Focus on Charity

Focus on Charity
The print and the electronic media flashed the news that Bill Gates of Microsoft was to become Full-Time Philanthropist. Bill Gates announced that within two years, he plans to transition into full-time work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization he founded with his wife, which focuses on global health and education. "I believe with great wealth comes great responsibility - the responsibility to give back to society and make sure those resources are given back in the best possible way, to those in need," he said. Gates added, "It's not a retirement, it's a reordering of my priorities."
Our own Narayana Murthy of Infosys too has announced that he would pass the baton to the next-Gen and he along with his wife Sudha Murthy would shift their focus on charity.
It is heartening that such people in their positions with wealth, in whatever form it may be: health, relationships, time, or resources, have decided to immerse in activities that would leverage this privilege for others. This made me recall the following inspiring quotes of Andrew Carnegie, one time world’s richest man.
“This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community, the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent ...” ----- Andrew Carnegie

“Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast.”------- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) @@

@@ (Andrew Carnegie, hailing from an impoverished family was a Scottish-born American businessman, a major philanthropist, and the founder of the Carnegie Steel Co.which later became U S Steel. He is known for having, later in his life, given away most of his riches to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in Scotland, America and worldwide. A self made man who wrote his own destiny of ‘rags to riches’)

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20th jun 06.