Friday, June 25, 2010

Giving back to society..

Lately, "Giving back to society" caught my fancy. At home, we often talk about it. Recently, in a newspaper one article appeared on (link) how ones values are most certainly "wealth" ,  than any physical form of wealth. This article was on one of Warren Buffet's sons. His comparison of "born with a silver spoon" with "born with a silver dagger" is so much relevant in present day society. It is a fact that only handful of people on this earth control around 99% of the resource  - It is so unfair!! Look at countries like USA. Here average energy consumption is so much higher than average energy consumption in developing countries. In countries like India, people travel in crowded buses/trains to work where as in USA, a single person drives a big SUV guzzling  large amount of fossil fuel to work. There is disparity in energy usage. An average American has carbon foot print that is 20 times more than an average Indian. But the global outcome is global warming and the effects are distributed uniformly upon the entire human kind. Here, I am comparing resources with wealth with carbon foot print. OK now lets get back to the subject.
The new generation philanthropists like Bill Gates, Warren Buffets and our own Narayan Murthy, Rohini Nilekkani, Sudha Murthy etc.. are doing great job!! All these people are self made - in other words, they have generated their wealth through their hard work. So, they have decided not to pass on their hard earnings to their offsprings completely. Instead they are making every effort on passing large chunk of it to the society, which in some ways helped them accumulate the wealth in the first place!
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has a trust that supports research and development in developing countries in eradicating infectious disease. Warren Buffet also funds Bill and Melinda gates foundation. All the Indian counterparts of Gates and Buffets(Murthys, Nilekkanis) have also set up similar trusts in India, that are engaged in activities like clean water supply, providing instruments to hospitals, setting up venture funds, helping sanitary condition of the cities just to name a few.
Giving back to society is always considered  healthy! When in nature everything else is getting recycled why not wealth? I am not sure whether nature can recycle wealth or not(Is wealth bio-degradable?), but wealth do get recycled but not as frequently as it should be. Kingdoms rise and fall, countries rise and fall, dynasty s rise and fall, I would call all these the results of recycling. But this recycle is a very slow process and does not happen unless there is a catastrophe. An average individual with average life span does not get to reap the results  of a wealth recycle in their life time. So, the money recycle should happen more frequently than the rate it is happening now.
In our life time one accumulates things - be it knowledge, wealth or anything else and all that ends when one dies. So, whatever we have accumulated during our life time just gets passed on to our offsprings whether they are worthy or unworthy of it and it never gets released to the society. Now, majority of problem India facing in the real estate sector/housing sector, food inflation sector, is just because some people hold onto what they have and pass it on to their children. As a result of which, there are adequate number of houses, yet real estate prices are insanely soaring. Large number of people are still homeless. Isn't it worth to return our accumulated stuff to the society/universe, the moment we leave it? If such a thing will be brought into practice, this universe will be such a wonderful place to live.. Here is what I perceive as the possible outcome: There will be no dearth of place for people to stay - in other words there will be no homeless. All will have adequate amounts of land to grow their own vegetables, there will be no scarcity of food, clothing and shelter. All will get clean drinking water and live in sanitary condition, there will be no chronic disorder (I assume chronic dis-orders are the result of pollution, food habbit etc.). This world will become a beautiful place to live. Are we all listening??

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