Since denying, some weeks ago, that he was the Maitreya – another word for “Messiah” – Raj Patel has been unable to quite shake the story foisted upon him by obscure religious group Share International.
But the activist-author is taking it in his stride, and recently returned to the US comedy show The Colbert Report – his earlier appearance on the show being the unintentional source of his deification – to make light of all the fuss. Watch Stephen Colbert speak to Raj Patel:
On a more serious note, Patel has been blogging about his book, The Value of Nothing, and we’ve found a post that all can relate to. Do you really know the value of things? For example, how much would a housewife earn, were she paid for her daily work? What is the true cost of fish fingers? Patel takes a look at how much ten universally-consumed items really cost us:
#10 Bottled Water – Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper – it’s 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive. Make a start: stop your local government from wasting your money on bottled water, as we did in San Francisco.
#9 Cellphones – We’ve all got them. The trouble is that one of the minerals inside our high tech toys – coltan – is bought very dear indeed. With around three quarters of the world’s reserves of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our demand for gadgets fuels bloody conflict and vast human suffering. The No Blood on My Cellphone campaign shows how we can stop it.
#8 Double cheeseburger – A value meal is a great way to eat if you’ve neither time nor money but this cheap food turns out to be ‘cheat food’. What if we had to pay the full environmental, labour and health costs of a burger? Some researchers think we’d end up paying over $200, and that doesn’t include the modern day slavery in our North American sandwiches.
Team coaching is all the rage these days but getting the right person to bring out the best in you might be harder than you think. Coaching is a “soft” skill and regulation for the field is far from adequate. Helena Dolny, editor of Team Coaching: Artists at Work, takes a look at the questions you need to ask before hiring a coach:
My friend Oscar asked me what sounds like a simple question: “How do you choose a coach for yourself or your team?” Yet there is no easy answer to it.
Professor David Lane, a doyen in the British coach-training industry and active in setting up the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), was the keynote speaker at the launch of the Coaches and Mentors Association of South Africa (Comensa) a few years ago. He began his talk with a description of medieval guilds.
Penguin Books has been both delighted and overwhelmed at the response we received for the Penguin Prize for African Writing. We received an unanticipated number of entries: around 250 manuscripts were submitted for the Fiction award and 50 for the Non-Fiction award, most of which were received just before the cut off date at the end of January. Entries have come from countries all across Africa, including Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Malawi and South Africa.
In our search for the best writing out of Africa, and in light of the astonishing number of entries received, Penguin Books had to extend the assessment time for manuscripts. The announcement of the shortlist will therefore take place in June 2010 and will be displayed on our website. The winners will still be announced in September.
We have been thrilled with the tremendous response to this inaugural prize and wish to express our sincere gratitude to all the writers from across the African continent who put fingertips to keyboards and hit the “send” button in order to get their manuscripts to us on deadline.
CANCELLED – CANCELLED – CANCELLED This event has been cancelled due to road works in the Melrose Arch region that will make it difficult for people to reach the store. The event may be rescheduled – watch this space!
As a child in South Africa, spending summers exploring the wild with his boyhood friends, Lyall Watson came face to face with his first elephant. From that moment on, Watson’s fascination grew into a lifelong obsession with understanding the nature and behaviour of this impressive creature.
Around the world, the elephant – at once a symbol of spiritual power and physical endurance – has been worshipped as a god and hunted for sport. In this captivating portrait of the elephant, Watson draws from scientific research, anthropological studies, and personal experience to document the animal’s wide-ranging capabilities to remember and to mourn; and he reminds us of its rich mythic origins, its evolution, and its devastation in recent history.
Part meditation on an elusive animal, part evocation of the power of place, Elephantoms presents an alluring mix of the mysteries of nature and the wonders of childhood.
About the author
Born in Johannesburg in 1939, Lyall Watson was an author, zoologist, scientist and adventurer. He entered the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 15 and completed degrees in botany and zoology, and would later gain further degrees in chemistry, geology, marine biology and ecology. He is the author of over twenty books, and is best remembered for the bestseller Supernature (see also Beyond Supernature), which was first published in 1973 and would go on to sell over 750 000 copies.
There wasn’t much room to move at the launch of Ann Bernstein’s The Case for Business in Developing Economies at Exclusive Books’ Hyde Park branch on Thursday. Media and guests filled all the spaces between the shelves.
Penguin’s Alison Lowry welcomed guests, particularly the contingent of young, up-and-coming British publishers who are visiting South Africa to explore the industry – the 2009 UKYPE finalists, budding businesspersons in their own right. She called them the “most intriguing entrepreneurial brains in British publishing” and hoped they would learn much and enjoy their trip. Lowry then introduced guest speaker Bobby Godsell, Chairman of Business Leadership South Africa.
The UKYPE finalists
Godsell began by stating, “This book is a very important contribution to a very important debate”. He provided two reasons for this, saying the book is “a head-on, feisty response to the sentiment of anti-business” that prevails in certain sectors of African thinking; and that “it repeats strong challenges to the business community” about being good corporate citizens. Acknowledging Bernstein with a smile, Godsell stated that she “has never been shy to speak the truth to power”.
Godsell told how The Case for Business in Developing Economies is based on Bernstein’s South African experiences, but that it “also presents some good lessons for other developing economies”. He ended his speech with a challenge to the gathered crowd: “Let’s have the debate about what South African society should expect of its business community. And the business community should in turn be clear about what they can and cannot deliver – they are not Father Christmas, they’re here to produce goods and services in a profitable way honestly and by doing business that helps to build the nation. It’s not a debate about the state versus the market. We need a business community that has good South African values, we need a politics that can engage with those values and then we’ll have a smart state regulating a smart market – and what a good place that will be”.
Taking the mic, Bernstein touched on key ideas from the book, which include the question of the role of business in both just and unjust societies. She said that in the book she tries to “construct a developing country perspective on business and its social role”.
Bernstein acknowledged that companies around the world are being pressurised to do more to demonstrate what benefits they provide society, in addition to simply doing business. She said that one of the prevailing ideas is that the profit-making entity needs to redeem itself through “good work”; to pay reparations against the fact of its existence. She said there is now a need to restore the balance; for “the debate to take place within a much more comprehensive understanding of what just doing business actually contributes”, both directly and indirectly.
Citing India as a lesson for many in what a developing economy can accomplish, Bernstein said her book is in favour of the enterprise and the corporation. However, she was quick to clarify this statement: “I am not a business fundamentalist arguing that the business of business is only business. In the book much attention is paid to what else business and business leadership should be doing”.
In conclusion – and to applause – Bernstein stated that businesses need to “stop apologising for their existence, and stand up for what they do every day”.
Coaching expert Helena Dolny, editor of Team Coaching: Artists at Work, maintains that team coaches have much to learn from horses.
It was the last day of life coach training with Martha Beck. Surprise, surprise: we were asked to show up at an equestrian centre. Fiona Hoekstra of Equisight co-facilitated the programme.
I knew so little about horses. I’d managed to sit and stay on a horse on holiday rides, but nothing more. I arrived not fearful, but wary and respectful; I know a farm manager whose horse-loving daughter died as a result of a horse’s kick.
The lecture began. Horses apparently have special eyesight. From afar they can read human beings impeccably. They read the very essence of our being and decide how to respond.
Economist and author, Raj Patel, looks at the world differently to you and I. He digs below the surface to discover how much the things we eat, drink, wear and keep really cost us. The Value of Nothing succeeds previous works by Patel such as Stuffed and Starved.
Readers who aren’t familiar with your work will want to know what qualifies you to write such an ambitious book. Can you tell us a little about your background?
I was born in London from parents born in Kenya and Fiji and with ancestors in India. My family have been living globalisation from way back when it was called imperialism. I’ve studied mathematics, philosophy, economics, and sociology, with some of the best teachers in the UK and United States but actually none of this qualified me to write a book about how we might value our world differently. I’ve learned most of the ideas and insights that propelled this book forward from being an activist, and being lucky enough to meet and learn from ordinary people in social movements in South Africa, Mexico, India, Brazil and right here in North America. And even then, I don’t think I’ve got all the answers. What I’ve managed to do is pick up more good questions, though, and seen how people in different democratic experiments have created ways to learn from their mistakes.
Sunday Times books editor Tymon Smith has a wide-ranging conversation with Ja, No, Man! author Richard Poplak about the effect of American pop culture in the so-called Muslim world, which is the subject of Poplak’s latest book, The Sheikh’s Batmobile.
Listen:
Podcast: Tymon Smith in conversation with Richard Poplak
Since denying, some weeks ago, that he was the Maitreya – another word for “Messiah” – Raj Patel has been unable to quite shake the story foisted upon him by obscure religious group Share International.
Economist and author, Raj Patel, looks at the world differently to you and I. He digs below the surface to discover how much the things we eat, drink, wear and keep really cost us. 
