John Kralik This is a true story. Depth of despair It was December 22, 2007 and 52-year-old John Kralik felt it was the lowest day of his life. His law firm was going bankrupt, he was going through a difficult divorce, he had no money, and even his sons had grown distant from him. His…
Month: May 2020
046. Anna Hazare: Gandhian fight against corruption in India
Anna Hazare Kisan Baburao Hazare, affectionately called Anna Hazare, comes from a poor family in Maharashtra, India. He joined the Indian Army as a driver and had an epiphany of sorts in 1965 when all of his comrades were killed in action and he alone survived in an incident at the Khemkaran border. Transformation of…
045. Laurie Baker: The man who built for the people
Laurie Baker Meeting Gandhiji Born in England, Laurie Baker (1917-2007), a British Architect, worked during World War II in an ambulance unit in China, Japan and Burma. When he was in India sometime in the early 1940’s, he had a chance encounter with Mahatma Gandhi, which changed his life. In 1945, he came to India…
044. What comes first? Priorities in life
The Professor was meeting his class of freshers for the first time. From his bag, he pulled out a large jar with a wide mouth. He put rocks, each about 2” in size, into the jar and when they reached the top, he asked the students, “Is the jar full?”. They all agreed that was…
043. Rajendra Singh: Making rivers come back to life
Rajendra Singh “Build a johad!” On Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday in 1985, five young men led by Rajendra Singh got off the bus at Kishori Village in Alwar, Rajasthan, India. They belonged to the Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), founded by Singh. They had come to the village “wanting to fight injustice against all people”, but had…
042. Women of Dangejheri: Forming patrols, protecting the forest
Women of Dangejheri (Cover of an IUCN Journal) Dangejheri is a village in the Ranapur Block of Nayagarh District of Odisha State, India. The village has 30 odd households dominated by the Kondh tribe. As in many parts of Orissa, the forests on the hillocks around Dangejheri had all but vanished by the 1970s. The…
041. Ken Saro-Wiwa: Victim of Nigerian oil and martyr for the cause of the Ogonis
Ken Saro-Wiwa Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist. He belonged to the Ogoni people, who are an ethnic minority in Nigeria. Once oil was found in the Ogoniland of the Niger Delta in the 1950s, millions of tonnes of crude oil have been extracted from the region by multinational…
040. Granny D: Walking 3200 miles for election finance reform
Granny D Can one do extraordinary things late in life, if one becomes driven by a public cause? Granny D showed us that it was possible. In her early years, Doris Haddock (1910-2010), who came to be known as Granny D, was housemaker, who raised two children during the Great Depression and later worked at…
039. Chewang Norphel: Creating artificial glaciers to solve water shortage
Chewang Norphel Born in 1936, Chewang Norphel is a resident of Ladakh in the Himalayan region of India. A civil engineer and a former Sub-divisional Officer, Norphel had been to many areas of Ladakh, building school buildings, bridges, canals, roads etc. But what he did outside his job and does even after retirement is a…
038. The man that corrupted Hadleyburg
Mark Twain The incorruptible town Many years ago, Hadleyburg was known as the most honest and upright town in the whole region. The nineteen main residents of the town were very proud of their fame and taught their children the virtues of being honest and incorruptible. Once, however, the town offended a passing stranger. It…