Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 275 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
actually on offer. The only question the story leaves
open is whether the state chooses to be the one that
tells it first.
If it does, the chapter it writes will not be about
artificial intelligence, any more than the literacy
chapter was about primers or the Kudumbashree
chapter about thrift accounts. It will be about a
society that decided, at a particular moment and on
purpose, that the small acts which make a place
livable, the segregated bag, the worn helmet, the
maintained well, the kept welcome, the logged
volunteer hour, the attended screening, the
surviving tree, would no longer be invisible and
unrewarded, and built a permanent, trustworthy,
self-funding institution to see them. That is a thing
worth being first at, and it is, at bottom, all this book
proposes.
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