Just because there’s shit in the world doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty and greatness and awesomeness sometimes. In fact that’s what makes it wonderful.
If you’re bitter and all you see is the shit, and resent any inspirational story, well, good luck to you but I definitely don’t think you’ll have a productive, or inspirational life.
TLDR: man and wife move to poor rural region of Indian, see wild fire problem caused by pine needles, invent a machine that turns pine needles into electricity and cooking fuel, employ villagers to pick up pine needles, deploy it to dozens of villages with help of the government and village entrepreneurs.
A success story that lifts people out of poverty with well-paying work, renewable electricity, and cooking fuel while cleaning up the environment in a scalable, decentralized, locally-suited way. Incredibly inspiring.
1. For the villages that have now "made it" economically, there are countless others that haven't, that still live in one-room houses. What about them?
2. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that the product that he created, while popular and financially successful, is still used in the same settings charcoal is. And while carbonized briquettes produce less emissions that charcoal, there are still a non-negligible amount of particulates generated. By introducing a new source of this type of fuel he could be creating a local maxima that's still far from ideal. Additionally what are the effects of the type of repetitive labor these people are up to?
That said, it's wonderful to see someone lifted out of poverty. I hope millions more have the same chance.
(Do you get why some people are pushing back on your comment above? You can come up with this kind of stuff for anything. You can't eat an apple today without possibly furthering child labor, our world is too complex to try and turn every feel good story into a dig for downsides, because they will always exist. It is in no way "important" to do suss them out. And it's fine to discuss them, but you don't need to make it a reaction to the feel good story, you're allowed to just discuss these topics independently of the story)
There's actually a problem with "rags to riches" stories, specifically: they're used, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, to justify and reinforce unjust systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rags_to_riches#Criticism). Looked at objectively, they're often essentially a dramatic version of someone buying a lottery ticket and winning the jackpot.
I'm not saying you can't look at the negatives of stories, far from it, but trying to bring a story to an extremely open-ended negative point is so easy, but adds nothing of value. You could have the conversation separately of the story and lose absolutely nothing, the story is just being used as a springboard then tossed.
Suppose you drop any and all negative criticism of the story. What's left? What's that for? What should anyone make of this story? What lessons can they learn? What true lessons can they learn? What invented lessons can they learn (because sometimes we tell stories to convey invented lessons, rather than ones rooted in truth)?
What is it that you want someone to get from a story like this, and do you believe that your desired lesson is useful and/or true?
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At the end of the day this feels like such a HN thread. A story can't just be a moment feel good?
It has to be reinforcing systematic injustice or a looking glass for how terrible so many have it?
It can't just be something that makes you go "huh, neat, good for him" and you move on with life?"
Again, I'm not saying it has to be that, I once again reiterate it's fine to look deeper and for negatives, just maybe actually keep it relative to the story... but just "accepting the bait" as it were...
Would it really be so terrible if all someone got out of it was a moment of a smile rather than some grand philosophical prototypical mind twisting that defines a story?
Stories don't have some sort of "answer" there's no singular reason why they all exist.
However ... having established that as the goal for this particular story, we can ask how well it does that, compared to other stories that might also have this as their only goal. We probably should ask this, because there almost innumerable stories whose primary purpose is to create a smile, and we may as well not waste our time on the less good ones given that we have (individually and as a culture) only a finite time to tell and/or listen to stories.
The ranking is necessarily personal (subjective), and incomplete (given the scope of possible stories). Even so, if I was looking for a story to just smile at, I'd rank this one fairly low (mostly because it butts right against the more difficult questions you've asked us to put aside (for a while, at least)).
A story can have good parts and bad parts. It does not make you a bad person to like the good parts. It does not make you a bad person to pick out the bad parts. It does make you a bad person to take a dump on someone's comment to "own" them.
It's not! It is literally the furthest thing from important in the comment section for that story! Certainly not in such an open ended way!
It's the laziest form of concern-baiting.
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And don't project your own little weird need to "own" people like your comment is trying too hard to do onto me, I'm pointing out something that should be obvious: it's easy to go "what about the other guys" but not every story needs to be about "the other guys"