Development

The short documentary on a small Peruvian's journey into becoming a "developed" place in the world, offers insights into assumptions we rarely examine.

The popular notion is that "development"=wiring a place. To develop today means simply to attain a spot on the worldwide landscape of the Internet.

However, this small village has no road, a fundamental infrastructure without which the village in a geographical sense of the term, remains, as one of the wiser residents say, a "prison".

Navigating knowledge of the wider world via the medium of the screen is fine, but a prior acculturation to acquiring a sense of what's out there beyond one's village or strip of homeland, is necessary before the secondary witnessing of the world through a mediation by the Internet takes place.

It's like the hungry child has to be first fed with essential nutrients before it can successfully go on a diet of tertiary food.   

Normalizing failure

I sometimes wonder if the Buddha took a (calculated or not) risk in turning his back on the certainties and comforts of a princely life, and take up the no-success-guaranteed life of a hearth-less wanderer, heel-bent on understanding the conditions of human suffering.

Was he braced for failure? What if he really didn't attain that ultimate of all the wonders that a human mind could possess--the gift of enlightenment? Would he have roamed the land telling tales of his failure? would those tales have served humanity better in the long run than the extant tale of the infallible mendicant? 

Fallibility is the core principle behind an emergent concept in the field of social development--innovation and progress, in life as in institutions and businesses, can unfold only when risks in these areas are undertaken; and to undertake a risk is to embrace the possibility of intense failure. 

In a global culture where the regnant paradigms of life and success are those of market capitalism--succeed in terms of dollars and cents or perish in shame--failure, as technology and innovation expert Wayan Woda says, is "literally the f-word in development." 

Woda organized the third annual conference called FAILFaire. The idea behind FailFaire is: 

To highlight, even celebrate, instances of failure in the field of social change as an integral part of the process of innovation and, ultimately, progress.

Failure is not only an f-word in development, but also a stinging f-word in culture. It's deemed to be the opposite of success. However, as experts in the world of development show, success is not a smooth linear movement from good to better to best, but a many faceted, non-linear journey an important part of which is failure.

Returning to the Buddha: What if he were to share with humanity his varied experiences, including those where he utterly failed, in making his enlightenment project?