Money has become the measure
of everything. Your social stature depends on your wealth. Your health depends
on it too because our hospitals have become expensive multi-speciality
industries. Your children’s education depends on it because what the top schools
charge as annual fees is more than what majority of people earn in ten years. Interestingly,
even your spiritual salvation depends on how much money you can contribute to
the earthly reps of your heavenly gods.
Economy became the heart of
our socio-political system in the last few decades. We thought economy was the
panacea for all our problems. Creation of more and more wealth was the ultimate
goal of globalisation. More wealth would mean more happiness. We were told so.
When wealth became the ultimate
goal of life, everyone obviously chased it heart and soul. That chase became
the new pilgrimage. Not only is your worth measured by your wealth but wealth
is the very purpose and meaning of your life. The means you resort to for
making wealth do not matter anymore. You may swindle banks out of billions and
leave your country. You may run a spiritual industry like an ashram or
ayurvedic centre. Even the government has funds that are above auditing. A time
may soon come when your government just declares certain bank deposits of yours
to be the government’s hereafter. Certain institutions and organisations may be
banned and their assets taken over.
The last of the above things
are possible not because the end justifies the means but because the single-minded
focus on wealth has engendered a system which justifies many evils in the names
of putatively noble ideas or ideals such as nationalism.
Human life is not an economy.
In other words, people do not exist in an economy. People need a lot more than
wealth to add meaning to their existence. Religions, morality, art, literature,
and so on serve the function of adding meaning to life. Today these things have
been subsumed under the chase for wealth. Consequently there is a feeling of
inner emptiness. In India today, nationalism seeks to fill that emptiness. No
wonder, it is a highly vengeful nationalism. It is founded on certain hollow
notions like ghettoising certain communities of people so that their
properties, wealth, jobs, and whatever else possible can be taken over.
It is not the majority who
benefit from this, however. It’s just a tiny minority whose wealth increases
year after year. The others keep becoming poorer. But they are fed with
vindictive feelings against certain others who are projected as the cause of
all the misery in the country. What a nice system for enriching a few at the
cost of all the others!
We inhabit a marketplace. You
and I are just commodities there. We are being sold day after day. Again and
again. Think about that.
Painfully, whatever you have asserted in this article is true and true only. We are no longer the consumers, we have become commodities ourselves and being sold day after day, again and again. Everyone who has to live and perceive himself / herself like a human-being, kicking and alive, should ponder over it.
ReplyDeleteIt is a wretched condition though most people seem to think, or have been taught to think, that this is the best possible world.
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