A CLOSE LOOK

How misplaced priorities have governed human minds

Nilratan Halder | Published: November 29, 2024 22:52:46

Human mind is shaped by an array of physical, mental, social, cultural, religious and geographical elements. Both hereditary or genetic and environmental influences go into the making of the mind. There is nothing absolutely evil or good in the bargain. Now the question is, if a person's overall makeup that is what one ultimately becomes is predestined or some association, contact, event or incident can change the course of life. Civilisation makes progress through a process called evolution which happens on the basis of natural selections.
Gregarious animals as human beings are, they hardly lived in peace at any time even in the prehistoric time. About the time, 5,000 or so years ago, the Greeks and Trojans in Greece and in its neighbourhood and Rama and Ravana and little later the Pandava and Kourava in greater India or its neighbourhood were locked in mortal wars, the hero worship began. Since then physical power and skill to kill opponents have been glorified. The two world wars were fought with far more advanced weapons than the swords, arrows and lances or spears and maces the warriors of the mythical time used.
The modern civilisation has glorified adventures for discovery of lands but what has gone in the name of educating the locals or establishing the footholds of Western powers on different continents is simply extermination of the native peoples there. Not only were the Red Indians reduced to a handful of specimens but black people from Africa were captured to use them as slaves. That is a despicable history of the ultimate maltreatment meted out to human beings.
What if such deadly tribal, racial, national and international conflicts and
the mentality to subjugate others were foreign to people! Only one man stands out for his unwavering meditation to develop an insight into the purpose of human life. He is prince Sidhartha-turned Goutam Budhha. His attained what is called 'Bodhi Gyan' which does not seek paradise but helps realise the impermanence joy and sorrow. Thus one overcomes the pangs of sorrow and the cycle of mortal ties. Attainment of 'Nirvana' is a way of staying free from the many trappings of life.
In fact, the history of mankind has been a history of wars and invasions. Buddha alone could not turn the tide in favour of withdrawal from futile exercises of aggression that has become ingrained in human psyche unaware. War is not about mass annihilation only; it strangulates the humanity in a person. Had there been the sanity of realisation of the futility of war, this world could reorganise its wealth for far better purposes than developing weapons of mass destruction.
However civilised and advanced the human race may be, its basic instinct for establishing supremacy and promoting self-interests among groups, societies and nations is as primitive as before. The majority of human beings can be accused of bias for this or that mental narrowness. Even skin colour, gender and a lot more other differences are not recognised as the attributes of a particular people. Some frontline nations in the world are in no mood to end their eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations. They are also ready to wage proxy wars so that their enemies become weakened. Sometimes their subtle manoeuvring does not work well and they go for naked aggression as has happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere.
Not only has the hegemony of war psychosis but the socio-cultural variants of this exercise have also been presented as attractively as humanly possible, courtesy of the superior communication technology and the enormous investments to back such aggressive promotion. Modern devices, particularly smartphones are the potent weapon to advance the deleterious causes. Peoples not accustomed to inventing their own technologies to counter this, actually falls prey to the cheap and luring alien influences. They buy or borrow those for imitation of the modes of the lands of origin.
Thus the mental maps of people in the less developed and developing countries have imperceptibly been undergoing a sea-change. How the Artificial Intelligence (AI) will revolutionise human relations in the long run has already been a cause for serious concern. But by this time the phenomenal cultural transition has not been a subject of informed discourse in this part of the world. No doubt, people are enjoying the many advantages of the modern gadgets but at the same time they are paying a heavy price for the dissociation from their cultural mooring. Violence is one of the outputs of this cultural transition.
Today few of the young generations are eager to take delight in the sparkling dew drops that hang from the blades of grass or paddy leaves. Although it is reassuring that some young boys and girls go extra lengths to protect street dogs or fix earthen pots on trees for nesting of birds. But they are a minority. Without the cultural awakening and book reading accompanied with developing passion for arts and culture of the soil, the mind will go distracted and distorted. Love for the motherland will not get consolidated unless comprehensive cultural pursuits become a norm for society.