HONG KONG, November 20, 2013 – After putting a selection of stories from The Other Hundred photo-book on display in Hong Kong in mid-October, Chandran Nair, Founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow, who founded the project, shared the mission behind this counterpoint to the Forbes 100. Through this photo-book project, Nair aims at challenging norms set by photo journalism in the world and overthrowing stereotypes of poverty and how the world is viewed and portrayed by traditional mass media.

Those who expect terror, tragedies and war scenes in Afghanistan and Syria will be surprised by photos of the tranquil, normal daily life of people there shown in the book. “Pakistan is not what you see on CNN,” Nair stated. While the majority considers France and Germany as wealthy countries and colored people as the major population of poverty in the United States, the book pictured native Europeans and Caucasians there living in underprivileged conditions. Also, people in Nigeria are not hopeless as one may think.

Nair’s sharing was followed by a panel discussion on lives of ordinary people, a.k.a. the other hundred, moderated by Deborah Kan, the executive producer at the Wall Street Journal in Asia. The panellists were asked to suggest people whom they think should be included in the book. One example raised by Zoher Abdoolcarim, Asia Editor for TIME International, was a Japanese forensic doctor who helped identify decayed dead bodies of victims in the 2011 tsunami, and Chika Unigwe, a Nigerian-born novelist, suggested her sister who raised three of her children under very difficult situation – they are all ordinary people doing extraordinary things whose lives deserve to be celebrated.