be 65 years old 

and older 

› 1 would have HIV 

› 51 would be male; 49 would be female 

› 17 would be malnourished 

› 80 would live in substandard housing 

› 70 would be unable to read 

› 1 would have a college education 

› 6 would control 50% of the entire world’s wealth; all 6 would be US citizens 

› 33 would lack food security 

› 18 would be without access to improved water supply 

› 39 would lack access to improved sanitation 

› 2 would be near birth; 1 near death 

› 30 would smoke tobacco 

› 7 people would have access to the internet

I am grateful to have this fellowship with LGT Venture Philanthropy. This has given me the opportunity to take a step back and realize, it is not about me anymore. This fellowship is not about me. 

Life is a comprised of many small moments building to bigger and better things.

I wanted this fellowship for a chance to work with Aangan Trust. I had never worked with NGO on a professional basis outside of Acumen Fund. In a previous life, somewhere in Chicago, I was trying to raise venture capital. Now I’m trying for social capital. Last week I began wavering in the sea of doubts,questioning, “Who am I? I’ve never raised large scale funds for an NGO before. If I can’t even get my FRRO papers, how the hell am I going to start helping diabetics when the fellowship is over? What kind of impact am I actually having?”

I think we all have the tendency to think about these kinds of things, and self-reflection naturally leads to selfishness. It lends itself to forgetting some of the lessons we learn even as children. 

When I was a little girl, I didn’t know how to tie my shoes. I will confess, I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until years after most children had. Pleasant Lea Elementary, most kids learned at 1st Grade, or around age 6 how to tie shoes. It took me until almost 4th grade to master this. I lied my way through elementary school. I would convince the other kids to bend over, daring them that they couldn’t tie a knot in my shoes that would last the entire day. I would make bets with the other kids if their knot fell apart, they would have to tie my shoe the entire day.

Kids actually agreed to this bullshit plan of mine. 

Reality was, not only did I not know how to tie shoes. I hadn’t even really tried. I loved the feeling of my Papa bending over, helping me, that I became addicted to that dependability. Within time, I forgot I could even try. 

I had forgotten to try.

I became convinced I was stupid, that I didn’t possess the capacity to tie my shoes, “Ugh, I am TEN YEARS OLD AND I CAN’T TIE MY SHOES!!! How am I the top reader in my class, the fastest to do my time tables, yet I can’t master this simple routine? I must be stupid”.

 I eventually learned how to tie my shoes when I became vulnerable. Just like I am learning how to rock this fellowship. Last week I got news on more progress with my diabetic venture, and I am feeling some relief from the burden of looking at my work so critically I begin thinking, “Am I doing anything, at all?”

The answer is, I am trying.

For reasons such as these, it’s hard to quantify impact on any kind of scale. How can you prove that the fellowship will have outcomes? There are dollars raised, processes used, metrics and measurements you can analyze it by. But in the end, it’s not really about any of that. It’s not even really about me. That’s the great thing about joining something like the LGT Venture Philanthropy fellowship.

I say these things because today is my birthday.

My birthday always times nicely with Easter and I get holiday to see my family. I’m not homesick; I miss familiarity. There is something about returning to people that have known you your entire life, and support you no matter what, that is intimate. It’s your roots. 

…I received my first birthday call from my parents, at 12PM, IST. 

…I was woken up in the morning by one of my fellow iCats, a Columbian, who had been living in Paris, calling from Nicargua.

…Call was interrupted, by another iCat who is Indian and living in Cambodia.

…Beep!- text message from another iCat stationed in New Delhi, who’s had been living in North Carolina.

…I walk outside my bedroom after accidentally disconnected from Cambodian call, only to be greeted by death-sick French roommate, another iCats fellow, holding out boxes of French candies for me. 

This is not to undermine any of the other wonderful people who have sent positive wishes my way. There are too many to list. But sometimes this experience is hard to quantify into words. Sometimes I don’t know what to say about how the fellowship is going, because quite frankly, even I’m not sure how to gauge it. Is there ever a “normal” for these kinds of things? It’s kind of one of those things you need to be sitting over some cocktails with chairs intertwined (definitely gimlets, Ms. Grace).

I’m happy to share my birthday with people I love all around the world, and the reminder that this day is not about me, but about those who have chosen to share it with me. Because I would not be here without the support, love, advice, and wisdom that I have been given despite all my shortcomings. 

That includes the (hands clasped) forgiveness of Pleasant Lea Elementary alumni I have been lying to for 15 years about my inability to tie my shoes.

My birthday wish is dedicated to all those that are trying.

Hands that help are holier than lips that pray.