Development or Self-destruction

It’s time for a model change to make way for real development.

It takes plenty of humility and tremendous amount of courage to accept the truth about development today. What is unfolding in the name of development today is self-destruction in myriads of ways. For some more time, we may be cruising along this path without facing life-threatening havoc and collapse on a large scale. However, unless we step out of our current denial, it may soon be too late. We are at that juncture in our life time.

Staying in Ahmedabad for the past 4 months, in what is billed as among India’s best cities to live in, provides ample proof of this self-destructive pattern. This is my second stay this city where I started my career in 1997 and stayed for over an year. Though much bigger in size in these 16 years, it pales before its original self in most yardsticks of real development.

With a few days of rains in September, roads are in pathetic state. With the city having expanded multiple times beyond its means, there seems to be little respite in time to come in form of road repairs. Roads are in bad shape across the city. In the Prahaladnagar area for instance, there are crater sized potholes in most places With waterlogging all around this is a dangerous situation as it’s not even possible to gauge the depth of the craters.

Due to bad roads, there is plenty of traffic jam and pollution from engine idling as well as from deteriorating condition of vehicles due to bad roads. With numerous auto-rickshaws running on adulterated lubricants, the air gets filled with their toxic fumes. Public transport is in poor shape as a result of bad roads, fare price escalation and growing pollution in the city.

Traffic lights even on the busiest junctions either don’t work or are inconsequential. The city is flooded by 2-wheelers. With the city’s rapid expansion and growing distances, this amounts to longer and stressful 2-wheeler rides on the city’s roads. This is already showing up in people’s health.

At a time when there is so much talk on the “Gujarat model of development” around the country, the state of prime areas in Gujarat’s leading city can no longer be brushed under the carpet.

Food – Where “development” hits the most

Food is badly affected by the current model of development. No one can deny that food and water are an important part of our lives. Most of us cannot survive without them even for a few days.

Despite great care to pick up fruits and vegetables, most of them taste bland with a lingering taste of the chemicals in which that are used to grow and to ripen. It’s quite an effort to persuade children to pick up fruits at times, which they otherwise love to eat.  There is also a very limited variety of fruits that’s available, mostly hybrid bananas, apples and pomegranates. Mangoes, the king of fruits seems to receive the worst treatment. They are utterly bland and tasteless.

Most of them are transported from far distances and are hardened either due to packaging or due to their chemical treatment. Pear for instance, which my younger daughter loves to eat, disappeared from the fruit market within a month. Good quality Chickoo similarly disappeared from the shelves in no time. The variety that’s left has hardened peel and can only be fed by pulping this into a milkshake, which can then be gulped down.   

Vegetables have become equally tasteless. This is a direct impact of much of the peri-urban areas where vegetables would be previously grown has been sold out as real estate or for setting up industries. The worst condition is of tomatoes, a commonly used ingredient in many Indian dishes. The softer and juicier  variety with a much thinner peel has disappeared from the local vegetable market. Other common vegetables such as potatoes, ladies’ finger (bhindi or okra), cabbage, cauliflower fare no better. The crass commercialization of vegetables has distorted the much prized seasonality of vegetables which ensured that we ate the right kind of vegetables in different seasons that was a secret to our good and robust health and long lives of around 100 years. 

Rice and wheat face a similar predicament. Rice, which is the staple food for many people is tasteless and lacks nutrition. Wheat flour is powdery and devoid of nutrition. Though Ahmedabad is fortunate to have a variety of pulses (called as kathol locally), oilseeds and millets available, the variety and taste is much poorer to what it was a decade and a half back.

The saddest state of affairs is with the state’s milk supply. This is ironical as superbrand Amul comes from Gujarat. When quizzed about the condition of mal-nutrition among even the well-off sections of Ahmedabad, the state Chief Minister Sh. Narendra Modi is reported to have said that the children have become fitness-conscious. The mothers run after their children with glass of milk but they refuse to drink milk. The reason lies elsewhere. Most of the dairy supply is from reconstituted milk powder and largely from Fiji-Holstein and Jersey cows. This milk is unsavory and therefore most children refuse to drink milk. Pasteurisation and UHT (Ultra Heat Treatment) further take away the taste and nutrition from milk.

Inferior Water quality – The slow killer

Water quality and availability is likely to be the death knell of the current model of development. Piped water may remain a pipe dream in the years to come. Already, the piped water supply is reduced to an hour in morning and in the evening. What’s so evident that there is no effort on rain water harvesting that accumulates in the low lying areas. With rapid expansion of the city in the past decade, a number of these low lying areas were agricultural areas or had lakes and ponds. 

With increased precipitation this year, the road side garbage and sewage water gets all mixed up to create a scary scenario. Schools had to be called off for consecutive days because of the waterlogging on the roads and in the neighborhoods. On days people can’t even step out of their houses. This leads to gradual contamination of ground water, which was already saline in several places due to overuse and misuse of the natural water system.

This water is not even suitable for bathing purposes. It is already leading to a variety of skin problems and hairfall, even among women and children prematurely. This same water is filtered and used for drinking. This water, devoid of the natural nutrition can only be mechanically drunk, as it’s devoid of taste.

It’s all in the mind

With collective efforts, the situation could improve. Certainly, Ahmedabad has several pluses that make it a relatively better city by Indian standards. What’s most disconcerting though is the degree of denial and even intolerance to discuss these issues among city’s elite, decision makers and influencers. It has been shocking that such intolerance can be found in a leadership development institute in the city where I briefly worked.

This exposed me to the murkier side of Ahmedabad. In one discussion, where it was highlighted by the leadership trainer on the effectiveness of meeting in person, I asked some of the participants about its implication on the number of car trips. The participants were small and medium industrialists. I asked them if they would venture on the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) for occasional trips. BRTS incidentally is one of the showcases of city’s development. I shared how CEOs and mayors in large cities took the public transport and some even cycled to office. I also mentioned how the traffic  jams are becoming more frequent and longer.

The response was an eerie silence at the very mention of public transport. One of the ladies’ who runs a steel making unit immediately withdrew from the conversation leaving behind a blank stare. On my feet, I explored other options of allowing car poolers on the BRTS routes. This was again cold shouldered by a group that was attending a program called “Exploring Potential, Achieving Dreams”. A world-class city where people across the board use public transport is not the stuff, their dreams are made of.

Instead, as some of them shared in the subsequent sessions, they would rather grow into a 1lakh crore company where every employee had a car and a flat to themselves. In a visualization exercise, one thing common to many of the dreams was a fleet of swanky cars or a mention in the Forbes magazine list of most wealthy Indians.

Not surprisingly though, the same set of participants with those swanky car dreams reported in the following week that they were feeling depressed. No wonder, they had been so busy destroying themselves with imbecile dreams egged on by a “self-proclaimed” spiritually inclined leadership coach.

In another meeting with a director of a large steel-furnace manufacturing company, the discussion veered towards how China was producing 650 million metric tonnes of steel, which was more than half of total world production and ten times more than India’s production with similar population. He shared how Chinese authorities serve evacuation notice of 36 hrs. and this is followed without any resistance.

The director also mentioned how the Chinese production was for captive consumption to indicate the rate of growth. I wondered if such a rate of production was sustainable, if at all it was desirable. I was reminded of Jonathan Long’s book titled “When a billion Chinese jump” on the destructive ecological impact of Chinese “development” and what would happen if India followed suit, but chose to keep quiet.

It was at the mention of “this development was the only way that we could feed the 30% of starving Indians that I finally broke my silence. I asked if all the coal-mining and pollution was not affecting the food security of hundreds of million Indians. There was a muzzled silence once again. 

There is still hope

Can Ahmedabad turnaround from its path of inevitable self-destruction ? It looks unlikely that this change will come from within the ruling classes in Ahmedabad. The 2002 riots and the paranoia that has followed since has been useful for its feudal class to muzzle the voices of dissent from the common people.

It’s with Narendra Modi’s rise to the centre of Indian politics that Ahmedabad and the “Gujarat model of development” and specially Ahmedabad is likely to come under closer scrutiny. It’s sores and blisters have long been hidden through cosmetic surgery.

One way for the city to recuperate is to release its peri-urban areas by stopping any further concretization and even de-concretise, wherever necessary. The government needs to buy back the peri-urban land and dedicate them for agriculture and for pastures so that the city’s food supply can be revived. The city needs to promote urban gardening on small plots and terraces to meet its food requirements. It needs to revive its water bodies with a network of storm water drains so that the run-off can be collected for use. The rejuvenated peri-urban areas can be used for this purpose.

Lots needs to be done on the transportation front. Basic things like traffic signals must function. The planning for the entire network of the BRTS must encompass demand management measures and feeder services for last mile connectivity. Without this there is no respite to the burgeoning fleet of private 2-wheelers and 4-wheelers that’s piling upon the city roads.

In time, we can hope for a far more better city that we can be truly proud of as one of the best cities to live in, not only in India but in the world, albeit, a much smaller than what it is today. Rather than taking pride in ever expanding cities rolling into grey-goo megalopolis, we shall soon discover that small is indeed beautiful.

National Rural Livelihood Mission - Statement of Purpose

I have been deeply moved by the agrarian crises, the spate of suicides that consumed over two and a half lakhs farmers’ causing immense distress to the families. My thoughts also centred on food and environment security in coming years and our moral responsibility towards our children and coming generations, if this crises persisted.

Rather than just brood and fret about it, I decided to do something about it. In the year 2008, the first opportunity came to study the impact of a few projects of inclusive growth in the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

The key finding of this study was that even as there were some attempts at inclusion of poor and deprived sections, there was concomitant process of systemic “exclusion” that was driving a much larger section of people into poverty and deprivation. For a long time, I wondered why people should bear with such an exploitative and extortionary system. Why were government and non-government programs focused on wider and sustainable development oblivious to this aspect?

The key challenges were pricing of farm and other primary produce in the rural areas and the kind of education and skill-building programs that children and youth were being subjected to. There was also the issue of social and cultural alienation of people educated in ways that drove them away from their roots. The pricing failed to cover the higher input costs, risks and uncertainties of rural production where as the education and skill development seemed to be at odds with their basic needs.

For the next 2 years, I was involved in the anti-corruption movement but that too was confined to Delhi. I did explore staying in a rural area for a period to study and understand the situation at the grassroots level. It was only in Feb. ’13 that the first opportunity to do so arose.

This was as a week-long workshop in a village called Govindpur khiri in Bijnaur district in Uttar Pradesh. This was addressed by noted expert on traditional socio-economic system in India Sh. Ravindra Sharma. This opened my eyes to an alternative development model that’s truly inclusive and sustainable unlike the current model. This also gave me an opportunity to stay and feel the beauty and richness of traditional village life and how it was being ruptured by misplaced notion of development.

A further opportunity came to stay in a village near Wardha in Vidarbha where I could reflect upon what I had learnt from Sh. Ravindra Sharma. I stayed for over a fortnight with the Kathiawadi cowherder community in a village called Tigaon-Amla. With meager resources, this community of about 40 people is able to look after about 400 Gir cows.

This is a hardworking community where women and children are integral to the overall work responsibilities. They supply valuable milk to the nearby town of Wardha. They follow natural breeding, keeping and pasturing practices as a result of which their cows are in good health and have fairly good milk productivity.

They migrated nearly 5 decades back to Vidarbha and other parts of Maharashtra. This is a close-knit traditional community that has stuck to its roots even as it has adapted reasonably well to local conditions. By the estimate of one of their elders, the number of Gir cows in Maharashtra reached a peak of 50lakhs about 10 years back and has since declined to 13 lakhs.   

Yet, because of Pricing and Education, the community faces a crises in various proportions. There are a variety of reasons due to which milk being a valuable and essential commodity in many households has not been able to find an appropriate price point.

First and foremost, as a perishable commodity with a shelf life of just a few hours and even less during long summer season, milk producers are at a loss. This also cannot be sold to faraway markets. The price distortion is forced upon them by the government machinery that administers the price of milk. In search of a stable customer base, the cowherder community which is already pressed for time and is under great stress due to depleting pastures, rising fodder costs, cost of living and the distraction of its younger generation who are under various pressure to move away from their traditional sources of livelihood.

So, when I assessed the situation on the ground, I advised them to process milk and to sell value added products such as butter and ghee, with longer shelf life. Butter and ghee, along with butter milk from this source, produced in a traditional way, fetches a high premium in markets both as medicine and food. There is also a medicinal market for cow urine and cow dung from this source, which could reduce their dependency on selling milk to buy fodder for cows.

This will also allow them to get a better price for their milk commensurate to the input costs, the efforts put in and the risks and uncertainties. Without that the younger people of the community are tempted to sell the calves and thus deplete their asset base for some easy money.

Ironically, the Education of these children and youth leaves a lot to be desired in learning appropriate skills and to enrich their lives. The more therefore “educated” they are, the more distracted they get to veer away from their traditional livelihoods. This is indeed a tricky issue of freedom of education and needs lots more attention.

During my stay, I explored how milk could be supplied to the adjoining village community, which I was told does not consume milk. The grapevine was that they would rather pay lots more for country liquor than pay for milk. It was also shared that their children were not adapted to taking milk. However, when I met up with the children in the village school, I found that the reality was very different than what was gossiped. The children did want milk and said so vocally in front of the principal and other prominent people of the village, who I accompanied. In fact, they did produce some milk in the village from the local Gavrani breed that sold at Rs. 40 per litres while the Kathiawadi community was selling milk more than 10 kms. away for Rs. 20 per litre.

The main reason for this distortion was lack of education and awareness about how locally available cow milk from the Gir cows could be a valuable source of nutrition for children, which that children asked for, but were denied because of cultural alienation.  

These were just some of my findings. Even as I had to cut back a detailed study and action to keep up with my family responsibilities in Ahmedabad. Yet, given an opportunity, I would like to work on increasing rural livelihood opportunities, productivity and the quality of life.

In course of my stay, I met with Smt. Sarada Muralidharan, COO of NRLM at a recent meeting in a nearby village in Pavanar. I am enthused that a program such as NRLM can bridge the gap in Pricing, Education as shared above and various others as we have come across. Many of these learning as studied.

With the recent meeting with Sh. Shravan Hardikar with my associate Col. Alok Asthana in Mumbai, I am enthused that NRLM in Maharashtra may be a good opportunity to work on this subject, so close to my heart. With well-designed leadership development and training programs, we could help the rural sector strengthens its roots as well as adapt to the modern idiom, in an assured manner.

We learnt in our schools that India lives in its villages. That message is finally coming home.   

Is technological progress leaving life behind?

“Technology is a good slave but a bad master”

Articles are not written these days. They are more likely “marketed” to their target readership. The typical English newspaper is not the target readership for this article that I am about to share with you.

At the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where I studied nearly 15 years back, they do teach about the tale of two marketers who are both sent to a remote island where no one wears shoes. One of them comes back to report that it’s most unlikely that they shall ever buy shoes.

The other however sees a great opportunity in what she believes is a virgin market. With changing lifestyle and work routines, she pitches that each one of them is a potential customer now or later. That was an important lesson for me that I still steadfastly hold on to.

Another interesting thing happened a day after I sat to write down this article. An article titled “Techno-vision: Solving humanity’s grand challenges” (TOI, 18^th Aug.’13) written by Silicon Valley evangelist Mr. Vivek Wadhwa appeared in the press the next day. 

This is a grandstanding article that firstly portends a scenario where the only kind of water may be left to drink or for potable uses is sewage water and such yucky water which will be “Slingshot” for an initial price of a few thousand dollars and electricity cost of one kilowatt for 30 litres. He forgets to mention a likely annual maintenance cost and the fact that human beings do not consume sanitized distilled water but natural mineral water. There is certain extra costs to be incurred if any company were to provide water of the same composition as natural mineral water from natural sources, that’s been available for a long time before we began to rapidly pollute river and ground water a few decades or so back. This also varies every 20kms. according to geo-climatic conditions.

He cites several such examples of how “artificial meat” for burgers are going to be manufactured in laboratories, how solar energy is going to be dirt cheap and with similar such pipe dreams of unlimited “free” energy, food is soon going to be unlimited with the help of advances in medicine, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other fields. He does mention that there will be some problems but fails to learn again and again and again that many of his techno-wizardry driven solutions may be worse than the problems that they are targeting at.

Mr. Wadhwa and the cottage industry of such techno-evangelists that he belongs to are a third kind of marketer, who presume that we are all born with two left feet and that too, these are feet of the same size for everyone on the island. This echoes Henry Ford’s “any color of car as long as it’s black” over a century back. Haven’t we moved on! 

  

Technology today has pervaded every walk of our life. Motor cars, smart phones, Hi-definition television sets, blue ray audio, automatic washing machines, pressure cookers, microwave, oven, toaster and grill, digital cameras – they are no longer merely status symbols. Life seems so difficult to imagine without several or even one of these in the hustle-bustle of city life. What came as a surprise is how they are making way into the rural areas, as I experienced in a village stay near Wardha in Maharashtra, a town where Gandhi started his experiments with Gram Udyog or Village Industries, 75 years back.

There are essentially two kinds of technologies. One is Wadhwa’s technology which is built on lies, cunning and videotapes. That’s conducted in the “Closed Source” confines of the office and the laboratory. This may be initially developed by entrepreneurs as Mr. Wadhwa is quick to point out, but is soon controlled by a handful of corporate in a remote location. The work is mostly done in uniform air-conditioned ambience that defies the wide diversity of geo-climatic conditions around the world. This also therefore leaves behind so much of “grey goo” that Mr. Wadhwa perils at, before he starts belting out another set of his techno-solutions that will create an even worse kind of grey goo and even faster. This may be lucrative for him but comes at a great cost to the humanity today and more so for our children and future generations.

The other is Gandhi’s technology on which the Gram Swaraj model is based. This is “Open Source” technology that’s built on truth, perseverance and a sharing of knowledge without any barriers. This will also be developed by entrepreneurs but not in the closed confines of the office and the laboratory, but in the open fields around the world with its diverse geo-climatic conditions. Unlike Wadhwa’s technology which seeks to first dirty and then purify water, Gandhi’s technology gets down to the field and assesses the sources of water pollution. The polluter must clean up the water before releasing it in the open. If it cannot it must close down.

Next, Gandhi’s technology seek to tap all natural sources of water including rainwater and explore ways of storing them so that they are available throughout the year. Ponds and wells are made at appropriate locations and of sizes guided by the topography of the place.

It even deploys practices such as reducing the use of water in washing in certain months, which coincides with the holiday season for the local washer-families. By keeping the village well a little away from the house block, it also developed camaraderie among the water carrying folks. The use of earthen pots also ensured that there is good handling of water besides their sanitizing properties, unlike plastic pots that are in use today. This also creates the market for the local potter-entrepreneur. In the winter months, water is stored in copper or brass pots which beneficiates the water in those seasons. Water is also stored in storage bags made of dead animal’s skin which was suitable for irrigation and even for drinking in some areas. This also created a market for the local cobbler-entrepreneur.

On the whole, clean natural mineral water with great quality and purity is made available throughout the year. This is strictly not sold even as its storage and upkeep generated plentiful of market for entrepreneurs who are paid in local currencies, in grains or other useful or aesthetic stuff that they may need. They didn’t have to ask for a return. People gift each other as honor and in dignity of their service for each other. The houses are designed in such a way that water is accessible to any passer-by who may need it.   

Wake up Mr. Wadhwa and all other techno-blinded folks and get your PET “mineral water” checked. It may be missing a statutory warning that water stored in plastic bottles for a length may be carcinogenic. In several tests they have even been found to be more contaminated than the local tap water. What else have you been drinking?   

Are we already so blinded by technology to see how Mr. Wadhwa’s “techno-vision” technology blinds us?

Chandra Vikash is a management consultant and social activist. He is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur and MBA from IIM Calcutta. He can be reached at chandra.vikash@gmail.com.

The “fully automatic” Washing Machine – Is it an overload?

In an era where future wars are proclaimed to be fought over water, the water-guzzling “fully automatic” washing machine should have been quite an anathema. Washing machines today could be using as much as 20litres of water per kg of clothes washed. Ask any housewife, however, and she would have countless tales of the drudgery of having to wash clothes manually. The washing machine does cut out the drudgery of washing clothes.

Before we delve into the merits or demerits of the washing machine, we must ponder over why our clothes get dirty so fast, how the volume of clothes could be minimised and spare some thoughts on our sartorial choices that lead to easy washability.

A big reason for clothes to get difficult-to-wash-off dirty is the pervasive presence of oily and sticky dust from vehicular emissions and  perennial road construction that mixes up with the roadside eroded soil and depleted green cover that absorbs some of this oily and sticky dust. In several areas oily and sticky dust emanates from industrial pollution such as coal-based thermal power plants and chemical plants.

A logical question to ask is whether we could minimize our exposure to such oily and sticky dust. Looking deeper, here we are both the perpetrator and the victims of this oily dust.

Imagine a scenario which is being presented world over as the new urbanism. In this model, most of our day to day activities are localized. So, the neighborhood serves as the school district, the work district and the shopping district. In such a scenario, why would we need oily and sticky dust emitting motor vehicles inside the neighborhood, with emission and dust coming off the tailpipes and the wheels respectively.

Wonder if there are no motor vehicle movements within the neighborhood district, why would we need space-guzzling tarmac roads. We could make way for much lighter roads with rainwater and drain-off channels alongside and which could be made of recycled materials – rubble from old, dilapidated buildings, plastic bags etc. They could also have thin film solar canvas on the top which apart from charging the low-powered, ultra-light Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, could also provide shed for pedestrians. To absorb even the minimal dust in this scenario, the green cover lining the streets will absorb them. In such a dust-free environment there is significantly lower chance of our clothes getting dirty and needing a wash that often as they need now.

Apart from wearable clothes there is also a large volume of bedsheets, pillow covers, curtains, doormats, carpets etc. that will require much less frequent cleaning in such a dust-free environment. At the same time, with the neighborhood as school and work district, we could also explore how more people could gainfully work out of their work studio as a part of the house or apartment building.

Going out and dressing up in such a scenario will be for special occasions of festivals and ceremonies rather than a daily ritual of dressing up for school or to office. The school routine should become considerable easier than the ordeal it’s today. With the neighborhood as school district, teachers should pick up younger students to walk them to a classroom which could at times be under a tree or besides a pond or river rather than being a boxed room every day. To ingrain children with a model morning routine, teachers could be visiting home with the sunrise and the children leave home with a pair of clothes. They are taught to brush their teeth with the twig of neem, babool or some such tree with healthy juices tricking into their tummy. They next go to a nearby pond or canal for a bathe where they also learn to wash their clothes. Children, rich and poor, wear ordinary clothes every day and dress up only on special occasions.

The simplified work routine also eliminates a separate pair of clothes for a far away office. Dressing up again is only for special occasions. Unlike the office and laboratory routine today, most people shall serve the local society and earn their livelihoods locally. Their dresses for a farmer or a cowherder, carpenter or cobbler, blacksmith or goldsmith could be designed suitably. The office and the laboratories would gradually convert into work studios in the house or on the fields for most people.

One such profession in this new urbanist neighborhood will be that of washermen. They shall have specialized washing practices and material to remove various kinds of dirt and stains. Do we need to pay them heftily ?

Not, at all. These washermen or dhobi community in a traditional set up are paid for their services with cooked food and the village neighborhood takes care of all their other needs. The lady of the household is considered as the Gram Putri or as the daughter of the village. She, thus doesn’t have to cook her own food while she is busy with her washing and drying work. In special ceremonies, such as after birth of a child in a village they are treated with special honour.

The washer community also is given special access to a pond or canal where they set up their equipments for washing and drying. They have their own folk music that they hum in tune with their washing chores.

The washer community is given access to land where they can set up their sun drying nets and beds. They also have access to their own transport which in a traditional set up would be a pony. This could be replaced with a solar-charged electric cart in today’s scenario.  This would also double up as their ironing board for clothes that need ironing. With such specialized skills and practices, we were dressed immaculately both on special occasions of festivities and ceremonies and also in our daily lives.     

In such a new urbanist model, every household will be able to access specialized washing services at their doorstep and shall not be loaded with the washing course. This also implies a far greater efficient use of scarce water.

What we wear widely varies across the country today and in urban and rural areas. One trend that’s prominent is the comeback of cotton and linen fabrics. Keeping the sanctity of our sartorial choices as a private affair, it’s worthwhile to comment that at times we seemed to be dressed for an overkill and are under dressed on other occasions. Men’s suits and tie in the warm climes seem pertly inappropriate. That’s a big reason why apart from water guzzlers, these sartorial choices lead to overuse of air-conditioners in numerous offices and guzzle power as well leading back to more of the oily and sticky dust.  

Chandra Vikash is a management consultant and social activist. He is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur and MBA from IIM Calcutta. He can be reached at chandra.vikash@gmail.com.

Tale of Two Civilizations

All life is art. The key difference and similarity between the western and the eastern civilization is that in the former, "life imitates art" where as for the later,"life is art". They merge into and spin off from each other as life and art.

The canvas for the former is a contrived, artificial stage or backdrop, where the artist performs. Life is short-lived, pumped up and sexxed up. It arose from beastly conditions in Britain, spread thru' bestialisation in other areas to create the craving for such a life. When conditions change, it spread thru' crass commercialisation. It's coal and fossil fuel -powered technologies create mind-boggling speed and dazzle, albeit fleetingly. Once the dead and decadent fossil fuel reserves deplete, rapes and plunders nature to whet its addiction and finally self-destructs. After having rewritten the history books and erasing them from our living memories, it lingers its wretched existence out of a deepening fear of being stranded with no alternative. "18 till I die" is its swan song.

In the later, nature in all its seamless simplicity and suffusive splendour is the canvas, stage or backdrop, where the artist performs. It prospered in the heavenly conditions in India for a long long time. Life is full, rhythmic and beautiful. Its rich and powerful technologies leverage nature's immense power to move at wondrous speeds across seas, across space and time into multiple universes. Its deep psychology traverses inwards to explore the immense and expanding vastness that's mirrored in the outside world. "Live and let live" is its eternal mantra.

The eastern civilization must necessarily be destroyed thru' bestialisation before cravings for the western civilization shall arise among its own denizens, as is its mettle. As it implodes and self-destructs, its remnants shall be the raw material of a brand new civilization. It's only thru' several reiterations of the "life is art" principle that we can create nature in its pristine and virgin form as mankind's most wondrous invention.

We are witness to this extremely rare episode in our life and times when we may be toggling from the "life imitates art" into the "life is art" way of living. In order to enjoy the ride, we must hold our nerves surrender to the forces of nature and become one with it - cradle to cradle.

Happy journey!