Having become a content creator (storyteller) on YouTube, I am using the app much more frequently than before. And it is becoming quite an education, in the sense that I am learning - to my great edification - that lots of people, including young people, are thinking and saying a lot of good and necessary things, and, going by the stats (though number of views, I fear, doesn't say much about whether the viewers actually listen to, or watch, the whole show, let alone being affected by them), many people are being impacted, too.
For instance, I just watched a nine-minute movie called Delivery Boy. Short as it is, it draws attention to how hard hundreds of thousands of people are working around us for a pittance, and how we hardly notice them, taking them for unthinking, unfeeling drudges, hardly better than pack animals or robots, and yet they are humans just like us, with the same needs, desires, weaknesses, and ability to feel hurt and sympathy - sometimes more so than many of us. The director also draws attention to how many parasites live idle, slothful, irresponsible lives feeding on these unfortunates - notice the wife and son briefly shown halfway through the movie: but such parasites are to be found in every family, not only in those of the badly off. While as a socialist by conviction I believe that no able bodied man or woman should eat without working at least between the ages of twenty and sixty, I also believe every man, even a driver or delivery boy or janitor deserves a modicum of attention, compassion and courtesy - and no man deserves slavish admiration or wide-eyed deference merely because he has made a pile of money. Next time someone delivers a package, don't forget to give him (or her) a tip and a kind word if you consider yourself a civilized human being, and at least stop flattering yourself that you are a vastly superior somebody. It's the same message you will find here.
Meanwhile Akash Banerjee aka Deshbhakt has uploaded his gawaar swag part 2 video. It is people of the sort he has marked out that are giving India a bad name all over the world, and making the more decent among us cringe with shame. I am asking every reader to reflect whether s/he, while travelling abroad, has done something to shame us, imagining that they are being 'cool' and street smart, or simply that they are entitled to being ill-mannered because they have recently made some money. Being loud and aggressive, dishonest and abusive and in-your-face, whether inside India or abroad, only shows you up for what you are, a boor, a bad advertisement for the country. I only wish that our celebrities, including our top political leaders, would hammer this message over and over again through every available channel of public propaganda.
And then there was the video where the speaker was talking about how Japan - materially and socially speaking one of the most advanced nations in the world - is increasingly becoming a 'low desire society', in the sense that people there, even young people, are no longer very ambitious in a worldly sense, they are increasingly indifferent to the consumer culture, they save rather than buy things unless they are essential, many of them are more and more content with living with and by themselves according to minimalist ideals. Many experts, says the presenter, are worrying that this might be a major social disease, and/or harbinger of a great economic crisis (how will business and industry keep running if people in the mass stop buying new things all the time?), but is it really so? Haven't our great spiritual teachers been urging us for thousands of years to control our greed, and to learn to be comfortable with ourselves, inside our (enriched) minds? Aren't the modern environmentalists saying exactly the same thing? And what sort of sick economy is it that enslaves people into working and consuming all the time, not that they might be safe and healthy and happy but so that the economy might keep running (and the fat cat businessmen keep getting fatter still)? Given that Japan has already attained some of the highest living conditions in the world - stable to declining population, very high per capita income, very little extreme poverty, excellent public, security and welfare services, universal education, an orderly and peaceful society and so on, why shouldn't they now say 'Enough... from now on we shall take increased income not in terms of goods to buy but in terms of leisure and freedom to pursue hobbies we really like to engage in'? Shouldn't that be every nation's goal? That is what Dr. Goobie, the bright neurosurgeon who quit his job at the peak of his career decided for himself in America, too - that the whole system is corrupt and rotten, designed to exploit the vast majority of people by making them run the rat race forever, and the only sane option is to step off the treadmill when you have got just enough. And, as I have been repeating over and over, one needs the deepest sort of education to realize that one does not really need much from the material and social world to live a truly good life. It has been well said that the rich man is not he who has much but he who wants little. I hope this post, and all the links I have provided here, would set many people thinking along those lines before it is too late, for them and for the planet.
... alas, this is what, instead, we are currently doing in India. The only correction I would offer the presenter here is that it's not Gen Z which is alone to blame: many of their dads and moms are doing it too. In fact, I am convinced it is the parents who infected them with the disease. I am sorry, readers, that this video is in Bangla, but do listen, even if you don't understand the language very well.
