బాగుందనిపిస్తే దయచేసి తెలుగీకరించండి

ఎవరికైనా ఇది బాగుందనిపిస్తే తెలుగులోకి అనువాదం చేయండి.

Tapping the potential for harmonious co-existence

నిశీత్ శ్రీవాస్తవ

It has become somewhat passe, in recent memory, to take Gandhi’s socio-economic views too seriously. Even as globalisation putatively improves the standards of living of vast swathes of the erstwhile rural population, it would be a foolish voice indeed that would call out materialism in both its capitalistic and dialectic forms for the canard that Gandhi saw it to be. This panic, we must remember, has been caused for no other reason than bankers refusing to trust other bankers because other bankers were not trusting them because the tangled web of lies called leverage was getting too big to keep tossing around. Workers keep working, factories keep churning, the sun keeps shining, but the wheels of capitalism seem to have gone off the rails, as they seem to do about once every decade.And nowhere is the scene more poignant than in my present adopted land, the glorious land of the free and the home of the brave, who go about bombing people’s countries to smithereens anytime they get frightened by monsters under their bed. The American entrepreneurs’ faith in the strength of capitalism is almost touching to observe. Though the brave thinkers exclaim, ‘In every crisis there is an opportunity. The American dream will simply take on a newer shape, as it has always done.’ And yet, for all the bravado, a refreshing breath of change is sweeping through this land, for while the plutocracy is ever a slave to its own interests here, there are large sections of the general public in the U.S. that constitute without a doubt the most open-minded and intelligent of all the cultures in the world.Old paradigms fallHence, there is a deepening interest in building up economic systems based on survivability and sustainability rather than economies of scale. As the standard of living in the U.S. has reached a gentle asymptote and begun declining over the past couple of decades, the advent of the internet economy has broken the old paradigm of the necessity for hierarchy in production. Intellectuals and forward-thinkers here are increasingly pondering the future and finding that it lies in sustainable semi-rural communities, with a minimum of industrial production and great administrative autonomy. And even as my fellow NRIs flock into this golden land, eager to print professional degrees, mint money and date blonde women, there is a gradual but perceptible shift one finds in the American ethos: away from the alienation of a professional middle class ఎక్షిస్తెన్కెand towards a richer and more meaningful life premised on community and small-scale industry.The old assumptions do not hold any more in an era that is gradually progressing towards post-scarcity; government and industry are no longer needed to maintain peace. There was a village where two factions once put up a wall midway through, because the grand gentlemen who stood in front of them and called themselves ‘leaders’ decided that they were especially and solely chosen by the Great Big Chestnut Tree to lead their followers (and no others!) to a glorious future.Once the wall was put up, both sides had to try to raise it higher to keep the other side from looking over to see what they were doing. So, they told some of the people who had been quietly minding their own business to stop minding their own business and take shifts in building up the wall. While one faction decided to do so by promising to give them a lot of things they did not need, the other one persuaded them by preaching to them the value of honest self-subservience and submissive labour at the behest of authority.The walls have risen higher, but we are now running out of bricks. And even as we do, the villagers are realising the wisdom of what an old fool had told them long ago. That there is no real need to build walls, only fences for corn-fields and ditches for water. That professionalism is but a euphemism for slavery and that individual freedom and symbolic group identities are incompatible. That Gandhi was right. That small is beautiful.