Enlightened Self Interest: Fair or Foul

Technology & knowledge for a long period in human civilization remained an exclusive preserve of the elite. The elite forbade common man to get anywhere close to getting access to knowledge so as to maintain their stranglehold of few vicious people on the entire population with the sole aim of exploiting the people & keeping them poor & sad. There are numerous incidents in Indian mythology & history that points to existence of such abhorrent practices.

Despite being an Indian myself I am appalled by the ‘divide & rule policy’ propounded by a court teacher by the name of Manu in his work Manu-smriti that in my opinion is the main reason for most of the unfortunate happenings in our past. How could you take away self pride of millions of natives in the pretext of high or low caste and then except them to defend themselves against foreign invasion? Such divisions in society resulted in vast majority of Indians losing all self respect and pride in their talents & skills. Thus it led to establishment of hideous social structure based on master & slave relationship. The philosophy got further institutionalized with marching social rituals of folding hands, touching feet of authority & burning the dead.

No wonder that whenever India was attacked by foreign invaders, we lost every time. Why? How so many people brought up on two famous war epics of Mahabharta & Ramayana, could lose on the battlefield?  I wonder how we forget our Chandragupta & Eklavaya and remember Chanakya & Daroncharya? Who is more important achiever or the teacher?  We need to find answers so that our future could be better than our past.

India needs double digit growth for a couple of decades to be able to get noticed & counted among respectable countries in the world. India was never ‘shining’ despite projection by some politicians for sake of getting back into power. Even they agreed privately about the real state of economy. In order to achieve continuous double digit growth, most if not all Indians must agree on basics of progress. Firstly we must guard against those leaders who do not speak truth generally. I mean we could live with those who speak more often than lies. We must reject politician who keep their own enlightened self interest before the national interest of India. Of late we have seen politicians & people alike who would not mind hurting India for their own sake. Enlightened self interest must be aligned with social objectives of our India.