Urbanisation

I have lived both in the rural and urban India’s, both seem the same to me. One of our well known poets wrote that “the City is morally poor and artificial while the countryside is full of unseen goodness” He wrote it sometime back. But to me the dissimilarities have certainly thinned out, and for the worse too. Now the rural India is as bad as the urban India, most of the urban goodies are available in the villages as well, at least in the places I have been in. It has obliterated whatever goodness the people in the villages may have had in the past. No wonder some advocate going back to nature…..

Cross cultural exchanges have one thing in common; they tend to cater to the worst elements in the human nature. I once asked a common man “why are people drawn towards evil?” He gave me an answer which I did not fully understand at the moment. He said “because people are intelligent” There of course was deep sense in what he said. It is intelligence which devises methods to enhance pleasure, and pleasure comes in many guises. I am not talking merely about the personal moral depravity we all have in us however polished we may look on the outside. This intelligent misuse of our social, economical, emotional environment goes much deeper than that. It is as if we have some sort of sanction to break all established norms. From whom, we may ask, from ourselves of course. We are the lords and masters of our own internal universes and we would not permit opposition to our supremacy.

I know that terms like “evil” and “goodness” are subjective and can be viewed from different perspectives. But I would like to place the right to live as the primary objective of all living things and everything which trims that right has to be viewed with suspicion. Cultural dominance is subtle and can not be perceived in action unless one is on the look out for it. There is no method to exclude lesser healthier elements in the dominant culture from operating, but being aware of them goes a long way in being prepared when the attack comes

Can we turn back rural India to what it was before globalization? NO. We can not and it has also brought several good things to the countryside in its wake.

The question remains, is this right direction to take? Well I do not know for one, there could be others more knowledgeable who can provide an answer.