The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary
I want to hug this guy.  Like, really.  Buy me a airplane ticket.<p>Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero.  I use that word in its full magnitude.  Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the <i>entire</i> article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man:<p>- Grit.  Crazy amounts of grit.  The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother:<p><i>"It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food."</i><p>- Humility combined with hunger:<p><i>"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."</i><p><i>"Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says.</i><p>- Love of humanity, on some level at least:<p><i>"Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."</i><p>As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end.  This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined.  I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness.<p>And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true?<p><i>There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.</i><p><i>There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married.</i>