Once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived a handsome prince named Sid in a tiny kingdom nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas wedged by powerful empires. Now, as things turned out, Sid’s dad, the peace-loving Sudd, lived in constant fear that his tiny kingdom may be gobbled up by his ambitious neighbours some day. So, he spent most of his time in grief while his kingdom lived in misery. Young Sid spent several sleepless nights wondering how to help his insecure dad in a way that might bring cheer to his subjects. And then, one night, after the palace lights had dimmed, Sid crept out of his bed in silence and made good his escape, to lead the life of a wanderer, leaving his unsuspecting wife and kid behind.

Many, many years later, the handsome prince, now wiser with age and experience, returned home as Bud, and started teaching his people the virtue of begging as a path to liberation. When his folks asked him why the prince had turned a pauper, Bud smiled wide and explained that in begging, we destroyed our acquisitive impulses that ultimately lead to suffering. Man can only kill his ego when he seeks help for sustenance.

So powerful was his message, that soon the wisest scholars, the richest merchants and the smartest princes started giving away their fortunes to be buddies with Bud, wandering the streets together in ochre robes in their quest for nirvana. Over time, Bud’s mightiest neighbours too came knocking to hear his voice of reason and exchange their arms for alms in search of peace. Bud’s conquest of the human heart was so profound that in it he sowed the seed of universal compassion.

Two-and-a-half millennia later, Bud’s legacy survives as the world-embracing Buddhism as we know of today. It also flourishes beyond the ochre robes of spiritualism, in the virtual world of realism, as I will tell you later.

Alms or almsgiving in organised Buddhism is the respect that a lay gives to a monk, nun or the spiritually inclined. Buddhists believe that the act of giving and taking helps us make a symbolic connect to the spiritual realm by demonstrating our humbleness and respect for each other in secular societies.

In giving, the seeker makes a connect with the seer and what he represents. In propounding this philosophy of giving, the Buddhists have also constructed an exquisite paradox that the more we give without seeking something in return, the wealthier we become in the broadest sense. Now I don’t know how often you draw comfort from such emotions in every day life, but on the flip side, if you care for a moment’s silence and delve deeper into yourself, you will actually realise that we have received our happiest gifts when we asked for them, not when somebody gifted something to us just like that. Which is why at Stanford, I am told, they now teach students about the joy of asking because they believe that your biggest desires are fulfilled when you ask.

I woke up to the possibilities of asking last week when I received an unsolicited mail in my official drop box that went like this: “We know this might not be the usual news story for Financial Chronicle but we wanted to send it to you anyway in case you thought it might be of interest. Chris Riley is available for interviews and we have a great selection of stills from his film First Orbit too should you wish to see them. The main crowd funding feature story can be read in www.indiegogo.com/firstorbit and the attached press release also explains why this unique historical film has led to a worldwide search for financial support.”

Chris who? I asked. What’s crowdfunding, I wondered.

Before long, my Silicon Valley whizkid friend Sriram Shankar, who’s graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is now working on low-cost android platforms for education — a regular in the weekend issue of Financial Chronicle — wrote up a long memo on this newest concept in sourcing cash for innovation. You can read more of that in Sriram’s exhaustive research on the opposite page (Read Wisdom of the crowd: METAMIND). Without taking away from Sriram’s research, suffice to say that bright and enterprising talents across the globe are now using social networking platforms to raise petty sums of cash from thousands of unacquainted people to fund innovations. Chris Riley is the latest to try his luck.

Chris who? You may still ask. Professor Riley is an independent filmmaker from London. He worked on Nasa’s early Spacelab 1 Shuttle mission for his PhD at Imperial College, before embarking on a career making science documentaries for the BBC.

For a little over a month now, he has been seeking support from space enthusiasts across the world to crowdfund a multi-language DVD and Blu-ray version of his hit internet movie First Orbit that celebrates Yuri Gagarin’s historic space flight orbiting the Earth in 1961. You can watch it on YouTube where the film has already attracted 3.5 million views, revealing to us what man saw of Earth when he first plunged into space 50 years ago in a 108-minute sojourn onboard the Russian Vostok rocket. First Orbit also clearly shows what Gagarin did not see — bloody, nasty feuds on ground that separate you from me.

In return for your cash, which could give you “a warm fuzzy feel” for giving away as little as a dollar, Chris promises to place your name in the credits in the DVD/Blu-ray versions should you pay $10 or more. So, he argues it’s not really a charity; he is funding the project by pre-selling the DVD and Blu-ray and credits on the film, so people get something for their money, rather than just making a donation.

I didn’t quite realise how to help out Chris in his venture till I wrote back asking what was his deeper philosophy behind making a film for as little as $35,000 out of cash support from ordinary folks, when any large media house should have backed his project. Chris wrote back saying, “Yuri Gagarin made his pioneering flight for all of us. His story is our story. And his achievement, in becoming the first human being to orbit the Earth, is part of our shared cultural heritage. So we always wanted to share the film with as many people on Earth too; by giving it away…. That said, it would have been a very hard film to get a global media giant to back in advance, as it’s somewhat unconventional — being entirely made of images of Earth, as Gagarin would have seen it, set to music and the original voice recordings. TV commissioners aren’t brave enough to commission something like this, which is why I didn’t bother even asking them for money, and instead just went out and made it without a budget!”

First Orbit is the precursor film to a new film Chris is making called, Orbit, the story of the first 550 people to fly into space. Will our very own wing commander Rakesh Sharma, the only Indian in space, find space in Chris’ project? I wonder!

Yet, for all the excitement around the First Orbit project, money hasn’t come in easily. Till the time of this article going to press, Chris has only raised about a $4,969 or barely 14.19 per cent of what he’s planned to spend on rolling out the video discs, from just about a 100 people in 20 countries. That kind of cash will at least help him start manufacturing the discs.

Chris thinks that’s success. It has built Chris a community of interested fans to help him embark on his next bigger venture. “We always knew it was going to be hard to raise such an amount of money in this way, but you’ve got to try.”

Time is running out for Chris. I checked his crowdfunding site once more, before keying in my Visa numbers. You too can make it happen before the campaign runs out at 11.59 pm pacific time tonight.

PS: I don’t intend to take away from the earnestness of Christ when he says, “The human spirit is a powerful creative force for good, and yes, it can still launch big dreams.” But, I must also confess that ever since I checked out Chris on the net, I have been wondering aloud, if I could be the Buddha of the web one day, passing my bowl of humility around, in my eternal quest to become a billionaire in the shortest possible time funded by the goodwill of the crowd.

Please post your answers to the email below. Better still, please help Chris tonight to complete his mission on humankind’s shared vision.

shubhrangshuroy@mydigitalfc.com