KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS Then she joins the volunteer register, and the register knows exactly what she is for. Within a year she has organised a walking group, trained a dozen younger volunteers, and shown up at three blood drives and a flood relief camp. She is, by the only count that matters, one of the most valuable people in her panchayat. Kerala did not just take her remittances for forty years and let her fade on return. It gave her, at sixty-five, a reason to have come home. Three small lives, three ordinary acts, all of them possible with what Kerala already has and what has just become affordable. Hold them in mind through the chapters that follow, because every framework and every figure in this book exists only to make stories like these ordinary rather than rare. 44