When our teachers taught us about the evolution of womankind (my equivalent of “mankind”) they narrated how we moved from the stages of savagery to tribes to the barter system to agriculture to monarchies to the industrial age to the total rule of capitalism. What they never said was that with each new step in the ladder of evolution, we were enabled a greater availability of and access to the concept of ‘choices’.
A man today can choose to devote an hour a day to facebook, an hour to eating food, two hours to television, an hour to woo his crush and five hours thinking about how to, eight hours a day to sleep, eight hours a day to his pursuit of money – thus food, shelter and so on. A man 50,000 years ago didn’t have as many choices at his disposal. I assume he didn’t even have the needed mental abilities to think about creating and using choices then. However, have we truly ever given our evolution the respect it deserves? Have we thought of evolution just as a boring academic concept or have we actually made positive use of the advancements in our generation as compared to our ancestors?
The upbringing of and the lack of initiative from a boy born today is such that his foremost ambitions are an Audi, a bungalow and a ‘hot’ wife. Their female counterparts aspire to get a rich, preferably handsome husband, shop at will and be factories for producing more kids into the same system. Is a get up-shit-bathe-eat-travel-labour-eat-labour-travel-eat-sleep life the only conclusion we deduced from our 1 crore 50 lakh years long human evolution? I assume that when popular saints and even religious books spoke of “pursuing the truth” or attaining “moksha”, this was certainly not what they intended.
The world today is a market and we are oblivious, willing commodities. In these times, everything from our education system, our notions of occupations and earning money, the media, governance, family systems and much more are all ultimately steered to a capitalistic goal. Ken Robinson once said that “our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity”.
“The work that interests you is not going to earn you money”, “Marry a person of our choice or find your own shelter”, “No, you can’t study what you like. You have to do either a CA or an MBA because everyone does it”. We all idolize a Shahrukh Khan and a Sachin Tendulkar but are not allowed to and lack the courage to pursue a similar pursuit. Picasso famously said that “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” During the course of our interactions with Youth as part of the activities undertaken by our non-profit Youth organization ‘The Difference’, we realized that for most non-underprivileged urban Youth today, issues such as these occupy a much greater share of the turmoil within them rather than larger social issues such as Communalism or Climate change. Alas, a majority of them lack the necessary support and courage to take a stand and stick to it and thereby succumb to the pressures around them, letting their dreams and their hopes of a distinct identity die in the process.
Not just are these restrictions symbolic of domination, ignorance, lack of concern, lack of initiative and a fear of the unknown, they are even mathematically incorrect. Given the current situation of Gujarat, if we assume that 80% of privileged Gujarati youth have either done a CA or an MBA and being fully aware of the fact that so many things in this world need people with other skills, doesn’t that lead to a direct deduction that opportunities for the other 20% are much more and far easier than for these 80%? One does not need to be a great Amartya Senesque economist to come up with as simple a supply-demand situation as this.
All it takes is one sustained push and a life can change forever. The desire to question and form one’s own beliefs, about our own lives and others, brings a never-before-experienced sense of mental liberation. Just one trip to a ‘different’ family, place, culture, time reminds us of how chained our current mindset is and how vast the world really is. There are examples abound of humans truly being ‘human’, exercising their choices and carving out immortal identities of their own. Oh and trust me, they earned pretty well too and didn’t have particularly unattractive spouses either!
Happiness is not earned or bought or studied. It is a state of mind that simply comes by doing the things that make us happy. Will you like to spend your only life doing something that “everyone does”? Will you like to be one of the millions or the one in a million?
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