Every year, at around this time, some Left-leaning intellectual stands up, strokes his beard and proclaims annoyingly, `Gandhi was right. Small is beautiful.' It has become somewhat passe, in recent memory, to take Gandhi's socio-economic views too seriously. Even as globalization putatively improves the standards of living of vast swathes of the erstwhile rural population, it would be a foolish voice indeed that would call out materialism in both its capitalistic and dialectic forms for the canard that Gandhi saw it to be. The mad preacher's birthday takes on special poignancy this year in the wake of the carnage underway in the world's financial system. This panic, we must remember, has been caused for no other reason than bankers refusing to trust other bankers because other bankers were not trusting them because the tangled web of lies called leverage was getting too big to keep tossing around. Workers keep working, factories keep churning, the sun keeps shining, but the wheels of capitalism seem to have gone off the rails, as they seem to do once every decade.
And nowhere is the scene more poignant than in my present adopted land, the glorious land of the free and the home of the brave, who go about bombing people's countries to smithereens anytime they get frightened by monsters under their bed. Familiar monsters too - oil supply, the currency of oil-trade, the cost of sustaining economic growth indefinitely or appearing to do so. The American entrepreneurs' faith in the strength of capitalism is almost touching to observe. As the days of Peak Oil - the irreversible decline in the supply of oil worldwide - come upon us, and as the economy of the country that uses a fourth of the oil in the world sputters, the brave thinkers exclaim, `In every crisis there is an opportunity. We will set up new sectors in our economy - renewable energy, CO2 sequestering, bio-chemo-physico-artistico-nano-technology. The American dream will simply take on a newer shape, as it has always done.' And yet, for all the bravado of the maintainers of the status quo of economic productivity, a refreshing breath of change is sweeping through this land, for while the plutocracy is ever a slave to its own interests here, there are large sections of the general public in the US that constitute without a doubt the most open-minded and intelligent of all the cultures in the world.
Hence, there is a deepening interest in building up economic systems based on survivability and sustainability rather than economies of scale. The organic farming movement may be considered a vanguard in disguise for this change. As the standard of living in the US has reached a gentle asymptote and begun declining over the past couple of decades, the advent of the internet economy has broken the old paradigm of the necessity for hierarchy in production. Intellectuals and forward-thinkers here are increasingly pondering the future and finding that it lies in sustainable semi-rural communities, with a minimum of industrial production and great administrative autonomy. And even as my fellow NRIs flock into this golden land, eager to print professional degrees, mint money and date blonde women, there is a gradual but perceptible shift one finds in the American ethos: away from the alienation of a professional middle class existence and towards a richer and more meaningful life premised on community and small-scale industry. As the internet destroys physical and cultural barriers in communication, and becomes a viable medium for dissemination of creative output, programmers, artists, journalists, authors , musicians etc. no longer need hierarchies to eke out a comfortable existence. The old assumptions do not hold any more in an era that is gradually progressing towards post-scarcity; government and industry are no longer needed to maintain peace. The world's citizens are finally growing into their potential for harmonious co-existence.
There was a village where two factions once put up a wall midway through, because the grand gentlemen who stood in front of them and called themselves `leaders' decided that they were especially and solely chosen by the Great Big Chestnut Tree to lead their followers (and no others!) to a glorious future. Once the wall was put up, both sides had to try to raise it higher to keep the other side from looking over to see what they were doing. So, they told some of the people who had been quietly minding their own business to stop minding their own business and take shifts in building up the wall. While one faction decided to do so by promising to give them a lot of things they did not need, the other one persuaded them by preaching to them the value of honest self-subservience and submissive labor at the behest of authority. The walls have risen higher, but we are now running out of bricks. And even as we do, the villagers are realizing the wisdom of what an old fool had told them long ago. That there is no real need to build walls, only fences for corn-fields and ditches for water. That professionalism is but a euphemism for slavery and that individual freedom and symbolic group identities are incompatible.
That Gandhi was right. That small is beautiful.
