Supporting Dalit women to become leaders, promoting a school for Tibetan refugees, helping educate girls in rural West Bengal, supporting a children’s hostel in rural Goa, offering IT training, personal development and English classes in Nagpur, offering a retreat from the slums in Bhaja and Bordharan: these are some of the projects run by the Karuna Trust. “Inspired by […]
He’s an “Inspioneer”. “A what?” you ask. A pioneer who inspires. That’s what Bertrand Piccard is. His Solar Impulse, a long-range experimental solar-powered aircraft project, is meant to inspire us, to show us impossible things can be done with clean technologies. Bertrand Piccard likes to affirm: “Change is possible right now. We can halve the world’s […]
Malvika Iyer is a model and role model. She’s an example of a person who has maintained a hugely positive attitude despite great adversity. And adversity seems like a weak word when you know what happened to her. When Malvika was 13, she lost both her hands and sustained severe injuries, nerve damage and multiple fractures […]
In his book, Before Happiness, Shawn Achor, writes about “actionable strategies to create a positive path to success”. Here are some tidbits: – “You can summon all your cognitive, intellectual, and emotional resources to create positive change, because you believe that true change is possible.” – “The better your brain is at using its energy to […]
Drag queens are not new but, in that role, Conchita Wurst (or is it Tom Neuwirth?) has forced us to rethink gender stereotypes. He’s a bearded woman. Conchita is not the first person to win the Eurovision Song Contest whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender. But she has […]
It’s amazing how many newscasts are all about events that concern one family or community. A husband murders his wife, a child is kidnapped. The event is reported on national television, sometimes for days on end. Albeit tragic, these events monopolize the news, drawing attention away from the globally significant, newsworthy information the public must be […]
Does work make people happy, or does being happy bring us work? Psychologist Shawn Achor argues that happiness inspires productivity. Shawn Achor is an educator and author who advocates positive psychology. He is the CEO of GoodThink Inc., whose aim is to “make you happier”! GoodThink “researches positive outliers — people who are well above average — to understand […]
Paolo Petrocelli uses music as a form of diplomacy and positive force for change. Paolo is founder and president of the Euro Mediterranean Music Academy for Peace, which promotes music education in Europe and the Middle East, and brotherhood among young multi-ethnic musicians. According to him, artists should think beyond their personal career to a higher […]
Kimberley Motley is a lawyer. She is the first foreign attorney to set up a practice in Afghanistan. She left the United States in 2008, intending just to work there for a year, but when she saw the atrocious conditions in an Afghan prison she decided to offer her legal services to foreigners imprisoned in the country and, later, to Afghans. […]
