The beauty of bazaars: for a market culture beyond greed and fear
The Abundance Masterclasses are back! 🫐
We welcome you to a unique exchange with Rajni Bakshi, an Indian elder who actively carries forward the legacy and wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi. Join us on September 24th, between 3:00 -4:00 pm CEST, for a dialogue focused on the beauty of bazaars and their power to drive a market culture beyond greed and fear!
What to expect?
Bazaars are an ancient mechanism of human societies across the world. ‘The Market’, as we now know it, emerged and took shape over the last 250 years. Greed also is an old human instinct. But the celebration of greed as a necessary instrument for production and exchange is a relatively new phenomenon in our journey as a species. Can human beings reclaim the bazaar as a community anchored mechanism from ‘the market’ which has created the atomized individual?
This session will briefly explore what we can learn from history and focus largely on contemporary efforts that see abundance as being quite different from ‘wealth’, just as well-being cannot be equated with money. We will touch upon a wide range of creative challenges – from the seminal contributions of the free software/open source movement, to socially responsible investing and ‘real-world’ economics.
About Rajni Bakshi
Rajni Bakshi is a Mumbai-based author, speaker and founder of Ahimsa Conversations.
Her books include: Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom: for a market culture beyond greed and fear (Penguin, India, 2009 and Greenleaf, UK, 2012), which won two Vodafone-Crossword Awards; Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi (Penguin, India, 1998) which inspired the Hindi film Swades; Long Haul: the Bombay Textile Workers Strike 1982-83 (BUILD, India, 1986). Rajni has also written several monographs including: Trusteeship: Business and the economics of well-being (2016); Civilizational Gandhi (2012); An Economics for Well-Being (2007); Let’s Make it Happen: a backgrounder on New Economics (2003); A Warning and an Opportunity: the Dispute over Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy (1994).
In 2020, Rajni launched a Youtube Channel called Ahimsa Conversations, which is a platform for exploring the possibilities of nonviolence.
From 2013 to 2022, she served as member of the Executive Committee of the Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. From 2013 to 2016 Rajni was the Gandhi Peace Fellow at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, a Mumbai based foreign policy think tank. She serves on the Boards of Child Rights and You (CRY), Citizens for Peace (CfP) and the Centre of Education and Documentation (CED). Rajni has a BA in Journalism and Political Science from George Washington University and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Rajasthan.
About The Abundance Fellowship
This masterclass is part of The Abundance Fellowship - an in-depth program for social innovators looking to regenerate their relationship with money, economy and livelihoods. We design and facilitate experiences that invite participants to co-travel from separation to interconnectedness, from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to reciprocity, from individualism to commoning and a sense of belonging. Every year, up to 20 fellows get a chance to experience a 3 months, online journey centered around a more holistic approach to our economic systems. Together, we challenge the underlying assumptions of scarcity, greed and individualism, share money and power, remember the ways of the gift economy, and develop a more systemic lens to our individual and collective stories with money.
Read more about our journey in this article. Besides this annual, cohort based journey, we are also opening our work to a larger audience through the Abundance Masterclasses and our Resources Corner.
Registration details
Once you RSVP, we will share a calendar invite and the Zoom details to connect.