India Unplugged: Escaping the Illusion of Material Progress.

“What happens when a civilisation rooted in renunciation is seduced by competition?”

“When the land of Sarva-Dharma Samabhav is rescripted with metrics and market logic?”

When the world was still discovering the wheel, INDIA had already birthed philosophies that embraced coexistence and cosmic unity. The country which taught the world that civilisational unity is possible with religious coexistence is struggling today with religious extremism and that extremism is making profit for some individuals but this value system which prioritises physical possessions, profit, wealth, and external success over spiritual and communal well-being is not the value system we inherited from our ancestral civilisation, that is what we call the problem of imposition of western materialism.

          From where did the concept of western materialism have evolved? When we go back to the 18th and 19th century, the period of Industrial Revolution, the period in which the mass production of goods started, this mass production created a new consumer market and shifted values towards economic growth and personal consumption. After World War-II in the United States and European countries, rising incomes, advertising, and sub-urbanisation fueled consumer culture centred on commerce, status, lifestyle branding.

          Psychological marketing techniques created desires and shaped identities around the product. Did this occurred to you anytime that the product which is absolutely needless to you and you end up buying it, this isn’t magic or anything these are marketing techniques and we are falling for it because we are becoming the part of culture that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever increasing amounts often linked to personal identity and status, material possessions became central how individuals define themselves.

         This shift in the values has led to decline in spiritual literacy and ethical reflection amongst the youth, rise of ego, greed, and alienation representing rise of individualism, youth are undermining native identity and adopting western lifestyles. Communities are being fragmented for consumer competition and consumer identity.

         The spiritual traditions from different religious background like Vedanta, Buddhism, Bhakti, Sufism have one thing in common all emphasize inner growth over material gain, Indian civilisational principles like ‘Dharma’ which is interpreted as moral duty and cosmic order, ‘Artha and Kama’ are material and emotional pursuits of life, and ‘Moksha’ is spiritual liberation of the soul. To reclaim the civilisational unity and spiritual pathways we have to integrate ‘Artha and Kama’ with ‘Moksha’ as Swami Vivekananda quoted “Materialism without spirituality leads to moral decay”, material progress must serve spiritual evolution, and kindly don’t misinterpret spiritual evolution with being part of some spiritual institution or following some particular saint, spiritual evolution is very personal process, it is process of discovering your inner self. So, let’s reclaim our roots by discovering ourselves and escaping the matrix of materialism.

          “You cannot believe in god until you believe in yourself” - Swami Vivekananda.