Tag Archive for shahid karim

VSLE: An alternative economy model

In 2009, I was the co-writer of a ‘good news’ show called Deliver!, which aired on Venus TV in the UK. In the last show of the season, we covered an ‘alternative’ economy model called LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) that was helping communities across the planet to get through recession. We described it as something that takes money ‘out of the equation and rewrites the rules’. It’s still up at YouTube here:

Fast-forward a couple of years to 2011, when Dr. Imran Chaudhry at Pakistan First Research Institute, the research division of PakistanFirst, asked me to co-author a paper for an alternative economy. (I had worked with PakistanFirst once before in a consultative capacity, on a paper making recommendations for provincial reforms in Pakistan.) He was aware of the alternative economy model covered in our news show, and liked the idea enough that he wanted PakistanFirst to present a model specifically tailored for Pakistani rural communities and villages. The resulting paper offers a system based loosely on LETS. We’ve dubbed it VSLE (Value, Skill and Labour Exchange). Like LETS, it’s interest-free and works on the principle of cooperation (collective interest) instead of profit (self interest), but it also has some distinguishing features of its own.

Emergency Economy

The paper was completed a few weeks ago and it has just been published at Smashwords under the grand title, Emergency Economy (though it’s not necessarily a model just for periods of recession; and its comments apply beyond just microeconomy).

Click here to pick up a PDF copy of this paper for free. You don’t need an account to download it. The provincialism paper I mentioned is available for free as well.

Marghdeen Learning Centre participants: I’d be particularly interested to know your thoughts on this, in light of the fact that the next MLC course promises to contain something ‘practical’. Do you see any similarities – in principle – between this alternative economy model and the ‘Marghdeen’ that Iqbal envisioned? Even if you don’t read the paper, the above video should give you a good idea of what I’m getting at. And this recent post offers a clue as well.

Systems at a film festival

You might remember a post I wrote back in August in which I mentioned my brother Shahid Karim’s short Terminator spoof film The ProcrastinatorHe had just submitted it to the annual bang! film festival in Nottingham, and today he has been notified that it will be screening there on 24 November, in the Crash bang! Wallop section. Since a copy of Systems happens to make a brief appearance, it’s as good as an advert. 😀

If you are anywhere near Broadway Cinema from 3 p.m. onwards that day, maybe we’ll see you there!

Systems in a Terminator spoof

Apparently, humans are not the only readers of my novel. In this short spoof, the Terminator (or rather, the Procrastinator) has a habit of putting things off with meaningless tasks. He also has interesting reading habits. 😉

This short film, titled The Procrastinator, was in fact created by my brother Shahid Karim, and it has just been submitted to a local film festival (bang! film festival in Nottingham). You’ve seen his work before: He created the trailers for both Systems and SJ2.

(And yes, this really is my third post in as many days. A record from me, and not likely to be repeated any time soon. Just had a lot of news. 🙂 )