LOS ANGELES: A former top executive of US software giant Microsoft Corporation has traded his high-flying job to deliver books to remote villages in Nepal on the back of a yak.

John Wood, a 39-year-old senior executive at the Washington-state based company quit his $300,000-a-year post and launched a charity in 2000 to boost literacy in remote Asian communities in countries such as India and Nepal.

The firm’s former director of business development for China used the substantial cash cushion he had built up while in the technological fast lane to set up the non-profit Room for Read which focuses its energies on Asia.

“People thought I was crazy, but I think it’s how you use your freedom that counts and I wanted to do something for other people,” he said of friends’ reaction to his transformation from executive to educator.

His life change came after a backpacking trip to Nepalese Himalayas where he was horrified to find that none of the children in one isolated village, which was a two days walk from the nearest road, could read.

The school’s library was empty and the only books it possessed had been left behind by foreign backpackers and were locked up so that the children would not damage them.

Wood began persuading friends to ship books to his father’s garage in Colorado to be sent on to Asia, but the project gathered a momentum of its own and soon filled the space, forcing his father’s car out of the garage.

“What started off as a hobby became a bit of an obsession for me when I saw how many children were unable to read,” he said.—AFP