Download Yunews instead of YouTube

I like alternative views instead of carping against an established view.

Take for instance what Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, the innovative microcredit lending institution, and Nobel Prize recipient, has to say about, not simply against capitalism:

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully. The selfless part of human beings has not been allowed to play out. As a result, we created a concept of business based on money-centric, one-dimensional human beings. But real human beings are multidimensional.

Like the Biblical house of the Father with multiple rooms, the metaphorical house of capitalism too has multiple rooms; Yunus points out that the world thus far has focused on opening the door to just one. 

In response to a question about envisioning a world with minimal poverty, Yunus makes a connection with Science Fiction:

People dreamt of going to the moon when they couldn’t even fly. They put the idea in science fiction. People always love science fiction. Look at the popularity of TV shows like “Star Trek”; it lets you feel the sensation of going to other galaxies. Then science always followed science fiction. Although it was fiction, somehow it inspired people. So I encourage people to write social fiction: imagine society where all our present problems remain totally unknown. All the impossible things of today’s world are routine there. At this moment that society looks impossible. It seems there is no way we will ever get there. But our minds will open. If we can imagine, it will happen. If we cannot imagine, it will never happen.

Social fiction! Haven't read that many, and the one that comes closest to the genre Yunus has in mind is Indra Sinha's Animal's People.

Lastly, Yunus asks business schools to introduce an M.B.A in social business.

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?