Monalisa Dutta

Hi! I'm Monalisa. I am currently based in Dubai and work on projects that lie at the intersection of business and interests of society (primarily in the social infrastructure and cleantech industry). My work takes me to regions as diverse as West Africa, Europe and the Middle East. I am the chapter Leader for DUBAI +Acumen, a 900+ volunteer-led group supporting a world beyond poverty, and serve on the board of Indian Sports and Cultural Society, a pan-India non-profit that supports sportspersons from underprivileged backgrounds.

I love traveling and have a passion for photography, learning new languages and debating. I have also been trying my hand at mixing music and diving in the Arabian Sea.

The following lines from Bertrand Russell sum up my life philosophy and driving forces aptly.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.