We are more
often than not referred to as a ‘fractured and frantic species moving down the
path of destruction.’ It’s surprising how easily people say that, and what is
more surprising is the number of people who would readily agree to such a
preposterous proposition. It is like the society is not left with any more
flesh at all. It’s is as if the bones that are meant to hold us up are the only
things we are left with. And when no hope is left, we turn around and ask a
question. A question that bears an almost equal stupidity in terms of what is
and what isn’t tangible. “Did we learn something from our past?”.
Aristotle
once said, “a man can never cross a river twice, because the river will never
be the same, nor will be the man” and though lesser quoted in various places,
this is probably one of the most important quotes of the century second only to
of course, “we haven’t intertied this planet from our ancestors, we have
borrowed it from our children”. The problem that we as a population face change
day by day. Our forefathers had the luxury of having a fairly constant scene of
quite some years. That made learning easy. You had what was essentially a
textbook field. Which is why textbooks were successful in the first place. As
time went by and we entered the post modernistic era, we stand in a dynamic
world where problems change by the minute and what we read yesterday becomes
redundant before the date can change and that is what makes learning form the
past mistakes a task that is not only intellectually changeling but also taxing
to the society at the same time. Taking lessons from the past would mean
vulnerability to circumstances that don’t even exist today. I am not dwelling
upon a proposition for completely discarding history but the trouble still
remains that a lot of what we experienced yesterday is experience that today is
almost useless. This can be substantiated from the fact that a lot of
corporations today are complaining about the employability of students once
they finish their education. Companies are of the opinion that the students
today are only qualified on paper and that the real world problems are too much
trouble for their tiny little brains.
These factors
hurt us even more when we have a developing country to feed. Not only do we
have more frequently changing problems, we are also short of the solutions that
others have access to due to a relatively stable economy. This unstable economy
is something that cannot be cured overnight and something whose solutions are
not referred to in the history that we have lived. Coming back to our point,
the introduction might have made it clear that I believe that the solutions to
our problems today cannot be directly derived from the happenings in the past.
Neither do we have books and epics that can grant an exit in the form of a
poetic magnum opus. The learnings that we can derive though are different and I
will sought some liberty in terms of defining problems and solutions as and
when we progress along this essay. That shouldn’t be much of a pain for
conventional wisdom has anyways abandoned us and a different purview is all
that we probably need.
Let us first
define what ‘country’ we are talking about. This involves not only the Republic
of India and all the terrain and exclusive economic zones covered hence but
also the countries that we are in relations with. (That’s pretty much the
entire world but still a certain set can definitely be defined.) This change in
definition becomes essential because several favors rendered by countries to
each other today are in some way or the other a form of barter when either now
or at a point of time in future we shall be expected to pay them back even if
it costs us our integrity. This being said, their problem and shortcoming
become our headache as well to quite some extent. Let’s move on to the
secondary domain of the problem that we have. This is the domain of the
stakeholders. Now the stakeholders in the country are not only the people who
reside in it and hold nationality but are also the ones who indulge in any kind
of trade relations or other interactions that positively or negatively affects
the nation. So we have an almost clear picture about where to look for the problem
and centering whom we should deal with. It is most irrelevant in abstract sense
as the domain is too large. But let’s look at it from a very objective point of
view in the following section.
The world as
a whole had changed over time and what has changed it more than anything else
is communication. The way that we converse and the speed at which news from all
around the world travels to places has changed. This causes a special problem
for the target group we have in study here. We have always been relatively
backwards in terms of technological or social growth when we look at the last
two centuries. Backwards relative to the living standards of the west and the
advancements in their social structures. Now this isn’t really a problem until
the comparison starts. We have a state where the communication about
advancements is so fast the people start expecting great things from everywhere
all at once and it is a fact hard accepted in the realm of sociology that not
all news is supposed to be taken seriously by a society. We as a nation have
started expecting way too much out of our social fabric while the amount of
maturity required in the foundation of our social structure has yet not reached
a point where it can cope with that change. This leads us to where we are
today. The potential as an economic and technological giant that we see in
ourselves isn’t exactly flawed but it is to some extent wrongly approached.
This is where
learnings from the past come into play. Let’s start by talking about the trend
of development in the world vis-à-vis the national growth. The world got
automobiles somewhere back in the 19th century. India on the other
hand had the first locomotive place somewhere in the late 19th
century. The world saw its first flight in 1903 by the Wright Brothers. India
on the other hand still extensively used bullock carts till the first quarter
of the 20th century. Automobiles did make an advent and with a lot
of panache but they were what 100 acre mansions today are for a common man. It’s
not really the question of how fast the world moved than it is about how fast
we coped up. As we move to the post-independence era, we saw the slow growth of
most industries under strict governmental control while the rest of the world
had already hit full scale industrial revolution, and that too privatized in
the early 20th century. This was also one of the reasons why the
first and the second world wars were able to move to such a large scales.
Now move to
the very recent history where in less than a year of the launch of the
curiosity rover, we have launched the world most cost efficient mars mission.
We still haven’t been able to land on the planet but nevertheless the leap was
large and gained appreciation from all over the world. We are catching up, but
we are doing so in a very polarized manner. Our advancements in all the fields
are fast and promising but they aren’t exactly ours. It is like taking pills
for power because the body can’t generate anymore of itself.
What we need
to learn from the past is to slow down a little and rethink where we are going.
Where we as a country need to be and what we want ourselves to be in the next
50 years. Being caught up in the global turmoil is not going to cause us any
good. It will instead make a scapegoat out of the country for its resources and
push us further into the past. That is a very caustic statement to make but it
will most probably be the violent result of the actions that we decide upon
today. When we look at brain drain as a socio-economic problem for the slowdown
of the nation’s growth, we must also realize that the motivating factors for emigration
are not only individual selfishness based but have a greater social grounding.
The dent in drapes of delusional reality hit upon us when we take a closer look
at the emigration trends over the last few decades. But let us not delve into
those numbers as they will not provide much insight into where we want our
learnings to come from. Rather, let’s have a look at the way we have changed the
way we look at things. Consumer goods today have a very polarized trend in our
country. They are mainly marketed on the basis of two properties. First is the
fact that they have been developed in or R&D in insert-developed-country-name-here
or second, that they have been made from insert-name-of-indigenous-never-heard-about-jungle-here.
Nowhere else do we find the distinction based upon made in your country vs. not
made in your country. And the surprising thing is that both of them equally sell
well. Figures of the same are out of the scope of this essay but are readily available
in the public domain. And the selling trends for both have seen a divide in the
class of people who buy them and this has a direct relation with the availability
of the products. When FMCG goods of non-indigenous making were not readily available,
their commercials featured scenes that would appeal to the elite while today
the exact opposite has happened and a trend of the more ‘so called
knowledgeable’ people is to go for goods made with as little machine intervention
as possible. Funny as it may sound, the Mughal and British rule has superimposed
a sense of ‘elite in rarity’ than in ‘quality’ amongst us. We need to rewind to
times that we have forgotten already and peek to where we had a perception that
was truly rational. Times when we were intelligent enough to make paths from
dense forests than to follow on the paths already laid by narcissists and
nitwits of a totally different level. We need to look at what wrong this form
of government has done to us and to our thinking in the name of democracy. We
need to put the right people in the right places and put or money where our
heart is. This is not only a talk about idealistic restructuring. It is more
about reorienting what we as a nation want. Incentives have been our sole
drivers as we have been oppressed for several centuries altogether now. We need
to remove that tarnish and find the true spirit that lies beneath.
And how do we
do it? Glorify the government. Make defenses more desirable as a profession, put
governmental autonomy into the right hands and have the judiciary run on interpretive-constitution
and not on bull-heading into notions. What we need more than anything today, in
times of a crisis where we as a nation might lose our identity, is to make sure
that we know who we are and what we can do if we look at the right places
within and around us. As I said before, being in a world where things change by
the minute, it is simply not possible to adopt a game plan right from the past
and throw it over the present. But what we can derive out of the times past is
the motivation that brought us here and that which can lead us forward.
As a note of conclusion,
all that I would like to say is, we don’t need to follow developments that
happen around us but we need to rise above them and particularly avoid
disrupting elements. Kill anything that comes in way and use the corpse to
cross the mud. Extremism is not quite advisable for a democracy, but sometimes,
we have to do what is necessary. As Dante rightly said in his works, “the
darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in
times of a moral crisis”. We are at the cross roads of that crisis. What we do
from here onwards will matter not only to us but to all the generations yet to
come. So let’s look back, correct and move on.
Parth Trivedi
