Off The Record

I had the joy to come across an interesting book review today by the crew over at 8CR .

It's reviewd a book called Banker to the Poor: Micro lennding and the battle against world poverty by Muhammad Yunus.

Here's the quote that caught my attention:

The starving people did not chant any slogans. They did not demand anything from us well-fed city folk. They simply lay down very quietly on our doorsteps and waited to die.

There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference. Like sleep, death by starvation happens so quietly, so inexorably, one does not even sense it happening. And all for lack of a handful of rice at each meal. In this world of plenty, a tiny baby, who does not yet understand the mystery of the world, is allowed to cry and cry and finally fall asleep without the milk she needs to survive. The next day she may not have the strength to continue living.

Now I am interested in a lot of buisness books but this one has caught my attention because it can highlight the situation where what we know and have been tought, my not be the answer people are looking for.

Another quote:

I wanted to teach my university students how to understand the life of one single poor person. When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant—you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance. I opted instead for “the worm’s eye view.” I hoped that if I studied poverty at close range, I would understand it more keenly.

I think it comes down to perspective. This book is probably my next read beacuse we can all do with the worm's evey view.