What the Rest of the World Can Learn From India

chillibreeze writer — Jitendra Pant

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The Indian paradigm as a global ideal: What India can teach the world

Every nation, like an individual has its own pulse, its own heartbeat. It is like a line of fate inscribed over the body of a land. It may run at subterranean levels at particular times and places, and at other periods, it may throb over the national landscape.

Working in India: Cultural Awareness and Tips on Doing Business in India

For India, the dominating idea has been faith. Take faith out of India, and you have just another country, a gray mass of individuals weathering the battle of survival. Put faith in, and she stands tall, a lighthouse of divinity. The magnetic compass of the entire nation points to and polarizes its social and political life towards one direction: faith.

And so India walks – fabulously wealthy, civilized and cultured for a thousand years, plundered and befouled for another thousand – with majestic dignity and grace. It is her path she treads that is her teaching, as she walks the road of peace and compassion. These are surely, virtues that every nation can use.

For the map of the world is today overrun with violence. It’s there in streets and in classrooms, in homes divorced with differences, and neighborhoods fraught with racial rancour. These are symptoms of a wider hostility among people which comes when, ironically, technology brings us ever closer – as it will continue to do.

Hence, it is imperative to learn to respect and adapt to each other. And India may teach most eloquently about tolerance: she hasn’t fought a war in two thousand years (and more) of recorded history. In contrast, the modern world seems pledged to fight.

Yet, our differences are not very deep. We, as nations and individuals, are different. That’s all. That difference needs to be celebrated, not condemned, sneered at, mocked, bullied, rejected, or ignored. As Walt Whitman memorably began – ‘I celebrate myself’. And for that to happen, we need a religion of self-esteem, a ‘man-making religion’ as Swami Vivekananda had it.

[Aside: Two very different personalities. American Walt Whitman was the individualist’s poet. Monk Vivekananda galvanized America with his address in The Parliament of Religions in 1893, was the greatest eulogizer of mankind, holding that its only sin was weakness.]

We need to get back in touch with our humanity more than our cellphones. We need to rediscover our sense of heroism and fair play, our ideals. A nation makes the worthiest statement of her ideals and her well-being by her actions, not by her GDP, though well-being seems to be mysteriously equated with it.

Nations stand tall when they stand up. And India stands up for the spirit in man, for that which cannot be defeated in him without destroying him: his sense of worth. It teaches him that he can reclaim his self, his incorruptible nature, through devotion to the ethics of humane living (which are so welcome to be the basis of business behaviour in an era of outsourcing), through the observance and not evasion of his duties. The path that India treads as a nation is one of amiable and amicable neighborliness, and as an individual, of a deep personal quest for the core of one’s self, for the real, for the truth in the face of the ever transitory world.

India’s teaching is a call to the best in men and women of all races and nations. Its timeless search for self-realization has antidotes for every modern malady. Its principles of balanced living are anchored around fundamental humanitarian principles enshrined in the religions and faiths of men forever. These proclaim, first, the divine kinship of mankind; second, its inalienable brotherhood; and promote, third, a philosophy of simplicity, kindness, and open-mindedness that cannot but be adopted if one is to survive the travails of modern life. And if one is to keep the individual, the home, and the nation safe.

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Jitendra writes for chillibreeze.

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