Nutty Coconuts

I had a 2 hour conversation with my room mate about materialism and spiritualism and it invariably drained both of us. We couldn’t quite convince each other. I talked about the two being concentric circles while my friend was quite “eccentric” about them.

But very few people in the world think beyond technology and wealth. This is the reason why India is not perceived as a power to reckon with and is considered the nation of half naked fakirs.

I agree that India doesn’t have the technology of the Germans, the brute wealth of the US or the workmanship of the Chinese & the Japanese. We haven’t invented a Tycoon jet or cracked the gene which causes leukemia. But we are not viciously raping the environment either. The wiki points out that an average Brit’s effect to the environment is equivalent to the pollution caused by 120 Indian people. (10: 0.8 carbon foot print). I was shocked to find an information board in a reserve forest in England which stated “The most prevalent wild life species here is the red squirrel and the salmon”.

Sometimes I do feel that the western ideology is a disease sweeping across the human race. What does humanity require in the next 100 years? More dose of this epidemic?

In the dusty old Hindu books, I could find the duality of light explained implicitly. Why didn’t our forefathers indulge in these technological advancements? For people who invented yoga, ayurveda, kama sutra . etc, when the rest of the humans lived a far inferior life, it wouldn’t have been difficult.

Let me quote a useless sadhu’s saying – “At the breaking point (the deluge), humanity would have realised that materialistic ignorance is always the bliss. The perpetual ecstasy lies somewhere else outside the world and it is search towards the infinity.”

Hmmm... We have become so obsessed with the western world that we are kind of losing our identity. My thoughts reflected against the empty beer can lying in the London underground train. All I could find was a hairy brown skinned Asian trying to become a white man inside.

We all are bloody coconuts. Aren’t we?