@Bharti 31 October 2020

A story of happiness from a far off place

Let me tell you a story. This is set in Africa. An anthropologist went to Africa to study a remote tribe and their way of life. After spending a considerable time with them when his work was over he was planning to return. On the day before returning he decided to gift the children something. So he collected fruits from the local area, put it in a basket a tied a ribbon around it. He put the basket under a tree and then drew a line on the dirt about 50 meters from the tree. He assembled the children and told them that whoever reaches the basket first will get the prize. The kids were excited and he said ‘go’. Surprisingly he saw that the kids held each other’s hand and started running towards the basket together. After reaching they sat together and ate the fruits. He asked one of the kid and she said that how can one be happy when others are sad.

This story is an amazing example of how a society thinks and also how the young generation keeps the values of the society intact. This is against the natural instinct of humans but an example of how a community can have a positive effect on its members. Now we return to our modern city bred community. Here things are different. Here it is a race of individual success and achievement even at the expense of community. Here success is measured by individual achievements. In that tribe the philosophy is, if the community wins then the individual also wins. But in developed communities it is the opposite; here individual wins are added to decide the success of the community. That African community believes in working together as a group and there is room for everyone on the top. They work hard not for the individual gain but everyone in the community so that there is abundance for all. We need to accept the fact that the modern community in the so called modern places have a fractured community system where amalgamation and interaction is severely lacking. Here the purpose is to extract more from the community rather than to give something to the community. The consumerist and capitalist economy system has made people individualistic and selfish. For this reason we see so much disparity in the society of modern culture. We see height of wealth assessment to the depth of poverty. The community structure of that African tribe is better because everyone is committed to the growth of the community. The growth of individual contributes to the growth of the community and the vice versa also. The growth of the community leads to the growth of community. This helps in better interaction and empathy within the society. The happiness index will always be better here than the modern communities. But it is not socialism or communism, its just system which gains collectively without the drawbacks of socialism and communism.

This leads to an important question of education. These African people are not educated as per our modern perception, but they have a better understanding which is the aim of an education system. Our modern education system is more of a materialistic education system where it is measured by which country produces more materialistic things. We can learn all the great things of science and philosophy but it doesn’t make us more knowledgeable and matured. Most of the bookish knowledge is never used by a person all through his life. These people without any modern education have learnt the way of life as it should be, better than us. They may not enjoy all the materialistic benefits of the modern world, but humans have survived for thousands of years without these modern gadgets. But once we are used to these things now we cannot go back to that lifestyle. But with modern education they can come up to the modern standards of living. They are more tied to their roots and a tree with deep roots survives the storm better.