Stories with Books

I never thought one could make a book out of this quote by Martin Luther King.

I Have a Dream is supposed to be a non-fiction but it gives the same delight as a fiction. In its essence, it tells the stories of twenty social entrepreneurs across India, who built their own foundations and then raised upon them their own minarets of excellence by coming up with models that ensure a business with a social front, or a social organization with a business model, whoever way you like it served.

The said twenty social entrepreneurs are divided into three groups: “Rainmakers”, “Changemakers” and “The Spiritual Capitalist”.

The Rainmaker category consists of those who made some changes in the society by zooming in on a particular problem, like sanitation, education and fishery. Changemakers have made changes at more visible levels: in politics, for example. The Spiritual Capitalists are those who run some spiritual organizations that also take care of the spirits still inside human bodies.

The book starts with a simple but beautiful idea: that there are two kinds of people: those who merely think and those who also feel, and that the latter is the category that usually makes considerable societal changes.

The book was first published in 2011. Afterwards, some of the personalities in the book rose still higher positions than the excellent ones mentioned among the pages: like Arvind Kejrival, who found a mention in the book due to his organization called Parivartan, who would later become the Chief Minister of the Indian National Capital, New Delhi; and Anand Kumar, on whose story a Hritik Roshan-featuring movie, Super 20, would be made in less than a decade.

The book fills you with a lot of new ideas, adds to the scope new opportunities and paths and widens the horizons by showing that possibilities are always something more than we think they are and that an idea is all it takes to start.