DR (MAJ) HARICHARAN
In the previous articles, there was a continuous effort of pointing at what’s wrong with our country and society which makes it so unscientific or anti-science as a result of which people lose lives at scores of millions but it all goes on as if nothing has happened.
To start with it would be appropriate to raise similar examples which would serve us to step back and look at the whole issue at a global level and also focus down to the regional level ultimately.
Take the example of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. This year Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists who could develop mathematical models to study and understand global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.
It is not even a few years since world leaders like the former president of the US was denying climate change due to greenhouse gases emitted by human activity on the planet, and not even a few years since the Indian government had harassed environmental activist groups who were striving towards spreading awareness around the same subject.
But amazingly even now in the global climate summit, the world leaders including that of China and India which are some of the top-level net emitters of greenhouse gases are setting goals half a century from now which is being criticized as equal to doing nothing because the same bla bla was committed by most countries in the climate summits in the past and has to lead to the situation as emergent as now, requiring very drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as per the intergovernmental panel on climate change.
It is clear that mad and blind economic pursuits in the name of development which is nothing but copycat culture of the west (that too of the past history of west) has led to such a condition. Instead of having an innovative climate-friendly strategy from the beginning factored into all economic activity, there was only blind unidirectional copying of industrialization on a massive scale which is what seems like countries like China and to a lesser extent, India and many more in other continents are waiting to happen.
It has become wishful thinking to desire it not to happen in other countries, just because such blind unscientific development will lead to environmental disasters worldwide at a scale that cannot be justified.
But in a country like India, it may be possible for such catastrophes to happen without any public consequence because there is an ingrained capacity to structure the future on the foundations of genocides for almost millennia.
The caste system is a classic example which even now manages to kill thousands of sewage cleaners every year. Yes, it happens even now after a ban on the same as per law, but when the culture itself is such as to make a specific caste people work as manual scavengers and in the process kill them in thousands then what is the use of any democratic process to stop it. But we have mastered the art of forgetting them comfortably and just moving on.
Coming to other cultural practices one of the horrendous practices was to hate other religions (xenophobia -which is probably extended caste system) which lead to the partition when millions perished in the world’s largest migration of humans on earth, but still, hatred persists to a large extent and more so since Islamic terror has become a bane for the west and it has got amplified in the mass media to the comfort of the west.
The genocide is the partition of India wherein the millions of innocent people who died are also comfortably forgotten and the business as usual goes on in the form of both hatred and peacemaking between the countries of the subcontinent.
Next genocide is that of the famines due to such economic policies as which doesn’t suit the region, people study the subject elsewhere but try to implement at the macroeconomic level in the south Asian region with disastrous consequences, example the economic policies around the two world wars and even before had lead to massive expiration local food grains due to debt-driven wars between nations no way related to the subcontinent which leads to famines and death of millions, the change in food habits to adapt to regular famines has driven the food-culture to change so drastically resulting in diseases.
Diabetes and hypertension and heart disease burdens are like ticking time bombs which are otherwise effectively hidden away from public notice because individuals suffering from the diseases can’t count the same at the national level, it is usual for everyone to jump to surprises only after some celebrities die because of such diseases.
Hiding the disease and going on as of nothing happened has become a culturally ingrained property of the country or to say the whole subcontinent because when there is already a precedent in the form of previous such national level tragedies going unaddressed one seriously doubts whether there is really something called society for the redress of such crimes at national level or it is so that everything is just a sham in the name of democracy without which there is no other alternative?
When someone suffers as an individual because of these global insults but has no method of redress what will such an individual do?
There are two options – to suffer in silence and another to protest, but it is common for protestors to face humongous challenges because the system is set in such a way that the promiscuous-hiding-the-truth education system makes an army of morons who literally fill the whole society with half baked citizens who all work against the very expose of truth which is necessary.
In such a scenario it is very unlikely that the family or society or the country will progress anywhere in a logically correct direction, instead, it would be lurching in a direction conducive for the powerful and the rich sub-castes who own most of the wealth until another aimless outrage fires up as it happened in the early 20th century which was variously named – Russian revolution, communist uprising, peasant uprising, etc.
But what will happen in the end is the usurping of the real reason for the revolution by a new powerful master either the military or an oligarchy or some other corporate hegemony, in the end, this seems the destiny of our society until a literate and emancipated set of people drive the change instead of uneducated politicians with crony-capitalist money coming to power repeatedly in the name of democracy.
But if the root cause of such emancipation lies in a defect in the culture what do you do? It’s like the predicament faced by the climate activist Greta Thunberg, world leader summit seems meaningless in front of the urgency of action needed in the light of scientific evidence in front of mankind but if more than 90 percent of mankind is so scientifically retarded as to not even able to know what the word science means what’re the consequences? It’s bla bla from politicians and destruction and destruction from the nature side.
The same was with the caste system same with wars and revolutions and the same has happened in front of our eyes with the pandemic. But our culture doesn’t change. It’s a warning. Viruses Expose but humans don’t see.