I am not a scholar. I am a practitioner who occasionally stops to write down what the practice has been teaching.
These pieces were written across more than a decade — in Jharkhand, in Nairobi, in Singapore, and on too many long flights to remember. They are not finished thoughts. They are honest ones.
If something here troubles you pleasantly — if it makes you want to push back or think differently about something you assumed — then it has done its job.
Selfless service is not about the sacrifice you make. It is about the fullness from which you serve. The difference is everything.
The moment you arrive believing you have the answers, you have already failed. The gift is not what you bring. It is your willingness to be changed by what you find.
The loudest person in the room is rarely the one doing the most important work. Real leadership often looks, from the outside, like nothing happening at all.
We live in a world that values speed. But the most important changes in a community — in a person — cannot be rushed. They require the kind of patience that looks, to the impatient, like giving up.
When a child who has never held a camera learns to frame a photograph, something shifts. They are not learning photography. They are learning that the world can be seen through their eyes — and that their eyes matter.
The most important things I have ever learned were not in classrooms. They were in the spaces between — on trails, in villages, in silences that asked better questions than any exam.
When youth with special needs bake pineapple tarts and call themselves entrepreneurs, something profound happens. It is not about the tarts. It is about who they now know themselves to be.
"Whenever I find a social problem, I'll create a business to solve it." Those words, heard in my forties, rearranged something in me that has never fully settled back.
This is not a metaphor about exhaustion. It is a commitment to not leaving potential unused on the shelf — in yourself, in others, in the time you are given.
Born in the year of the Fire Horse: a creature of movement, intensity, freedom. I have spent sixty years learning to direct that fire rather than be consumed by it. I am still learning.
The hardest thing about entering a new community is not the logistics. It is the discipline of setting aside what you think you know before you have actually seen what is there.
My greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. I have learned, slowly and painfully, that not everyone wants to be catalysed. Sometimes people need to be held, not sparked.
"If something here troubles you pleasantly — if it makes you want to push back or think differently — then it has done its job."— Alvin Yong
A
Magazine · August 2019
"In my 40s, I chanced upon Professor Muhammad Yunus... His words set me on my path to social entrepreneurship: 'Whenever I find a social problem, I'll create a business to solve it.' This became my mantra."
— Alvin Yong, in A Magazine
A rare pause in the journey — a full profile that captured, at length, the philosophy and practice behind twenty years of changemaking. Writers Mary Lim and Marie Wee spent time with Alvin to tell the story behind the story.
Read the full feature →Written across a year-long journey through Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Kenya. Raw, direct, and still true.
A true leader leads not with title or rank. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar lives out what it means to lead with Love and Light — and it rearranged everything I thought I knew about influence.
Read full reflection →My mind used to be like a short-circuited TV flipping channels. After decades of programming to believe I had to do something to get something, meditation taught me the art of non-doingness.
Read full reflection →Seva means selfless service. Working alongside so many selfless sevaks opened up for me a whole new dimension — the deepest learning does not come from seminars but from being touched experientially by another being.
Read full reflection →Farmers toil year after year to bring us our food, yet remain invisible to most of us. The divide between rich and poor, have and have-not, widens. What choices do we have to help uplift those who feed us?
Read full reflection →Standing before a 900-year-old temple of 10,000 stone carvings, built without cement or nails, took my breath away. What are you devoted to that compares to the degree of those ancient artists?
Read full reflection →Education should be about learning how to learn. But today's school imposes a right answer rather than exposing us to possibilities. It teaches us what to think, rather than how to think.
Read full reflection →Today's poverty-stricken tribal generation is the result of yesteryear's education-less tribal children. If such a cycle continues, tribal poverty may lead to tribal extinction.
Read full reflection →The tribal children walk home 1–3km barefoot on scorching roads every day. When asked how they bear the heat, the teachers said: 'They have gotten used to it.' If extreme discomfort can be gotten used to, so can poverty — and mediocrity.
Read full reflection →I used to take pleasure in being an empowerer. There were times it was pure ego. As my belief evolved to see all beings as one and the same, the word Empowerment took on a whole new meaning.
Read full reflection →At 72, Chawlaji has been nursing the Tribal School Project since 1999. He goes about his impossible multi-role with a smile and a sense of shanti that is so inspiring. When one lives with crystal-clear purpose, one dances through challenges that seem insurmountable to others.
Read full reflection →Coming into Himachal Pradesh from Jharkhand, I cannot help seeing the strong contrast in the report cards of the two state governments. The difference between them is the difference between a people who are thriving and a people in despair.
Read full reflection →Urban kids are always asked what they want to HAVE or DO when they grow up. Seldom are they asked how they wish to BE. Consider the significance of that difference — it is the difference that determines everything.
Read full reflection →For the community enterprise leader, he must win the trust and confidence of his community fellows through vision, plans, fairness and results — not through the fear factor of hire and fire.
Read full reflection →Tourists who sign up to help build Passive Solar Homes in the Spiti Valley work and live with villagers — leaving behind a meaningful dose of contribution, and taking away warm friendship and immense satisfaction.
Read full reflection →