the lottery of birth

From getrichslowly:

As I’ve mentioned already, at times I felt guilty too. It’s hard not to feel guilty when you’re staying at a hotel where the average room runs $618 a night — and meanwhile, half a mile from this posh palace, men and women are scratching to make ends meet.

On the road outside of Dharavi, Asia's largest slum.

Four miles from Dharavi, is the Intercontinental Grand Mumbai.

What is my moral obligation to these people? Do I have one? Should I feel guilty for spending money on tourism? Or, as our guides suggested, should I be comforted by the fact that I’m participating in a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor? What productive ways can I help aside from just throwing money at the problem?

I don’t have answers to these questions.

Ultimately, however, I’ve realized that guilt is not productive. Guilt doesn’t accomplish anything. I can’t change who I am or the circumstances I’ve been born into. I’ve made the most of what I have: I’ve been lucky, and I’ve worked hard to build upon that luck. I can’t change this, and I can’t regret it.

Instead, I feel like it’s my responsibility to do something with this hand that I’ve been dealt. Do what? I don’t know — and I’m not sure I need to know right now. As I travel, I’m becoming more aware of the world around me, and I feel like maybe there’s something I can contribute to make it a better place. I’m not sure what that something is, but I’m willing to be patient until I discover it.

I could have been born to any family, anywhere in the world, under any set of circumstances. I could have been any Indian girl - one of 600 million others.

But I wasn't. I was born to incredibly intelligent and educated parents. Who had families that supported them and career choices that made them successful, in today's terms. Who left the country of their past in hope of a country that could change their futures.

A man sleeping on a makeshift cot placed on a pile of trash near Loni Road in Delhi.

The Bah'ai Lotus Temple is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Delhi.

In Warren Buffett's words, I (like most of you) have won the lottery of birth. It's an incredibly humbling thought. As he describes it, if just before your birth you were put in front of a barrel containing 6.8 billion balls, and you pick one ball - one ball that would determine your gender, your birthplace, your parents - that determined the circumstances of your life. If you had that chance, would you put your ball back in hopes of something better?

I know I wouldn't. That's the hand that I've been dealt. All I can do now is give something back for it.

how bollywood is teaching india to read

Love this thought of the day from the New York Times (tip: Will - thanks!):

Think of the old follow-the-bouncing-ball singalongs, with a serious purpose. In The Boston Globe, Riddhi Shah writes that “same-language subtitling” of music videos in India improves literacy, once people become curious about the text at the bottom of the screen:

Indians and musical device for learning to read.

 According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi [in western India], newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.

India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.

The article adds that “this is big news” for fighting poverty, since literacy “is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process.”

It's originally an article in the Boston Globe. The development community has understood for a long time that literacy is a key step in building an economic future. The problem is that the conventional method of teaching people to read is labor-intensive and time-intensive, and requires access to ancillary reading material. But with the advent of television, even in the rural areas of India, and the popularity of its Bollywood film industry, a whole new vector to transmit information is being put to use.

I've talked at length about design for the developing world and of course, India holds a special place in my heart. This is a great example of a keen understanding of a target population and some very thoughtful and deliberate (yet unobtrusive) design to create access to literacy. 

she would give her life to preserve that kind of trust

(Dr. Muhammad Yunus and myself, bright and early this morning... please do not reproduce without permission)

I dragged myself out of bed at 6 am to attend a small lecture and meet-&-greet with Muhammad Yunus this morning. My academic background is in both biomedical engineering and development economics, and Dr. Yunus is a huge force in poverty eradication. The Grameen Bank is wildly successful, and incredibly simple. He spoke for a little more than an hour, off the cuff, and had some really great stories to tell. One of the most vivid, though, was about Grameen’s vision of having 50% of its borrowers be female.

When they first started in the 1970s, Yunus and his students went to the villages themselves. He would wait outside under a tree and his female students would go inside and talk to the village women. When the students had a question, they would come outside, discuss with Dr. Yunus, and go back inside to the women. For years, the women were so reluctant to borrow money. They heard things like, “My husband deals with the money.” and “I’ve never even held money in my hands.” and “I don’t know what a bank is.”

Imagine – how do you explain to an illiterate village woman who has never held money, what a bank is?

Furthermore, how do you explain this to a woman who, all her life, has apologized for the fact that she was born a woman? She has been called a drain on her family, she has never gone to school, and she is expected to manage a household with whatever she is given by her husband. Her life is not her own doing. This is the culture, the history, the circumstance that surrounds her life. How do you peel back the layers of fear and convince her to take a chance… on herself?

It took six years of convincing women like this for the Grameen Bank to achieve its 50/50 goal. That is, in the grand scheme of things, a very short time, but imagine giving six years of your life to walk around villages and convince women to build a better future for themselves and their families. That is no small investment. Yunus, when reflecting on the achievement, said this:

“A woman comes to the bank after days, weeks of pondering. Can she do this? What if she fails? Her family will forever hold her responsible, blame her for any mistakes. But she knows she wants a better life for her children. So she takes this sum of money - $30, $40, $45. It’s a larger sum than she’s ever seen. For some, it’s the first time she’s ever held money in the first place. That woman is reduced to tears by the amount of trust that someone has placed in her. And she would give her life to preserve that kind of trust.

Repeat that story 8 million times, and you will understand what Grameen Bank is all about."

A call to those of us who have been lucky enough to “win the lottery of birth” - It is possible to eradicate extreme poverty in our time. It is possible to improve healthcare in the developing world. It is possible to stamp out disease, to ease suffering, to empower women. All of these things are achievable. They require us, though, to take chances. To peel back layers of fear. It’s not about making money. The Grameen Bank is profitable. It is not charity. It is a business. But the goal is not to win the game of business – it’s to solve the problems in people's lives.

A woman came back into the Grameen Bank several years after she repaid her loan. She had built a successful enterprise in her village, and had managed to send all of her children to school. That particular day, Dr. Yunus was in the bank, and she came by with her now-grown daughter. This woman could have asked her daughter to stay at home and help with the business while her sons went to school, could have pulled her child out of school because she needed the help. But she didn’t. Her daughter was now a practicing doctor in a city in Bangladesh. These two women stood side by side. They looked the exact same, except the difference in age. And while he was talking to them, he couldn’t help but think – one woman, illiterate, uneducated, took a chance and made some sacrifices. The other woman became the product of those chances and sacrifices, and was now given the chance to save other peoples' lives. Her mother could have done everything that her daughter got to do, if only society had given her the same chance.