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Change Geography, Create History

Changing geography to create history is not a science that can be called social.

While we struggle to find thought leadership that can help India rise to and sustain the status of a global super power, we must start with generating ideas that can help create a geo-political environment complete with values of peace and mutual co-existence that reverberate the traditional Indian ethos of “Mera Bharat Mahaan” to the rest of the world. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “If I have an apple and you have an apple, and we both exchange apples, then you and I would still have one apple each. However, if I have an idea and you have an idea, and we both exchange ideas, then you and I would have two ideas each.”

As students of modern education in arts and science, we often make the mistake to find answers in illusions, while we know that talking to mirrors in the expectation of a response is nothing but stupidity. To elaborate, let’s consider the definition of monetary success in the financial world. We produce goods and services with different skill sets and exchange them across geographies through a financial system that has today grown to exploit differences in levels of income, expenditure and aspiration, and then creating multiple images of “exchanged apples” that reflect off the surface of mirrors that create a growing number of illusions until the mirrors themselves align parallel and opposite to one another and a few of us realize that infinitely many apples cannot exist and such illusions collapse.

Let’s look back and analyze the barter system. In the traditional world, trade was the means of acquiring those facilities which were unavailable because either lack of natural resources or human skill necessary to produce a service. So, if on my land, I produced wheat, and you on your land grew cotton, we would both exchange goods for their use value to one another. Currency was formulated with the idea of storing economic value associated with goods, and as a storehouse of wealth for future consumption.

Let’s uncomplicate. While patrons of modernization and technological progress will argue that life has improved with industrialization, we must remember there are only three basic necessities of life – that are necessary for survival. These are food, clothing and shelter. Contrary to the Darwinian theory, and the community belief of man being a social “animal”, we should at first let go of the notion that man should ever consider himself to be an animal, or a form of life close any other species. For in nature, intelligence is not a product of evolution. Intelligence is a gift to mankind which no other species possesses, and hence man is not an animal.

And if man isn’t an animal, then man can at once leave behind the barbaric thought around survival of the fittest, and relieve himself of the notion about being a part of the food chain. Life in its essence must have a greater connotation that must begin with the search of a supreme realization rather than base it on theories we have been taught to blindly believe as true.

And thus, we must think, that in tradition, men were collaborative social beings, who lived in mutual co-existence respecting land, nature and other resources. And the abundance of resources in nature, and their exchange created economic regions – not conquest and not destruction. History was made, when Geography was respected.


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