what we lost

What we lost

The interior love poem
the deeper levels of the self

dates when the abandonment
of certain principles occurred

The role of courtesy-how to enter
a forest, how to touch
a master's feet before lesson or performance

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting
How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.
The pattern of teeth marks on skin
drawn by a monk from memory

The limits of betrayal. The five ways
a lover could mock an ex-lover

The skill in tentative messages
which included yes and no
but never the direct maybe

Nine finger and eye gestures
to signal key emotions

The small boats of solitude

Lyrics that rose
from love
back into air

naked with guile
and praise

Our works and days

We knew how monsoons
(south-west, north-east)
would govern behaviour

and when to discover
the knowledge of the dead

hidden in clouds
in rivers, in unbroken rock

All this was burnt

or traded for power and wealth
from the eight compass points of vengeance

from the two levels of envy

by michael ondaatje

snow

Apparently my head nods, with simple harmonic motion. It's a Sri Lankan thing I'm told.

More snow, about 20 inches over the last two days and the world is gleaming white. What I do like is skidding about in the powder, packing it into hard crunchy balls and dumping it down someone's front.

So much snow that the skylight above the library is permanently clouded.

doofus

Men are such doofuses. I honestly can't think of a single man I know whom I haven't at one point gone, you're honestly the dumbest thing since peanut butter. This week especially, has been one resounding clarion call. If the species did not have to propagate itself, why then all men would be doorposts.

nb. this is not saying that men are bastards, which is also true but not relevant here. This post just refers to the 'doofus' quotient that all men are born with.

back then

There was an unseasonably warm front in today, and in a freak occurrence it is 20 deg Celsius, versus -20 just exactly one week ago. My body doesn't know what's happening to it, but it unaccountably lifted my spirits up. I feel like a better person. I am a better person when it is 20 deg Celsius. Am in my favourite faux-Moroccan coffeehouse right now typing away and it feels like I am in Paris, with persian carpets underneath me, and a wrought-iron balcony beside which my table sits, aflow with cigarette butts (not mine) and a large steaming cappucino. Just spent the last 3 hours with a dear friend, who I had thought I had lost, but it seems that no words are needed to apologize, and there is instant acceptance and a long-lost recognition that we were quite simply, friends before this birth, and probably after it. There are moments of recognition that leap across all preconceived notions and conceptions and it makes life worthwhile to realize that unexpected progressions can be made. We talked about mountainous communities and the challenges they face, those living on the steppes of Central Asia, romantic in writing but brutal in reality. Talked also about intelligence and how institutions in our life made us always feel that to be mediocre would be worse than death, but in fact growing up, one realized that mediocrity was in fact just fine. Talked also about the influence of parents, and that it was quite okay to make decisions to make them happy, even at the cost of some uncomfortability for one at the present. As for intelligence, I would rather be mediocre and happy than un-mediocre (what is that anyway) and unhappy. And then there were promises of classical music, the symphony orchestra, long ice-cream filled walks through the Common, promises of napping in the sun with half-read Russian authors, hair always smelling like spring. Filled again with an irrational exuberance for life, which even though it might dissipate tomorrow, is here today and I am reminded as always of that obvious but always poignant quote "Back then, I thought there would be other days. I didn't realize that it was the only day". Oh, life, London and this moment of June.

summer

The hilarious thing about being here is the summer is approaching fast and there is the usual overachiever nervousness pervading the school about summer opportunities and how to make the best of it. There is an extraordinary diversity of recruiting here. Unlike England, American universities do their best to remove any student effort from recruiting, all you pretty much have to do is to turn up. But the best thing is as campaign season hots up, all the Democratic candidate 'exploratory committees for President" are recruiting and first years have to make that difficult choice between working for Obama and Clinton! (and of course everyone knows that campaign jobs translate into White House jobs given a large dose of uncertainty of course) but nevertheless it is exciting to be around this atmosphere. Initially I wanted to come to policy school to become Josh Lyman, but the fantasy has taken a backseat to the reality of development which I am far more interested in (and also I'm not convinced of the electability of Obama, the only candidate I would work with and I'm also a tad risk averse) and so I will be spending the summer in the rural wilds of Tamil Nadu, India and I can't wait!

mandela

Our deepest fear
is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are
powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve this world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God
that is within us;
It is not just in some of us - it's in everyone
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others

Nelson Mandela, Inaugural Speech

the life of a graduate student

The Life of a Graduate Student

Alarm goes off at 7:30am. Flail wildly to hit the damn thing off. Fall out of bed, stagger into the bathroom. Spend long time examining toes on the toilet seat. Stare into mirror. Note bags under eyes expanding slowly. Hair unkempt. Shove toothbrush into my mouth while pondering the latest dilemma on Grey’s Anatomy. Is Addison to be pitied or hated? Secretly acknowledge that want to be Addison. Shower briefly. As housemate said, the only thing I achieve with any regularity every day is keeping my ass clean.

Emerge from bathroom clean if not exactly shiny. Walk from bathroom to room seems like an arctic corridor. Its -15 deg Celsius outside. Wash one bowl in the overflowing sink harrumphing at slovenliness of housemates (including me). Pour whatever cereal there is from multiple boxes. Milk is slightly off but decide not to think about it. Chow down in 4 minutes flat. Open door to room. Now that I can see properly (without haze of sleep blinding me), my room has been the victim of a nuclear holocaust. Luckily I wasn’t there while it happened, or else I might be dead.

Head out door 8am. Head down to avoid the gigantic sheet of ice that has formed outside house and leads all the way to the train station. Descend 20 storeys into train station. As usual on my train, there’s Alfie, the drunk guy who catches the same train every day and has the same things to say: Clinton is a pervert! Thank God we have Bush in da House!. I look at the ads in the train. Someone will pay 200 dollars to me if they can study my sleep habits for a month.

8:37am Arrive at school. Race to get a coffee jostling the 100 other sleepy-eyed students trying to get a coffee before first class. Hah! They don’t call me Singaporean for nothing! Get coffee, inhale deeply and race into class. As usual professor is on time, looking as though he has been up for hours, which in fact, he has. Bust out the laptop and check email. Nothing from my friends! Losers! How do they deserve friend status if they can’t even email me! Check the popular news and blog sites. Ponder what I am going to do over the summer. Check briefly what lecturer is talking about. Oh right the F test which tests for joint significance of variables in a multivariate regression ruling out heteroskedasticity. I have no idea what this means. I also fail to understand why a word such as heteroskedasticity exists in the English language. Professor mentions that we have a test next week. I sit up! A test! How come no one told me about this before? Deeply resent the lack of notice until friend tells me everyone knew about it 2 months ago. If I had attended class I might have known.

Finally the class, which seems interminable is over. It’s my first and last class for the day. Its 10am. And my day has just started, once the pesky classes are over.

Oh the life of a graduate student.

temp.

We had a high of -10 celsius and a low of -25 celsius. I could not stay outside for more than 20 minutes and it felt as though my legs were branches of ice and all I could feel was pain. They really weren't kidding about the weather.

conference

The conference went off seamlessly and I am so very proud of all the panels and panelists that ended up. Topics discussed (which ranged over 20 panels) : food aid vs. cash aid in complex emergencies, corporate social responsibility and climate change (headed by an evangelical reverend that unexpectedly stole the show), making people care (not whether they do but how to translate that into hard action), global health (enabling cheaper drugs to Africa and Merck was represented), microfinance practitioners (how to have an equity injection in an microfinance asset-building model) to name a few. Although I was literally running around all day (including a gasp-inducing moment when we thought our moderator was unavailable and d and I were frantically googling microfinance thinking we had to moderate the damn thing ourselves) and shuttling people to and fro, and packing a 1000 gift bags (the conference is entirely student run- and we fundraised approx 70,000 dollars in hard cash and inkind contributions- an amount that a standard nonprofit would have been proud of!) and we were sold out, and handling dan doctoroff (deputy mayor of New York who was our keynote), and falling in love with the social enterprise movement and making a difference in our world, all over again.

walking away.

Sometimes moments align themselves perfectly, irrevocably, and an excellent time is had by all. Had dinner last night with an emergency response crew of 3, hard-living, die-hard, hard-drinking, hard-cussing men and women who have seen the worst of this world, the arbitrariness, the brutality, the poverty, the deaths that hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, conflict, genocides, wars, and still have enormous compassion and passion for the people and the work they had to do. One of them was telling me about how he was on a mission in Rwandas, when the Tutsis were murdering Hutus, and 600 children had been taken to a refugee camp, and a Reuters reporter was there. The children were mute, distressed, unable to speak, eyes hollow in their faces, and this reporter was poking this child with a stick, trying to make her cry so that he could have a photo and the friend was telling me how he literally punched him and stamped on his camera and walked away and then got bollocked later on. Through much whiskey, tobacco and wine, stories of suffering and more importantly of hope were exchanged, and I came away with renewed respect for these men and women who fight everyday, unknown battles to the most of us, sacrificing every chance they have for a normal life and a normal relationship, simply because they cannot walk away.

tired.

So apparently it has all seemed to come together at the last moment and now I am truly exhausted with exams on Friday and me not having opened a single book yet or having only attended 50% of classes. The conference, www.socialenterpriseclub.com/conference/ is sold out and we have a 1000 people coming, with over 70 speakers and 20 professors moderating all the panels. It is quite possibly the largest event I have ever been involved with. At the same time, other things are percolating. I was very rude to someone that I should have been rude to, but did not quite need to be rude to, i can't help it- he inspires rudeness in me, just as I inspire philosophy in him. Also, I am about to spend the summer in the rural wilds of India, possibly fieldworking with women to investigate poverty and microfinance issues. I will be doing research with this guy- a hotshot economic star, and one of the most brilliant minds of his generation (http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1017/071_print.html) this isn't me talking, google him and you'll see). Our housing plan in Sri Lanka is slowly coming to fruition with some exciting leads/board members/investors coming together. the film project is also coalescing with WITNESS http://www.witness.org finally getting on board and definitely more exciting stuff. Finally a microfinance professor agreed to collaborate on writing a case, so if it all comes together I'll be writing a case on ICICI, fieldworking in rural India, and shooting in Sri Lanka in 15 weeks. That is, if I survive the rest of the semester. London in 3 weeks! Hallelujah. I am exhausted.

ghosts

"She pushed the sheet down to the foot of the bed and lay there in the darkened room, facing the waves of air. The island no longer held her by the past. She'd spent the fifteen years since ignoring that early celebrity. Anil had read documents and news reports, full of tragedy, and she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze. But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus — In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was. " excerpt from anil's ghost

it's true. it's all so heartbreakingly true.

breakfast with the FT

Breakfast with the FT: John Wood
By Shawn Donnan
Published: February 23 2007 15:16 Last updated: February 23 2007 15:16
The concerned volunteer handling John Wood's Hong Kong public relations says that my suggestion of breakfast at the newly refurbished Mandarin Oriental might seem distasteful to the head of a charity.
So on a Saturday morning – at an hour too early to be called brunch – I walk into the cloud of stale beer and cigarette fug that is the main bar of the Foreign Correspondents' Club in central Hong Kong. A few nights earlier, a proud member described this place as a club for "drunks, cheapskates and losers". Is this a more appropriate venue to meet a man who likes to think of himself as the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world?
I settle on a banquette in the glass-enclosed "no smoking" bunker and order a coffee. When a smiling Wood strolls in, he looks unperturbed by our surroundings.
Wood, a former Microsoft executive turned social entrepreneur, has plenty of reasons to be cheerful. This is a good time for a global tour in support of a book called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. New hedge-fund fortunes are being made; Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are deploying billions to address the world's ills; and celebrities - from Brad and Angelina and Bono downwards – are working away at good causes. Philanthropy is hot.
Wood's work has acquired an earnest fashionability of late, but it wasn't always that way. He left his Beijing-based Microsoft job in 1998 to found a charity called Room to Read, conceived as a way to get used books to the developing world.
The move prompted raised eyebrows among his colleagues, while his luxury-hotel-loving girlfriend soon became his ex-girlfriend. "I can still remember the days when I would check my e-mail and hit the refresh button four times and be like 'Damn it! My mail's not working. No one's e-mailing me.' There was just nothing going on," he says.
\nWood now gets 300 e-mails a day from strangers eager to get involved in Room to Read. The charity has expanded and builds schools and libraries, gives scholarships for girls' education, and publishes local-language children's books in countries such as Cambodia, India and Nepal. Not satisfied with styling himself as the Carnegie of the developing world, Wood says he also wants to be its Dr Seuss.\n\nHe works longer hours and travels more than he did when he was at Microsoft. He also applies plenty of what he refers to in his book as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's "get shit done" ethos to a charity world "immune from market pressures".\n\n"I think the charity world has been kind of given a free pass - 'Oh, they're trying hard' [or] 'oh they mean well.' But they're not well-run," he says. "In business there is always a market mechanism. If you [the FT] lose readers you guys go out of business. If Microsoft annoys people they are going to switch to Apple. And in the charity world that doesn't really necessarily happen."\n\nOver breakfast of scrambled eggs and pancakes, the word emerging most frequently from Wood's mouth seems to be "scaleable". There is plenty of talk of "metrics" and "return on investment", of branding and "market gaps". He wants Room to Read to be "the single trusted global brand for education in the developing world". And he plans to do that by creating an organisation melding "the compassion of Mother Teresa" with "the focus and tenacity of a blue-chip company like a GE or a Cisco".\n\nWood is obsessed with putting to work the business practices he learnt at Microsoft. He requires all Room to Read staff to include the latest quarterly measures of progress in their e-mail signature files, largely because "at Microsoft, Ballmer used to always say 'what gets measured gets done'".\n\nHe has an entrepreneur's obsession with costs, and relies on the kindness of powerful donors and old-fashioned penny-pinching to keep expenditure down. He travels around the world on frequent-flier miles amassed by "a senior figure at Goldman Sachs". To arrange fundraising events he draws on volunteer chapters in San Francisco (where the charity is based), and other cities such as London, New York and Hong Kong. As a policy, he refuses to recruit expensive expatriates to run local field offices.\n",1]
);
//-->

Wood now gets 300 e-mails a day from strangers eager to get involved in Room to Read. The charity has expanded and builds schools and libraries, gives scholarships for girls' education, and publishes local-language children's books in countries such as Cambodia, India and Nepal. Not satisfied with styling himself as the Carnegie of the developing world, Wood says he also wants to be its Dr Seuss.
He works longer hours and travels more than he did when he was at Microsoft. He also applies plenty of what he refers to in his book as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's "get shit done" ethos to a charity world "immune from market pressures".
"I think the charity world has been kind of given a free pass - 'Oh, they're trying hard' [or] 'oh they mean well.' But they're not well-run," he says. "In business there is always a market mechanism. If you [the FT] lose readers you guys go out of business. If Microsoft annoys people they are going to switch to Apple. And in the charity world that doesn't really necessarily happen."
Over breakfast of scrambled eggs and pancakes, the word emerging most frequently from Wood's mouth seems to be "scaleable". There is plenty of talk of "metrics" and "return on investment", of branding and "market gaps". He wants Room to Read to be "the single trusted global brand for education in the developing world". And he plans to do that by creating an organisation melding "the compassion of Mother Teresa" with "the focus and tenacity of a blue-chip company like a GE or a Cisco".
Wood is obsessed with putting to work the business practices he learnt at Microsoft. He requires all Room to Read staff to include the latest quarterly measures of progress in their e-mail signature files, largely because "at Microsoft, Ballmer used to always say 'what gets measured gets done'".
He has an entrepreneur's obsession with costs, and relies on the kindness of powerful donors and old-fashioned penny-pinching to keep expenditure down. He travels around the world on frequent-flier miles amassed by "a senior figure at Goldman Sachs". To arrange fundraising events he draws on volunteer chapters in San Francisco (where the charity is based), and other cities such as London, New York and Hong Kong. As a policy, he refuses to recruit expensive expatriates to run local field offices.
\nWood has a marketer's knack for laying out his achievements in a way that appeals to the global-oriented business class he and Room to Read target in their fundraising. The charity's pace of growth, Wood boasts, is faster than Starbucks'. In the sixth year after its initial public offering of shares, Wood says, Starbucks opened 500 new outlets, while Room to Read in its sixth year opened more than 1,000 school libraries.\n\n"I don't meant to be flippant about the Carnegie analogy," he adds later, "but we've now done more libraries in the developing world than Carnegie did in the US."\nAndrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born magnate turned philanthropist, built 2,500 libraries around the US. By the end of 2006, Room to Read had opened 3,300 libraries, and expects to have 5,000 by the end of this year. That number is expected to grow by a further 40 per cent, to 7,000 by the end of 2008. In coming years Room to Read expects to open an average of "30 libraries a week across the developing world".\n\nWood turned to philanthropy after a 1998 trekking holiday in Nepal. He visited a remote school with just a few books and, without much forethought, promised to return with reading materials for the children. An e-mail he sent to friends yielded hundreds of used books and when, months later, he returned to the school with his father and a donkey train loaded with books he was so moved by the reaction that he decided to change careers. This has since grown into his ambition to "democratise philanthropy".\n\n"What do you mean by that?" I ask, between bites of undercooked pancake.\n"I mean basically saying to the world [that] you don't have to be Gates or Buffett, [and] you don't have to be as good-looking as Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt to go help Africa. What we are trying to say is, it does not cost much to go make this change. It's $250 to underwrite a girl's scholarship. It's $2,000 in total to do a library. It's somewhere in the $10,000-15,000 range to endow a school. And I think if we really want to reach our long-term goal - which is to reach at least 10 million kids [by 2020] - we can't really necessarily depend on the fact that someone rich, someone really super-rich or really super-famous will do it for us."\n",1]
);
//-->

Wood has a marketer's knack for laying out his achievements in a way that appeals to the global-oriented business class he and Room to Read target in their fundraising. The charity's pace of growth, Wood boasts, is faster than Starbucks'. In the sixth year after its initial public offering of shares, Wood says, Starbucks opened 500 new outlets, while Room to Read in its sixth year opened more than 1,000 school libraries.
"I don't meant to be flippant about the Carnegie analogy," he adds later, "but we've now done more libraries in the developing world than Carnegie did in the US."
Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born magnate turned philanthropist, built 2,500 libraries around the US. By the end of 2006, Room to Read had opened 3,300 libraries, and expects to have 5,000 by the end of this year. That number is expected to grow by a further 40 per cent, to 7,000 by the end of 2008. In coming years Room to Read expects to open an average of "30 libraries a week across the developing world".
Wood turned to philanthropy after a 1998 trekking holiday in Nepal. He visited a remote school with just a few books and, without much forethought, promised to return with reading materials for the children. An e-mail he sent to friends yielded hundreds of used books and when, months later, he returned to the school with his father and a donkey train loaded with books he was so moved by the reaction that he decided to change careers. This has since grown into his ambition to "democratise philanthropy".
"What do you mean by that?" I ask, between bites of undercooked pancake.
"I mean basically saying to the world [that] you don't have to be Gates or Buffett, [and] you don't have to be as good-looking as Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt to go help Africa. What we are trying to say is, it does not cost much to go make this change. It's $250 to underwrite a girl's scholarship. It's $2,000 in total to do a library. It's somewhere in the $10,000-15,000 range to endow a school. And I think if we really want to reach our long-term goal - which is to reach at least 10 million kids [by 2020] - we can't really necessarily depend on the fact that someone rich, someone really super-rich or really super-famous will do it for us."
\nA flaky charity world isn't the only target for Wood's criticism. He is unimpressed, too, by some corporate social-responsibility programmes. He has had "very deep, very thoughtful" conversations with some companies, but is scathing of others that use CSR as little more than an addendum to their marketing budget. "I've definitely seen the companies that take out half-page ads in the FT, The Economist or Time, bragging about what good corporate citizens they are. And I'm like, 'Huh, that's interesting, I've never actually seen anything that you've done in the developing world and I've filled five passports with travel.'"\n\nWood argues that, by under-investing in the developing world, many first-world companies are guilty of short-sightedness. Greater corporate investment in education in impoverished countries would not be an entirely selfless act, he says. Better education would yield more affluent societies and, eventually, faster global economic growth and bigger corporate profits.\n\nHe also argues that, as the Bush administration's actions in Iraq and elsewhere are making the US progressively more unpopular in the world, businesses and charities like his are being forced into "freelance diplomacy" or "freelance foreign relations".\n\nBut his biggest concern is over what he calls the "Gates conundrum". With their moves into philanthropy, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have set a new standard for the world's super-rich, and Wood predicts that billions more will be thrown at non-governmental organisations in the coming decades.\n\nYet the charity world, he says, has a poor record of being able to absorb donations and grow quickly. "If you look across Africa there's just such a dearth of scaleable models for social change. I think in the next couple of decades that's one of the main challenges for the philanthropic world - can you teach these NGOs to build capacity and to scale?" Many groups erect one or two orphanages at a time, but in Africa "the HIV/Aids problem is such that you basically need a scaleable model for orphanages. You literally need someone to be the Starbucks of orphanages."\n",1]
);
//-->

A flaky charity world isn't the only target for Wood's criticism. He is unimpressed, too, by some corporate social-responsibility programmes. He has had "very deep, very thoughtful" conversations with some companies, but is scathing of others that use CSR as little more than an addendum to their marketing budget. "I've definitely seen the companies that take out half-page ads in the FT, The Economist or Time, bragging about what good corporate citizens they are. And I'm like, 'Huh, that's interesting, I've never actually seen anything that you've done in the developing world and I've filled five passports with travel.'"
Wood argues that, by under-investing in the developing world, many first-world companies are guilty of short-sightedness. Greater corporate investment in education in impoverished countries would not be an entirely selfless act, he says. Better education would yield more affluent societies and, eventually, faster global economic growth and bigger corporate profits.
He also argues that, as the Bush administration's actions in Iraq and elsewhere are making the US progressively more unpopular in the world, businesses and charities like his are being forced into "freelance diplomacy" or "freelance foreign relations".
But his biggest concern is over what he calls the "Gates conundrum". With their moves into philanthropy, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have set a new standard for the world's super-rich, and Wood predicts that billions more will be thrown at non-governmental organisations in the coming decades.
Yet the charity world, he says, has a poor record of being able to absorb donations and grow quickly. "If you look across Africa there's just such a dearth of scaleable models for social change. I think in the next couple of decades that's one of the main challenges for the philanthropic world - can you teach these NGOs to build capacity and to scale?" Many groups erect one or two orphanages at a time, but in Africa "the HIV/Aids problem is such that you basically need a scaleable model for orphanages. You literally need someone to be the Starbucks of orphanages."
\nIf the current giants of the philanthropic world succeed in preventing vast numbers of infant deaths in the developing world, they will also create a potentially overwhelming long-term challenge for already struggling governments and NGOs. "If those kids get to be the age of five, let's say, then how are they going to thrive?" Wood asks. "To thrive they need access to clean water and they need access to education... We've got five years to get ahead of Gates and Buffett on this issue and to me the clock is ticking."\n\nAs our allotted time is also about to run out, the conversation turns to lighter things, meandering around Wood's lack of executive stock options (he says he now gets "karmic options"); his Microsoft shares ("still my single largest holding") and the philanthropic habits of the new hedge-fund titans ("right now they are still in the wealth-creation mode [but] at some point, hopefully they will get to the wealth-deployment mode").\n\nAnd then Wood is off, heading back to his hotel - I decide not to ask if it is the Mandarin - for a work-out before a book signing. A few days later he is off to Cambodia and then on to London for the UK launch of his book. I, meanwhile, wander back out into the bar to secure a receipt I will eventually lose, leaving me unable to claim our breakfast on FT expenses - a little bit of unintentional philanthropy.\n\nShawn Donnan is the FT's Asia companies editor.\n............................................................................\nThe Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong\n\n1 x filter coffee\n\n1 x latte\n\n1 x double espresso\n\n2 x San Pellegrino\n\n1 x scrambled eggs with bacon\n\n1 x hotcakes with strawberries\n\nTotal: HK$160\n\n",1]
);
//-->

If the current giants of the philanthropic world succeed in preventing vast numbers of infant deaths in the developing world, they will also create a potentially overwhelming long-term challenge for already struggling governments and NGOs. "If those kids get to be the age of five, let's say, then how are they going to thrive?" Wood asks. "To thrive they need access to clean water and they need access to education... We've got five years to get ahead of Gates and Buffett on this issue and to me the clock is ticking."
As our allotted time is also about to run out, the conversation turns to lighter things, meandering around Wood's lack of executive stock options (he says he now gets "karmic options"); his Microsoft shares ("still my single largest holding") and the philanthropic habits of the new hedge-fund titans ("right now they are still in the wealth-creation mode [but] at some point, hopefully they will get to the wealth-deployment mode").
And then Wood is off, heading back to his hotel - I decide not to ask if it is the Mandarin - for a work-out before a book signing. A few days later he is off to Cambodia and then on to London for the UK launch of his book. I, meanwhile, wander back out into the bar to secure a receipt I will eventually lose, leaving me unable to claim our breakfast on FT expenses - a little bit of unintentional philanthropy.
Shawn Donnan is the FT's Asia companies editor.
............................................................................
The Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong
1 x filter coffee
1 x latte
1 x double espresso
2 x San Pellegrino
1 x scrambled eggs with bacon
1 x hotcakes with strawberries
Total: HK$160

leadership guff

If I have to go to one more of these leadership sessions I am going to gag and bind myself and throw myself off the waterfront. Yesterday's was particularly excruciating. Full disclosure: whilst many courses like "Leadership on the Line", "Negotiation: Dealing with Emotions", "Moral Leadership" are oversubscribed, I myself have stayed far away as possible from them. Public Group therapy is, simply not my fashion. Yesterday I couldn't avoid a sesh, which was titled The importance of storytelling in leadership. I was made to fly like a bird (more like a turkey) around the room. Then one participant burst into tears while recalling a moment from her childhood in the group session and I had this insane tendency to burst into horrified laughter. She just started sobbing and it wasn't a particularly poignant moment from her childhood (okay maybe I'm just insensitive) and I was just like: Are you kidding me? I always prided myself on being emotionally balanced unlike my parents, but I realized last night that I was nowhere close to these guys. It was very disturbing! Yikes!

cheese!

My sister sent me a pack of gourmet cheeses from Europe apparently, blue cheese, stiltons, goudas, sharp maple-aged cheddar, chevre, manchega and more. We fell upon the package like hungry jackals my room mate and I. the occasion warranted the opening of a good syrah, and together with scavenged almonds, organic honey and sliced ripe pears, we had ourselves a feast and completed our accounting homework with much hand-wringing and discussion of boys (unrelated perhaps to the revenue recognition concept but tangentially related to the matching concept) and got drunk and it was the lovely end to a long weekend spent doing absolutely nothing (except sighing at the situations that transpire), My room mate's nickname for me is buffoon and today I was a rampaging buffoon, which sounds exactly like something my sister would say so we toasted her and merrily ate, drank and lived to tell the tale.

hairdressing

I was in my usual hairdresser's the other day. In between lopping off an unimaginable amount of hair, and slathering all sorts of ointments on it, I also get relationship advice and spiritual advice. One point she mentioned stayed home, and that was this. " All women need to leave the men they found better off than they found him, as a service to the next women". It should apply to men too.

divisadero

May 29 2007: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje hits bookstores.

London

I'm going to London, I'm going to London, I'm going to London, I AM GOING TO LONDON! Yippeekayeah!!!! Just bought my ticket! I'm going to London for spring break!!!!!!YAYYYYY!!!!!



(I can't believe that I. Am. Going. To. London).

a moment

I wrote some time ago that someone had said that the biggest heroes to me were the unsung aid relief workers, working away from family and home, trying to build bridges, provide aid, be there for community after community. Doctors, logisticians, people who just know that the need is too large, and try to plug the gap any which way they can, without ideology or partisanship. I have the utmost of respect for that. Public service is a calling. Not everybody can sacrifice their own self-interest to do it, but blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

people who change people

Just back from New York and it would be too much to say how amazing the whole trip was in every particular details but it was a field trip with the fellows and we saw so many organizations fighting to change the world that it was truly amazing. In quick succession, we met with Acumen Fund which funds start-up capital to entrepreneurs in the developing world, with an emphasis on a double bottom line (i.e. mandating the entrepreneurs to for example pay 10 times the minimum wage to their factory workers), the Nonprofit Finance Fund that acts as an investment bank to nonprofits and has developed unique financial products (e.g. a conversion of a depreciation) product that improves liquidity on the balance sheet, KIPP academy, the highest performing middle school in NY located in the South Bronx, all students of colour, high poverty areas. The school has a unique pedagogical method that is yielding results in test scores and all that. Then the Harlem Children's Zone, headed by a charismatic black leader that has really cleaned up Harlem. Then dinner with documentary film producers that are submitting their pieces for the Academy Awards and changing the world in their own way and with other wonderful people (e.g. this guy from morgan stanley who's created a microfinance fund! morgan stanley! and it's headed up people from Europe that I KNOW!). Then the next day to see WITNESS, a human rights film advocacy group that was headed by Gillian Caldwell who worked undercover to expose Russian sex trafficking groups and now trains local NGOs to film human rights abuse. Then to see Chancellor Joel Klein (Head of the New York Board of Education) who was in the Economist the other day for his controversial education reform package who said that in life, like in politics, "you gotta give a little, take a little and let your poor heart break a little".