nipun mehta downloading love, social capital and the gift economy

from parabola magazine, winter 2009
richard whittaker talks with nipun mehta
 

At Nipun’s suggestion, before speaking we meditated for a half hour in the beautiful still space as sunlight streamed through the windows.

     Sitting there quietly, I realized how grateful I felt to have met Nipun, not only because of his own remarkable spirit, but because through him I’ve seen there are countless young people with a deep wish, in Gandhi’s words, to be the change they wish to see. —richard whittaker
 

(an excerpt)
NM:  Right. There’s no context to frame whether or not it’s trustworthy, particularly in the kind of community we now live in. What we can do, on a personal level, is these small acts of trust that ultimately will create the field for deeper change. At a systemic level, we have to bring all these small pieces together, which the Internet is really capable of doing. And at an even more meta-level, on a societal level, what we need to do is birth what I call “generosity entrepreneurs.” Those are people who have an entrepreneurial mindset of creating something new, but they are doing it in the spirit of the gift economy. 

We have think tanks in the world. They say, “Richard, you’re a really smart person. We’ll give you food, shelter, clothing, office space. You just do whatever you want to.” There are many think tanks that do just that. What about love tanks?

What about experiments in generosity? What about people who will say, I just want to give for the love of it? Why are those people working in the lowest rungs of our institutions? “Oh, nice guy.” But that’s about it. We just don’t know how to capitalize on that compassion quotient and we ought to learn that sooner rather than later. This is what I see “generosity entrepreneurs” doing.
RW: Have you talked with anyone about this?
NM: I have talked with some friends about this, yes indeed. I do think we need a laboratory of compassion. When the time is right, it will germinate. The way I go about things is not to say, here is a proposal. Here’s how you do it. I have an implicit faith in the self-organizing ways of the universe, that whenever it is time for this kind of a love-tank to be birthed, for a cadre of generosity entrepreneurs to bring out this gift economy in its full majesty, then something will happen. Someone’s cup somewhere will overflow and it will have just the right ingredients to create this kind of a movement.
continued here: 
http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=229