Get Back to the Basics
K S RAM
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Development is a much-abused word -it is used almost always to refer to material development, excluding the spiritual or holistic aspects. In our zeal to quantify development and express it in empirical terms, we seem to expect that the graph should ideally move only upward. Hence our obsession with rising GDP , production, sales, profits and salaries.Development is equated with a culture of `more'. This is so at all levels: personal, national and global. Mahatma Gandhi might have called this a migration from a need-based economic order to a greed-based one.
The goal of development, according to Indian thought, is moksha, or liberation. In life, the manifestation of such development is in your movement towards being a jivanmukta, a free-in-life person. The four purusharthas, or pursuits recognised and sanctioned by Hindu thought, are: dharma, kama, artha, and moksha.Moksha, of course, comes in the end, as a supreme finale.The other three pursuits are not sequential: they do not come one after another: they run concurrent.
Once the road map to development is clear, all doubts resolve by themselves. Kama and artha are valid insofar as they are moderated and guided by dharma. Dharma renders development sustainable and holistic. A culture of more -in Gandhi's terminology , a world order based on greed -is ultra vires to dharma. It leads a person astray from the road to sustainable development. What is true of an individual is equally true of the nation and the world.
The goal of development, according to Indian thought, is moksha, or liberation. In life, the manifestation of such development is in your movement towards being a jivanmukta, a free-in-life person. The four purusharthas, or pursuits recognised and sanctioned by Hindu thought, are: dharma, kama, artha, and moksha.Moksha, of course, comes in the end, as a supreme finale.The other three pursuits are not sequential: they do not come one after another: they run concurrent.
Once the road map to development is clear, all doubts resolve by themselves. Kama and artha are valid insofar as they are moderated and guided by dharma. Dharma renders development sustainable and holistic. A culture of more -in Gandhi's terminology , a world order based on greed -is ultra vires to dharma. It leads a person astray from the road to sustainable development. What is true of an individual is equally true of the nation and the world.
