“He is the best physician who knows
the worthlessness of most medicines.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1733.


India is shining. I could not agree more. Our foreign reserves have touched the all time new high, share markets are very, very bullish, exports are doing extremely well, we have surplus food, we are now taken seriously in all world fora, statistical figures for inflation are unbelievably low, bank rates have fallen and the industry is buoyant, the movers and shakers that could change the sensex figures are very vocal and have become the messiahs of progress in this country. What comes out of their mouth is taken as the wisdom for mankind and they are being heard with devotion by all and sundry like the rishis of yore. The economic gurus pontificate on anything and everything.

So far so good. “Say not”“I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth,” wrote Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet.Economic development, most of the time with an inverse-care-law, where the rich become richer and the poor poorer, is not the whole truth. It is a reductionist view of progress, just like our present day science where every new discovery is true only till it is proved to be untrue. Reductionism does not give us a holistic view of anything at any time. Healthy growth of a nation depends on the holistic growth of man who makes society what it is. Economic development is but an integral vital part of man’s progress but not the be all and end all of it.

Post industrialized America and the pre-industrial British Empire are two good examples to learn about mankind’s progress in this world in recent times. Yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream. “History repeats itself: if one does not learn from history one will have to relive history,” wrote Cicero, the great Roman thinker, centuries ago.Let us learn from the rich countries and be wiser. The rich have become so rich that eighty per cent of the world’s wealth is held by fifteen per cent of the rich, while the paltry fifteen per cent of the resources will have to be shared by the remaining eighty five per cent of the world’s poor! The gulf between the rich and the poor is widening by the day. Both groups suffer because of the fear of the other. Crime and, even, terrorism spring from misery, poverty, suffering, oppression and suppression with denial.

The voiceless poor, even in the west, pay for their poverty with their lives. The great British Empire, where at one time the sun never set; is now waiting with bated breath for the sun to show up occasionally. Britain has now become an appendage of the rich America. Both those countries built their economic empires believing that man’s growth depends solely on reductionist economic development. Whereas the British Empire was built with the sweat, blood and toil of the poor colonies, Americans built their empire on technology which they thought would take them to the moon. Technology did take Americans to the moon, or they say so, but failed to take Americans to their neighbour’s house with a smile on their face. America is paying a rich price for that lop-sided development by way of the two dominant epidemics there of suicide and divorce. In an elegant book Closing of the American mind, Allan Bloom, a well respected professor of social philosophy at Chicago, brings out, in great detail, the hazards of this kind of monetary economy.

The most sought after commodity today in America is eastern spiritualism. Any clever man from India could get into an ochre robe and sell packaged Indian spirituality to become rich overnight there. Pure materialism has driven Americans to the brink of total frustration and depression. Contentment does not exist in economic prosperity. Real contentment is in giving and not getting. Truly rich man is one who reduces his wants and not the one who increases his needs. The latter would eventually destroy all God given resources of this planet to satisfy his greed and his proclivity for comfort. Every religion seems to preach this philosophy but no religious zealot seems to practise it.

Holistic development:

Rounded development of any society and nation depends basically on a healthy society. Health does not depend on absence of bodily diseases alone, although it is better to be physically fit to be healthy. Total health is that state of the mind where man is enthusiastic to be creative in society and has got a balanced mind with physical, mental, spiritual, environmental, and social well being to enjoy the heat of summer days, the warmth of spring and also the cold of winter of life to live well and let others live in peace as well. It is only when man develops social consciousness and understands his societal obligations will a nation truly develop into a great nation. One is great only when one gives of himself/herself. India was one such nation in the hoary past and our efforts here and now should be geared to rebuild that great India of our past glory.However, that could never be done by shouting slogans or blaming any section of society. It could only be done by hard work and co-operation. None of the “isms” of the past have really succeeded as all of them were reductionist-be it autocracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, bureaucracy, democracy of the western model, communism, radicalism, or socialism sold in post-independent India! The only “ism” that will succeed for ever is humanism.

Humanism is a term used to describe an ethic based on human nobility. It recognizes and exalts the greatness of human genius and the power of its creations. “Reach towards the highest form of existence.” wrote Goethe at the beginning of the second part of Faust “by dint of uninterrupted effort,” he added. “Such a society lays the foundations of individual and collective morality, it establishes laws and creates an economy; it produces a political system which is egalitarian, and it nourishes art and literature.”“Humanism is against exclusive submission to God; against a wholly materialistic world view, against anything that neglects humanity, and against anything that denigrates human nature.”

All the “isms” of the past failed because they neglected humanism. When sociologist Edgar Morin left the Communist party and was asked why he did so? His answer was very revealing. “Marxism, my friend, has studied economics and social class. That’s marvelous, my friend. But it forgot to study humanity.” The same is true of today’s science and economic development. Thomas Malthus, the inspiration for both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, did mention, while exhorting them on the importance of class struggle and the survival of the fittest, that both these derive their strength from co-operation. Co-operation is altruism in a different language and it is based on humanism. Both Marx and Darwin seem to have forgotten the first advice.

A similarity in reductionist science is there for all of us to know. It was when the great brains, Nobels all, Oppenheimer, Otto Frisch, and Rudolph Pearls were getting ready to split an atom that their great guru, Max Bohm, exclaimed: “I am very proud of my pupils’ cleverness; how I wish they had used a bit of their wisdom, instead! This atom that they are trying to split would teach mankind a lesson one day.” How prophetic were the words? The split atom has taught mankind a lesson, although it has made man very proud and powerful. Millions perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki within fifteen minutes to win the Second World War. But today we do not know what to with the plutonium waste that is threatenin g mankind! We know that if one splits the hydrons further, one gets the lepto-quarks, which form the universal consciousness that binds everything on this earth as one large family of all that exists. “Vasudaievakutumbakam.” This is where the quantum world meets Indian wisdom.

The prophecy of the Rg.Veda says the same thing. Humanism based on truth and highest ethics alone could run this world. It also warned:

“etad vaco jaritar mapi mrisththa
a yat te ghoshan uttara yugani.”

[Forget not, singer! This word of thine, which after ages, will resound]

India will have to take a leaf out of this advice to make mankind really get developed by holistic methods and not just ape the west and depend on economic development alone as the real development and get deluded. Walt Whitman did warn the world that one could easily be deluded while riding high on the waves of success.

New Planning:

Half a century since independence and, after ten five-year plans, we need a new direction for our planning for the future, a holistic direction. While the powerful and the rich are asking for a single window to get their claims and difficulties cleared, the voiceless millions, that form eighty per cent of India, need at least a widow for their sorrows to be redressed. While the wise learn from their own mistakes, the wiser learn from other’s mistakes.

Let us take a couple of examples from the west to plan wisely for the future. The two areas that India needs drastic changes are in the areas of education and health care. While we could boast of hi-tech hospitals that could attract western patients to make money, we lose sight of the fact that even today our health needs like clean water to drink, contamination-free food for the masses, basic sanitary needs like toilets to let our children grow normally with full blood avoiding hookworms’ ravages, and smoke-free houses to lessen the heart attack and cancer rates in the unlabelled poor in the villages that die, have been neglected. Holistic development must take all these into consideration. Let us not ape the west in areas of health care. The western hi-tech medical care has already come to grief there. Oregon experiment is one such experience. The state of Oregon found out that to keep a terminally ill child with blood cancer alive for a few more months with the help of bone marrow transplant would cost the tax payers as much money as is needed to keep one thousand pregnant women properly looked after during pregnancy and their infants for a year thereafter. They could not balance their budget doing both those activities at the same time. Hence the new law, very controversial to begin with but followed by seven other states now, came into being. No child gets terminal bone marrow transplant at the tax payers’ cost there. If that were so in America there is no point in our Govt. hospitals competing with one another in giving this kind of palliative treatment to the millions in India.

West realized, in addition, that the top heavy, interventional, medical care systems result in a higher percentage of iatrogenic diseases. Third cause of death in the US is the medical establishment and the fourth cause are the drug side effects of pharmaceuticals. A study revealed reduced death and disability rates in Israel when doctors recently went on strike only to climb to the original levels after doctors came back to work! West also realized that where there were more doctors per unit population, longevity and health of the public was not better; on the contrary, longevity and health were better in countries with poorer doctor patient ratio-another lesson for our developers! Investments in health infrastructure, like water and food, gave better dividends and we may have to innovate methods in our country. What we are doing and planning in India at the present is only quick-fix medical care and very little of it is health care. This trend must be reversed for better development in the future.

Conclusion:

While I congratulate the powers-that-be today for shifting the gear to take the country forwards in the economic field in the short span of five years compared to the reverse gear of the last half a century after independence, I must hasten to inform them that by aping the west in the area of economic development they should not forget the holistic human development. Technology alone will make us rich but unhappy at the end. Humanistic rounded development would make the country the leader in the world. While we have the greatest resource, two and a half billion hands, we should harness that for our overall development using the roots of spiritual development from Indian heritage and the branches of hi-tech modern economic development striking a logical balance between the two. This should be possible as our leaders have the wisdom of age to guide them and the computer savvy handsome young people to give a boost to the old wisdom to make it appear modern.

Let us, in India, move from science to scientific humanism, hi-tech medicine to medical humanism, from war to peace, hatred to debate, suspicion to understanding, and from religious fanaticism to spirituality which simply means sharing and caring, common to all religions-religious humanism. Let us show the way to the world as to what true progress and development is all about. This world would never be peaceful unless and until the lowest man gets three square meals a day, a roof on his head and an opportunity to honestly earn his daily bread with the sweat of his brow.

“Two sorts of writers possess the genius;
those who think, and those who cause
others to think.”

Joseph Roux.