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Sudarsana
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The villagers have land, cows and bulls. They milk the cows, plow the fields and transport the produce with the bulls, and they grow food grains and vegetables on the land. They make simple but comfortable dwellings from readily available ingredients: bamboo, mud, cow-dung, and so on. Everything is clean and civilized. They are cooking very nice food with the produce of the land and the milk from the cows and their lives are full and happy. Although they are busy working the land, cooking, cleaning, bring water from the well, washing cloths, etc., still they are nowhere near as busy as we are in the Western world. They have time to think and time to serve God. When I saw this I was amazed. My Western conditioning didn’t prepare me for this. I couldn’t imagine how people could be living a civilized and comfortable life without the modern amenities we take for granted. There is no running water, no hot water, no electricity, hardly any furniture, no household gadgets, no carpets, none of the stuff we fill our houses with, yet I could perceive these people were happy and peaceful in this lifestyle. They have a peacefulness you just can’t find in Pitt Street Mall, or anywhere in Sydney for that matter. Their incomes are very small compared to our standards. We get twenty rupees for one Australian dollar and in Indian villages if someone is making twenty rupees a day it’s considered a huge income. They really don’t need so much money because their lifestyle is simple. It’s not that they are poor or missing out on anything...they have good food, clothes and comfortable houses, what else do they need? Seeing this lifestyle prompted me to compare it with ours in Australia. I don’t think we are better off than the Indian villagers. This was initially quite a shock to me as I had assimilated all the subtle brainwashing our society gives us to instill in us the desire to consume to the maximum possible extent and thus keep the capitalistic machinery running. We earn and spend so much money, but what is the result? What do we have that the Indian villagers don’t have? We have a house, it may be double-brick and in a posh suburb, but after all it’s a house. We are eating, we are sleeping and we are working, the same things are going on. Of course we have so many electronic gadgets but what have they brought us? The television and video are a direct line to the consumer society, and really who wants that? The computer has made half the work force obsolete, they are now thrown on the heap of social rejects which is growing at an alarming rate -- people who simply have no place in society. They don’t have the intelligence to become great computer programmers or high-pressure executives, so there is no place for them. The motor car has created so much pollution and has fostered a society where people now live two hours drive away from their place of work. They buy and maintain an expensive motor car with a large chunk of the money they earn simply to spend four stressful hours in it every day driving to and from work! So these were some of the thoughts that crossed my mind. We have created a very stressful society centred around personal sense gratification. The key word in Australia is "me." "What’s in it for me?" All the products and services are supposed to make life easier or to give one more pleasure. But the thing is these products and services were not created to help the public... they were created to make money for someone... that’s the capitalistic way of things. If this capitalistic society is to go "ahead" then people have to be encouraged to consume more. If people are satisfied with what they have they don’t consume so much, so there has to be discontent, people have to be dissatisfied with what they have now, otherwise they won’t buy the new model. Every year there is a new model of each car to make the owners of the previous years model feel they are driving an "obsolete" model. Everything changes so quickly. Even though the computer I’m using at the moment to typeset this magazine is working quite well, you can see the result is OK, I’m thinking I’ll have to upgrade it because after all it’s a 386 and now they are obsolete. This is the way we are trained to think. It’s perfectly alright to spend $2,000 on a computer and then throw it on the junk-heap eighteen months later because it’s obsolete. I actually bought this computer at an auction for $200, because it is a few years old. If you haven’t got the latest model you’re missing out... or so the story goes. Dissatisfaction is actually created in our society to fuel the capitalistic machine. But what sort of lifestyle does that give us? We are forced to work hard for things we don’t actually need only to find twelve months after we purchase them they are obsolete, they have no resale value and there is a new machine on the market with many more features. We are missing the wood for the trees, we have no idea what we are trying to achieve in this life, we are simply going from one sense gratification program to the next, and we are never satisfied with any of them. The thing is we never have any time to think. Actually thinking is not encouraged by our society, if we have any spare time there are so many mindless diversions to consume our energy. We can watch the television, play some sport, go to the beach, take some drugs, find a girl and try to arrange some sex life, go to a party, go to a disco, go to a pub, go to a restaurant, go to the movies, read the newspaper, go shopping... there is no end to the list of diversions available to us... perhaps that’s why we consider ours an advanced society? Thank you. Hare Krishna! Madhudvisa dasa (madhudvisa@krishna.org) /sudarsana All glories to His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada!
Sudarsana
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