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Monday, April 6, 2009

A society in harmony with Nature: it really existed in India!

This is one issue that has always recurred in my thoughts: how long can the world's resources last if we go at this pace? Not that long, I would say. Now consider this: modern society measures success with more consumption and possession and every nation in the world is out to increase its GDP and per capita income. Which means the pressure on our limited natural resources would get even worse. How long can the world provide for its people as more and more of them try to get more and more of those resources in their grasp? I am horrified to think of what is going to happen to this world.
Already we are hearing of many species going to disappear, ocean life and food chains collapsing, global warming, food and water scarcity and a lot more. But no one is paying any attention as we all try single-mindedly to get more wealth for ourselves and our families.
I have always wondered what an ideal world would be like. Should it be a socialist world with common ownership or resources? For a long time I thought such an arrangement could solve a lot of the problems faced by a world racing for more security and prosperity. But there are two issues here: one the socialist utopia can easily degenerate into an authoritarian regime, as happened in the erstwhile Soviet Union. Second, we are still considering nature and other living beings as resources -- to be consumed by humans.
That is where the problem is: as long as we consider that everything here has been created for our consumption, we are going to run into this wall of scarce resources and an inhospitable world sooner or later.
So what is the answer? Did a society ever exist that had tackled this problem? My search suddenly got an answer when I found this blog
This blog talks about what Pandit Rajmani Tigunait said about village life as it existed in North India a few years ago. Imagine how ideal such a society would have been, and the biggest surprise in this for me was that it had managed to survive the Islamic regimes and the British Raj in India. As materialism sweeped across India following its Independence, and as age-old social systems collapsed (some of the practices in those rural societies, such as untouchability, had to go anyway, but I would assume those practices were corruptions that crept in later into the system), the ideal and close-to-nature life that Indians had managed to preserve also were swept away.
With that went, I would say, the the wisdom of the sages from Indian society.
But here, finally, I think there is a blueprint that can be used to re-create such a society. Not just in India, but all over the world. For, if the world needs to survive, it will need to learn to live in harmony with Nature. My dream, nay, the Himalayan sages' vision of a Centre for Vedic Culture and Civilization would be the first step in re-creating such a society!