The other day some of our friends were having a debate. One side said that we are surely degenerating as human beings - be it health, be it culture, be it social life. Simply put life in general. The other side agreed but said not everything is dark. They said look at the brighter side where there has been development in science, information technology and engineering. One person stressed on how we are more connected and information is at our finger tips.
Maybe so but strangely the development is not seeming to take us to the brighter side of life but more to the darker side of life.
1) A mobile phone with all its social connect makes us more isolated.
2) Despite great advancement in science and medicines we seem only to become more unhealthy. A kind of chicken and egg situation. Which comes first the medicine or the disease? Is consuming more drugs making us sick in the long term?
3) I correlate point 2 with a similar case that seemed to have happened in agriculture. Did crops fail which forced farmers to begin using pesticides and fertilisers or did in time the usage of more and more pesticides and fertilisers make the land more infertile and so crops failed. This point for me is most important and an article published yesterday confirmed my reasoning of getting back to basics – FIELDS OF HOPE - Marathwada women's organic farms sow new futures http://bit.ly/2gMTOd
Marathwada is a region in the state of Maharashtra, which is popular for the number of farmer suicides that take place every year. Farmers spent huge money on fertilisers, pesticides, hybrid seeds and at the end they never made profits. So if one looks at it from the point of view of development, it cost not only them dearly but all of us. We humans filled ourselves with pesticide filled food. No wonder every second person has cancer.
What the article says is women in Marathwada region are sowing organic crops without the use of pesticides and are reaping profits as opposed to those men who in the hope of better harvest spent money on more pesticides and then got caught in a debt trap and resultant suicides.
What does this tell us?
It is for all of us to sit back and do a re-think on what we define as development and whether getting back to basics in many spheres of our lives makes better sense.