Wonderful Things

I’m bumping into a lot of wonderful things that seem to be sprouting up all over the place.

To keep track of them and share them, I have made a wonderful-things tag on delicious.

Enjoy!

Life’s Ironies: Prizes, Success, Points-of-View

On winning a Best Actor award at the Golden Globes, Bill Nighy commented:

I used to think that prizes were demeaning and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and real.

Also today, we got the news that Bob Dylan has apparently bought a mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Which somehow I think the young Bob Dylan would never have imagined that he would ever do. Probably he’d have associated buying mansions with selling out. I don’t know, I’m not that knowledgeable about him, but that’s my guess, based on what he sang about, and what I saw in No Direction Home.

And the greatest irony of all – John Lennon sang:

… Imagine no possesions… I wonder if you can…

And Yoko Ono is still collecting truckloads of royalties from that.

My point?

People are rotten judges on what their point-of-view will be in the future. They think their point-of-view represents some unchanging essence of who they are. But the view you have on life just depends on where you happen to be, and which way you’re looking. The same as the view out of a window depends on where that particular window is.

If you’re poor, you imagine that if you got rich, you wouldn’t behave like rich people do. (And maybe you have unprintable names that you call them.)

If you’re a success, you imagine that if you’d been born in different circumstances, you’d have been just as dynamic. That you wouldn’t give in to hopelessness and despair unlike the sad cases you see on the streets, and either pity or look down on.

If you’re blissfully in love, you imagine that your relationship will never descend into the squabbles and pettiness and stupidity that you’ve seen in other people’s marriages.

And you imagine that if you’d been born in a village in southern Afghanistan, or Victorian London, or a slave-owning Roman family, you somehow would have the same thoughts and values and personality that you do now, not the thoughts and values and personalities that people there have and had.

All of which makes you, and me, and all of us, far too ready to pass judgement on others, thinking that in their shoes we’d do something different than they do.

Mobile Phones – Impact in Africa

Tonight there was an excellent piece by BBC Newsnight on the impact of mobile phones in Africa generally, and Kenya specifically. See the 18 minute video here. (Or a short text article with alternate video link here.)

It’s also a vivid picture of life in Kenya generally, quite removed from a lot of the more cliched media pictures. It made me feel like going back there.

This reinforces the message of stories like Ringing the Changes in Nigeria and plenty of other evidence that mobiles are having a major impact on life.

As I said about this before: The kind of revolution that actually works.

What We Talk About, And What We Don’t

The BBC gives an interesting insight into what people talk about, at least when it comes to news and current affairs of all kinds. As they say about their “Have Your Say” feature:

It is a powerful body of opinion, one larger than any focus group and one which can be viewed anywhere in the world.

It speaks volumes about people trying to make sense of the new world order post 9/11, trying to work through the relations between different religions and cultures and shed some light on what is increasingly a complex and difficult world.

The BBC’s analysis of what people read and commented on in 2006 shows that 5 of the top 10 topics were about the Middle East or relationships with the Islamic world.

(And another two topics of those top ten were reactions to the death and near-death of two celebrities, Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond.)

This comes in a week when the Archbishop of Canterbury and other religious leaders have been telling us that the world musn’t ignore the issue of Middle East peace.

Ignore? All my life the world has obsessed about it. And never more so than in the last five years. But there is a world of difference between not ignoring something, and having the slightest idea of what to do that will work.

The Archbishop’s answer, of course, is to promote reconciliation and understanding and goodwill between men. Perhaps grounded in the injunction to love your enemies, and others.

And this is obviously wise and good. And just as obviously, it has been said many times before, and saying it one more time is unlikely to make any difference at all.

Loving your enemies hasn’t become popular these two thousand years. As John’s Gospel would have it: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

So if just repeating it one more time will have little effect, what will?

I don’t have the answers, I’m asking the question.

Maybe what it will take is a Gandhi, a Mandela, or a Martin Luther King to emerge in the Middle East. And that is not something any of us can make happen, except the one out there that takes that task upon themselves.

. . .

Meanwhile, notice what the world is not talking about.

As I pointed out in my discussion of terrorism, in the UK during 2006, precisely zero people were killed by terrorism. While in the same year three thousand people were killed in road accidents.

We talk about what is dramatic, new and visceral, and forget what is chronic and ongoing.

We love stories with villains and heroes, where we can get worked up in righteous indignation about the evildoers, whoever we decide they are.

And if 3,000 people died in the UK in road accidents in one year, by comparison 3,000 people die of malaria in Africa every single day, most of them children. Of course, Africa is a big place, and we need to get a sense of the numbers in terms we can relate to. In a population the size of London or New York, that would be 30-35 deaths from malaria every day, or roughly 12,000 in a year.

And that’s just a fraction of the deaths every day associated with extreme poverty.

But the world doesn’t talk a lot about that. Except when there’s a rock concert or a tsunami to bring it momentarily back into public discussion.

I don’t think it’s that the world doesn’t care – just look at the outpourings after the tsunami.

I think it’s that the world has collective attention deficit disorder.

One Woman Making a Difference in Afghanistan

The world is changing. And one way that it’s changing fast is that the likes of venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki are nowadays as engaged by making a difference as making money.

He says the most inspiring tale of entrepreneurship he’s heard in 2006 is not the one about a few young guys in a garage starting YouTube and making a billion dollars, but the story of a female entrepreneur in Afghanistan, who employs 260 women making leather goods.

For me, this story highlights many themes that are important:

• The power of the entrepreneurial spirit, especially compared to the way that many traditional charities and non-profits operate
• The shift in business consciousness, as more and more people are at least as interested in fulfillment and making a difference as making a pile of money
• The rise of global partnerships and the increasing solidarity between the rich and the poor

These are things to celebrate, take heart from, and work to expand.

Terrorism Paranoia?

Yet another person seems to have been charged with terrorism with little reason. The BBC reports that the terrorism charges against an alleged ringleader of the summer Heathrow airliner plot have been dropped in Pakistan. Other criminal charges like forgery remain but the report says…

Pakistan has presented Mr Rauf as one of the ringleaders behind the alleged plan to blow up flights

But an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi found no evidence that he had been involved in terrorist activities or that he belonged to a terrorist organisation.

There have been quite a few cases where the authorities seem to be jumping to premature conclusions. Not long ago someone described as Britain’s most dangerous terrorist was sentenced to forty years in prison. But as the Economist says:

Yet there is something a little strange about the case. Although a mass of data was discovered on computer hard drives, no weapons or explosives were found… And not once in his ten years as a terrorist did he ever carry out an attack. But he has just been given one of the toughest sentences, save for the very worst murders, handed down in modern times by a British court.

In ten years as an alleged terrorist, all he had done was write up grandiose plans on his laptop, and make the odd video of a target, making childish “boom” noises. But he had not taken a single step to implement any of these plans, had not gotten any of the materials needed, and as far as could be told, didn’t have the money to get them.

Perhaps more a fantasist than a terrorist?

And there are plenty of other examples… the Forest Gate incident, the alleged plot to attack a football match… The latter alarm appears to have been triggered because some Muslims were overheard discussing plans to go to Old Trafford. After much hysteria and dire warnings for all football matches, it turned out that there were indeed Muslims with such plans – because they were avid Manchester United supporters.

A journal article recently – unfortunately I can’t remember which one – pointed out that since 9/11 there has not been a single attack in the US. It argued that there is no doubt that al-Qaeda would love to carry out such an attack, and the obvious conclusion which no-one has drawn is that they haven’t done it because they have little capability to carry out another attack. Probably, the article suggested, they have few members left in the US, and it’s now not easy for any would-be attackers to enter.

No doubt there is a real threat as 9/11 and 7/7 show.

But it seems the paranoia is way out of proportion to the threat. Even in the week of 7/7, more people died in the UK in road traffic accidents than from the terrorist attack.

There are shades of the “intelligence” about WMD in Iraq. No intelligence agency in the world doubted that Saddam had them, and they were all wrong.

Often, we all see what we expect to see, especially when there is no clear information, and such sources as exist are murky and unreliable. Especially if you are already jumpy and saying to yourself “it might mean many things, but we need to be prepared for the worst”.

It’s not true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But the fear and paranoia may be far more dangerous to us than the threat gave rise to it.

Is Moving to India a Good Idea?

Ten years ago, I probably had a great opportunity to be in on the ground floor of China’s transformation. At the time, I knew it was going to be big, but it wasn’t such common knowledge then. I was doing an MBA where I had good Chinese and Taiwanese friends. I started to learn Mandarin. If I’d really wanted to, and had really gone for it, probably I could have started a new life there. And possibly made a lot of money for myself, and made a lot of difference there too.

Today, I’m asking myself the same questions about India.

The BBC has an interesting piece Brits head to India. Selected snippets:

“My major concerns were around the general poverty, the fear of malaria that all British seem to have – and the standard of living,” he says.
“But… amid India’s economic boom, Mumbai life is surprisingly easy.”

“I miss my family, my friends, the dialogue, the contact, simple things like finishing work and going to a pub for a glass of wine,” she says.

Nigeria’s Stone Crushers

Take a look at this BBC picture story . It vividly shows the lives of poor people making a living from crushing stones for the construction industry in Nigeria. The dignity and resolution of these people is astonishing, as they use any opportunity to take care of their families and send children to school.