Monthly Archives: November 2021

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗶 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗨-𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟯 𝗙𝗮𝗿𝗺 𝗕𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀?

::मेरे सपनों का भारत::

गौ-कृषि-ऋषि का हो अद्भुत संगम
हो कृषि आधारित अनन्य उद्यम
बने एक बार फिर से नवभारत
सुन्दर सशक्त समृद्ध औ सक्षम।१

हो ग्राम नगर अरण्य और उपवन
संस्कृतमय हो सर्वत्र जन-जीवन
वेद उपनिषद की ज्ञानगंगा में
प्रकाशमय हो जहाँ सबका मन।२

शिक्षा स्वास्थ्य हो निःशुल्क जहाँ
अंत्योदय तक साधन पहुंचे वहाँ
स्वदेशी हो भोजन भजन भवन
स्व भाषा भूषा सजे देश वहाँ।३

ग्राम गुरुकुल गीता गंगा गो
सांस्कृतिक धरोहर संरक्षित हो
जहां राजा प्रजा की सेवा करे
हर क्षेत्र का समुचित विकाश हो।४

जल जंगल जमीन जानवर पर
हो स्थानीय समाज का अधिकार
आजीवन हो आजीविका आरक्षित
खुशहाल हो कारीगरी कारोबार।५

“वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम” का दर्शन कर
पर्यावरण संकट से हम जाएँ उबर
विश्वगुरु भारत से सर्वदा सम्मान हो
सोने की चिड़िया के उग आएं पर।६

स्वदेशी का प्रतिमान बने भारती
सहेज-सजा कर अपनी थाती
होली हो फूलों के मादक रंगों से
दीपावली हो संग दीया औ बाती।७

धर्म स्वदेशी का है हमें निभाना
अब नहीं चलेगा कोई बहाना
स्वदेशी के उर्ध्वगामी मार्ग पर
है हमें अब शीघ्रतम लौट आना।८

– चंद्र विकाश ‘श्रीवास्तव’
२०१९

Reference:
The Road Ahead for GAIA Earth Sansad
https://chandravikash.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/the-road-ahead-for-gaia-earth-sansad

Best Regards,
Chandra Vikash
B.Tech IIT, MBA IIM
Convener – GES GAIA Earth Sansad
Uttar Pradesh, INDIA
http://www.gaiasansad.org
gaiasansad@gmail.com
chandravikash.wordpress.com

(𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙉𝙤𝙩𝙚: Uttar Pradesh is the heart and soul of India and also of the world. It is not just the largest state of the Union of India but also larger than most countries of the world with a population of more than 200 million. My sincere regards for your relentless efforts to improve the conditions in Uttar Pradesh despite the anti-people tactics of the central governments to bleed the states to benefit a handful of crony capitalists in the country and in foreign countries who in turn fund his propaganda to hide the true picture. My concern is that people are revolting against the present central policies dictated by the global capitalists through the GPPP but you will be held responsible for BJP’s loss in forthcoming UP elections unless you follow this proposal based on GAIA-WORK vision to replace him at the centre at the earliest possible as the Prime Minister of India as per the popular wishes of the people as well as the party.
This might seem a bold suggestion.
However, I am writing this letter to you, at a critical juncture for Uttar Pradesh, for India, and for our vision of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam. This is at a time when, as a member of Awaken India Movement, we have information of an Adharmic plan to kill billions of people, including our children, through a deceptive bio-weapon, in the disguise of vaccinating them, lockdown, and a wide array of measures as protection from a virus. This is bigger mass murder than all the previous World Wars put together in recent centuries and must be STOPPED. What you said to the ANI reporter sometime back on the Vaccine issue is turning out to be prophetic. Global adharmic forces in collusion with the Modi regime in India are trying to destroy Dharma. Like Sri Krishna, we look up to you to stand up for Dharma.
I deeply believe that you could do lots more for Uttar Pradesh and for India with this proposal based on the revolutionary GAIA-WORK vision, as I shall share in some detail in this email through Shri Aunjaneya Kumar Singh, Commissioner of Moradabad Commissionary, who I met two days back on Friday 12th November at his office in Moradabad. Having met hundreds of senior bureaucrats, I can share with a great degree of confidence that he will be the ideal Principal Secretary of Prime Minister Office with you at the helm as Prime Minister. He has been outstanding as DM of Rampur earlier, where our partner organization WORK has worked together with his administration in a number of social-cultural and environmental projects.)

Indigenous Model for Inclusive and Genuine Progress

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Samuchit evam Santulit Vikash

Vision Document
by Chandra Vikash
2012

We need a new model for development in Bharat. The current model has comprehensively failed us on several counts, bringing to close our experiment with the earlier “unnamed and intractable” development model.

According to various government and independent statistics, on average 50% people are below poverty line, even after nearly seven decades of independence. Moreover, in times of inflation, unabated pollution and malnutrition, the proportion of poor people is increasing. Even children in the so-called rich families are mal-nourished due to lack of supply of pure, fresh and healthy food. Even as vast majority of people lack basic health and sanitation, multi-specialty luxury hospitals are popping up to treat the sick and ailing rich in cold comfort.

Indiscriminate and half-baked imitation of Western values and practices, masquerading as some-kind-of-progress, is causing a breakdown of the traditional value system. Education levels are declining fast. With the resulting values and ingenuity gap, our priorities in life seem to have become grotesquely skewed. Rather than spending on pure and wholesome food, clean and healthy environment and the best education for children, we are splurging on pomp and grandeur of “lustful and crass” entertainment and the “frigid comfort” of fancy houses, private motor cars, air-conditioning, mobile phones and television sets.

With a ‘stark warning’, a recent Mckinsey report suggests that “if India continues with its current unplanned urbanisation, it will result in a significant deterioration in the quality of life in cities and will put even today’s economic growth rate at risk. Statistics show the current performance of Indian cities in water supply quantity, sewage treatment, healthcare and public transport is quite poor.”

Similarly, the current spate of events of terrorism and the attempt to throttle it, lead us to a challenging juncture in human history. We in a linear extrapolation of our popular behavior cannot accept that we have reached a blind alley in our quest to discover the ultimate reality of our existence – that the response to terrorism, for instance, has to be to dissolve its basis and not its overt manifestations.

What also seems evident is that technology and the market alone have no answers. Deeper inroads into the human consciousness and into the laws of nature hold the key to solving many of our problems.

Overawed by the intoxicating advances of modern science and spellbound by the efficiency spewing mechanism of the market, we have missed out on the exhilarating results of the incisive enquiries made earlier in our history and their practical applications. The efficiency brought by the market at present is confined to the industrial system and does not account for costs incurred in the overall natural system. Inquiries into the complex workings of nature and its cyclicality hold insights for better-informed business decisions and consumer choices leading to overall efficiency, much to the customer’s delight.

In the words of Rishi Kumar Mishra whose work on scientific interpretation of Vedas inspires this article, “a creative response to (such) challenges could open up an entirely new era, in which the search for knowledge and the pursuit of peace, harmony and happiness could be closely intertwined. A breakthrough would enable mankind to disentangle itself from the frustrating situation in which the more solutions are found to the problems the more it is confronted by new ones. We have reached this stalemate because the vast potential for discerning profound truths hidden in the forgotten labyrinth of history has remained untapped.”

Rediscovering ancient insights

To place and time the events in our context, these secrets — which include enquiries into the mysteries of nature and the processes and forces that create, sustain and ultimately subsume us — were unraveled and some of the eternal laws of nature discovered several thousand years ago by the great scientists of the Saraswati civilization. This civilization flourished in the catchment area of the gigantic river Saraswati, which dried up and disappeared underground following a prolonged spell of drought and natural calamities.

This society in the Saraswati basin enjoyed a rich culture. Great minds devoted themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. These seer-scientists — rishis — so called because they could see the reality of the workings of the cosmos, bequeathed to posterity an invaluable heritage of knowledge and insights, blending theory with carefully devised practices.” (Mishra, 2000)

Different from popular perception, the Vedas — the body of this knowledge — are no mere exertions in metaphysics, philosophy or spirituality that did not find place in the conventional scheme of commercial and consumer interests. Ironically, it has been even shunned, as a distraction to the ‘worldly pursuit’ of higher profit and personal income and in meeting our consumption needs.

In reality, this “corpus of knowledge include subjects like anatomy and medicine, architecture and town planning, meteorology and astronomy, language and linguistics, music and dance, statecraft and economy, social engineering and jurisprudence, psychology and physiology.”

A Parallel Story in the Modern World

Interestingly, this creates a convergence with a parallel quest for a ‘new’ story that leading management thinkers in the west such as Peter Senge and a host of cognitive scientists and cultural historians are groping for as well, deemed as the sustainability story that can be positively described as the story for genuine progress.

Work on innovation and change in organizations reveal how stories become a carrier of culture. In empirical studies a common approach has been to identify artifacts of a culture, such as the unique symbols, heroes, rites and rituals, myths and ceremonies, that are embedded in the stories that the organizations tell themselves, and then to explore, to a greater or a lesser extent, the deeper meanings of these artifacts (Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Trice & Beyer, 1984; Wuthnow & Witten, 1988, Hofstede, 1991; Martin, 1992).

According to cultural historian Thomas Berry, “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it…sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes and energized our actions. It consecrated our suffering and integrated our knowledge. We woke up in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children.”

“…sustainability (genuine progress) requires letting go of the story of the supremacy of humans in nature, the story that the natural world exists as mere ‘resources’ to serve human ‘progress’. But most of us grew up with this story, and it is still shared by the vast majority of the modern society. It is not easy to let it go, especially when we are uncertain about what the new story will be.”

Elements of the new story are emerging: We are just beginning to explore (from a western viewpoint) what it means to be part of a universe that is alive… not just cosmos but cosmo-genesis… Moreover, the new universe story “carries with it a psychic-spiritual dimension as well as a physical-materialistic dimension. Otherwise, human consciousness emerges out of nowhere… an addendum [with] no real place in the story of the universe.”

Such a story is essential if we are to make real changes in our practices — in our production decisions and in consumption choices and their overall experience. Stories are a set of deep beliefs and assumptions that develop over time by our repeatedly telling them. New stories emerge as we gradually see and experience the world anew. As author Daniel Quinn says, these stories become the carriers of culture.

Unlocking India’s potential: Traditional Wisdom with the Modern Idiom

Furthering and widening these lines of thought and practice, blending them with our current preferences and choices; processed and managed by our software and knowledge management skills, should be the focus of our attention at a national level. This holds the key to unlocking India’s potential to not only bail out of its current financial, social and political crisis but to drive genuine progress as a role model for modern civilization.

Our cultural roots in the Vedic stories — suffused with such artifacts — embedded in our way of living hold further promise for our genuine progress. It demands that we dig deeper in the goldmine of our practices and the rituals to comprehend the deeper beliefs, motivations and assumptions that underline these stories in our present context.

These beliefs need to be reinforced by their wider acceptance and pronouncements at the highest levels of leadership, intelligentsia and celebrities. Media coverage in print and in television with its wide reach, carrying endorsements and the practical significance of these stories can seed the stories in our imagination. Storyboards — cinema, soaps and theater — can take it further to wider sections of the masses with a telling effect.

Simultaneously, the new stories have to find prominent place in well-researched curriculums right at school. Research in management, social sciences and engineering on how these stories can impact consumption choices and patterns, and waste reduction with positive impact on corporate bottomline, need firm government support before they are lapped up by corporate, who are at present smarting from the adverse impact of the earlier take-make-waste stories. The downward spiraling effect on their bottomline and in their market prices reflect the unsustainability of the earlier stories and the pressing need to develop a new one.

We are sitting on a goldmine of our cultural heritage. During this financial and economic crisis that is likely to percolate deeper into the socio-political arena without an end in sight, we should not make the mistakes that cave dwellers made as they froze to death on beds of coal. Coal was right under them, but they couldn’t see it, mine it, or use it.

New Development model – Samuchit evam Santulit Vikas

The focal point of the new development model is comprehensive and well-balanced development that can reverse migration back to the villages and is made possible through the availability of viable choice, prior to returning to repair the city devastated by unjust accumulation. Focusing on the problems of existing cities is only a stop-gap solution. The argument is that in the present mode of development, the countryside has been largely neglected as cities become ‘the exclusive locus of development,’ compelling those in the rural areas to migrate to the city in search of better opportunities.

1. We need self-governed rural and urban districts as the grassroots foundation of a vibrant democracy at a national level. The last several decades of rapacious exploitation of rural areas has forced people to migrate to the cities in search of means of livelihood and sustenance.

To reverse this bizarre situation, we need a sustained national campaign to check food inflation on one hand and to allow farmers to get full value of their produce – grains, fruits, vegetables, milk, etc. With increasing costs and risk, the realization for farmers should be 3 to 4 times more the current procurement prices in a fair and efficient system.

2. The new prosperity and well-being of the rural areas as well as well-balanced regional development will once again attract people to return to the small towns and villages. At the same time, we need to revive traditional education and value systems in a modern idiom to balance people’s need and aspirations.

3. City districts must revise their future development plans based on the new population. In a new approach, the urban limits of any district shall not exceed a diameter of 3 to 4 kilometers. Every such urban district should have 2 to 3 kilometers of grassland and farmland for growing fruits and vegetables and for cows to graze. Mega-cities can be carved out as a cluster of several such urban districts.

4. Each rural or urban district should be driven by solar energy and other renewable energy sources and should wean away its dependence on coal and oil based electric power as far as possible. Conserving forest and water resources will strengthen balanced and prudent development.

5. Each Gram rural and urban district’s should follow a “horses for courses” transport system that allows only non-polluting, silent, light and people-friendly Neighborhood Electric Vehicles – 12-seater vans and rickshaws, walking and cycle for internal transport and motor vehicles that move from hub to hub at faster speeds, high occupancy and only proficient motor-vehicle drivers where they are less polluting and better suited.

6. With better balanced population of urban districts, the generation of garbage and sewage will be far more manageable. In a new spirit with greater engagement of citizens in community governance, garbage and sewage can be segregated by which organic residues within homes can be composted and grey water can be harvested. Modern technology are used to produce energy from other residues.

7. These will create a positive spiral of localisation of education and livelihood of most people in the rural or urban districts as well as emergence of world class centre of excellence in arts, music, literature, sports and in social and physical sciences.

8. A positive and healthy competition among rural and urban districts will be promoted with awards and honors and new festivities to celebrate them

9. This will pave the way for the emergence of India as a world cultural and economic power and as a role model for other countries around the world.

	Truthbearer on Excerpts: Climate & Ecolog…
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GAIA – Global Academy of Indigenous Activism

capacity building, indigenous way of life, Earth parliament, indigenous world order

Monthly Archives: November 2021

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗶 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗨-𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟯 𝗙𝗮𝗿𝗺 𝗕𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀?

::मेरे सपनों का भारत::

Indigenous Model for Inclusive and Genuine Progress