I am proposing to create another kind of business, based on "selflessness" that is in all of us. I am calling it social business.

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.

I was trained to become an economist and I finished my work and I was teaching and did my PhD so I thought I did that. I prepared myself for that kind of road. But then I realized that I had not learned enough to solve the problem of poverty. So I distanced myself from the things that I learned and tried to learn anew about people.

I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.