Monday, March 29, 2010

The Gates Foundation

There is a whole subculture out there which specializes in Windows bashing and I much confess I don't like the whole Windows culture very much, However, the work of the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is actually quite inspiring, even to cynics.

Do read it here in the Times of India or here in the Hindu, where the ubiquitous N Ram has to keep shoving his oar in and bring in his earlier interview with Bill Gates. However it's interesting to see a dyed-in-the-wool commie almost in awe of the contribution made by the Foundation and by Warren Buffet. Moreover they have “made a commitment that 50 years after the last of the two of us has died…all our money would have been given away.”

5 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Venkataraman said...

Seems like Google's traffic redirection is working. Your blog should be available to a wider audience now.

Unknown said...

Hi Rahul
This is about your food writing... I am writing an article from the Business Standard on regional cuisines and wanted to check if there were any interesting new places in Chennai, serving authentic Indian regional food-- Bengali or Avadhi or Gujarati et al. You can reach me on anoothi.vishal@gmail.com. Would appreciate your input-- and will quote you!

AmOK said...

Looks like your commentators are on every topic except Gates!

vbalki said...

Except for JRD Tata, a true visionary, none of our own captains of industry has come even remotely close to the kind of dedicated and methodical large-scale philanthropy practised by people like Gates and Buffet, and (in an earlier era) the Rockefellers, Carnegie, et al. I'm speaking of relatively recent times (the last 150 years or so), and not of historical times, when we did have some great benefactors of humanity as kings and emperors. Of course our top industrialists didn't have the kind of money that Rockefeller an Carnegie had, but of late this has changed dramatically, as all of us know. As they make it to the top of the heap, moolah-wise, will their mindset change as well? Will truly egalitarian and philanthropic schemes be taken up and funded on a large scale? Or will the donors be content with instituting (if they are enlightened) a small number of incongruously huge cash prizes for scholars, or else (if they are less enlightened, say) building more marriage halls and dormitories for carefully specified sub-castes? Only time can tell.

As for the "Chivas Regal communist" you have referred to (which means that his principles and scruples are
as subject to evaporation as the ethanol content of his imported liqueur), one refrains from comment since one wants to stick to mentionables in polite society!