KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS Afterword: the Kerala worth wanting A book can describe a place that does not yet exist. Whether it comes to exist is up to the people who read about it. Everything practical in these pages, the institution, the economics, the seven promises, the dozens of stories, has been in service of a single feeling, and it is worth naming plainly at the close. It is the feeling of wanting a particular Kerala: one where the street outside your house is clean because the whole lane takes quiet pride in it; where the auto driver who has been careful for twenty years is known for it; where the well still holds water in April; where a visitor leaves saying the welcome was the best part; where the nurse home from the Gulf is the most useful person on her road; where a child born abroad sees the family name on a cared-for street and understands, for the first time, that this place is hers. That Kerala is not a fantasy. Every piece of it already happens somewhere in the state, on some street, in some ward, performed by some person who never gets seen for it. The whole of this book is one idea: that a society can choose to see those people, and that when it does, the rare becomes 315