Stories To Inspire People Who Despair About India Bapu Kuti, At Sewagram Ashram, Wardha, Is The Mud Hut Which Was Mahatma Gandhi S Last Home. Half A Century After Bapu Was Killed, The Kuti Is Alive With Gatherings Of People Who Share His Dreams. They Do Not Call Themselves Gandhians . Yet, As They Search For Solutions To The Many Problems Of Modern India, These Activists Find Themselves Coming To The Same Conclusions As Had Gandhi. In This Collection, Rajni Bakshi Explores The World And Lives Of Twelve Such People Who Have Turned Their Backs On Lucrative Professions To Embark On A Search For Practical And Humane Ways Of Political And Social Transformation, Rooted In The Faith That A New India With Prosperity For All Can Be Built On The Strengths Of Cooperation And Community. In Rajasthan, For Instance, Through A Rare Community Effort, Villagers Make A Creative Livelihood Instead Of Migrating To Urban Slums; In Andhra, Impoverished Weavers Gain New Life By Reviving Their Dying Craft; In Bhagalpur, Bihar, A Movement Is Launched To Liberate Mother Ganga. These Images Of Passionate Creativity Present An India Seldom Seen In The Mainstream Media. They Challenge The Pervasive Cynicism Of Our Times To Show That Idealism Did Not Die With Gandhi. Affirming Humanity S Ceaseless Striving To Evolve To Higher Levels Of Being, They Anticipate An Age When Conciliation Must Replace Confrontation For Building A More Just Future.

Long before the financial meltdown and the red alert on climate change, some far-sighted innovators diagnosed the fatal flaws in an economic system driven by greed and fear. Across the global North and South, diverse people - financial wizards, economists, business people and social activists - have been challenging the "free market" orthodoxy. They seek to recover the virtues of bazaars from the tyranny of a market model that emerged about two centuries ago. This widely praised book is a chronicle of their achievements. From Wall Street icon George Soros and VISA card designer Dee Hock we get an insider critique of the malaise. Creators of community currencies and others, like the father of microfinance, Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus, explore how money can work differently. The doctrine of self-interest is re-examined by looking more closely at Adam Smith through the eyes of Amartya Sen. Mahatma Gandhi's concept of 'Trusteeship' gathers strength as the socially responsible investing phenomenon challenges the power of capital. Pioneers of the open source and free software movement thrive on cooperation to drive innovation. The Dalai Lama and Ela Bhatt demonstrate that it is possible to compete compassionately and to nurture a more mindful market culture. This sweeping narrative takes you from the ancient Greek agora, Indian choupal, and Native American gift culture, on to present-day Wall Street to illuminate ideas, subversive and prudent, about how the market can serve society rather than being its master. In a world exhausted by dogma, Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom is an open quest for possible futures. This fully updated and revised UK version of the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Award winner for non-fiction is a rare and epic narrative about those who have been quietly forging solutions and demonstrating that a more compassionate market culture is both possible and desirable.

Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.

"Banking in India’s Hinterland" isn't your typical how-to guide. Instead, it's a compelling account of the author's experiences as a rural banker in India. Through personal stories, the book sheds light on the struggles of impoverished communities, particularly the strength and resilience of poor rural women. The author argues there's no one-size-fits-all solution to poverty. He emphasizes the need for local experimentation and a deep understanding of local contexts. His core belief lies in gradual change and empowering the poor, especially women, through financial resources and education. The book offers a hopeful message. The author, based on his three decades of experience, believes poverty can be tackled by equipping the underprivileged with the tools they need to break free from the cycle.

Interesting Facts About Gandhi S Childhood, Education, Stay In London And South Africa And His Fight For India S Freedom.

The primary era of this study - the twentieth century - symbolizes the peak of the colonial rule and its total decline, as well as the rise of the new nation state of India. The processes that have been labeled 'westernization' and 'modernization' radically changed middle-class Indian life during the century. This book describes and explains the various technological, political and social developments that shaped one building type - the bungalow - contemporaneous to the development of modern Indian history during the period of British rule and its subsequent aftermath. Drawing on their own physical and photographic documentation, and building on previous work by Anthony King and the Desais, the authors show the evolution of the bungalow's architecture from a one storey building with a verandah to the assortment of house-forms and their regional variants that are derived from the bungalow. Moreover, the study correlates changes in society with architectural consequences in the plans and aesthetics of the bungalow. It also examines more generally what it meant to be modern in Indian society as the twentieth century evolved.

Identity conflicts, a prominent feature of our times, a phenomenon of belonging somewhere yet belonging nowhere, are increasingly finding their way into cinema. This book looks at the representations of identity conflicts in India on the canvas of Indian cinema, connecting them with broader socio-political developments in contemporary India. Starting with the historical background of how political developments in Europe like the emergence of Nation states, secularism, modernity influenced socio-political developments in India in the past century, the book looks at how those developments have shaped modern India. While looking at the cinematic representations of a variety of identity conflicts through the lens of cultural and political analysis, it provides insights into how the construct of an Identity and the inherent conflicts associated with it evolve and manifest themselves through the medium of a film.