Wisdom in the Rickshaw

While I was on my way to visit a friend in Delhi after a conference on Citizenship and Governance (organised by PRIA), I found myself on a rather long rickshaw ride. I decided to start up some casual banter with the driver, an old man from a village in Uttar Pradesh. After some small talk about whether there had been any change in Delhi recently, and whether the lot of the poor was getting any better, the conversation turned to the much loved subject of politics.

The old rickshaw driver took this subject seriously and displayed what I believe is a deep and rich understanding of what democracy is really about… his verdict: we are not living in a democracy! What we have now is politician-power, not people-power! Real democracy, he said, is about people sitting together, discussing things, making compromises and trying to ensure that everyone gains from an outcome. It is, essentially, a communicative process - or perhaps more than this - a community building process. What we have today is so far away from this that there is little surprise we are careering down a rather destructive path with things falling a part and everyone becoming obsessively self-interested, self-serving and just plain selfish!

The simple process of not being connected in any meaningful way to the plethora of decisions that really affect our lives seems like a perfect recipe for alienation. This alienation is supported - or made bearable - through an obsessive focus on things like wealth, status and mostly meaningless entertainment. The philosophical foundations of our culture - and economic, social and political systems that these foundations support - are all tuned perfectly to encourage this great lack of connectivity between people and the decisions the decision that they take every day. And the bizarre thing - in my mind - is that a very significant proportion of people living in this kind of a world actually claim to like living in such a system. They like not having to worry about who their neighbours are; they like not being called to meetings to discuss local development issues; they like talking about the new things they have bought, the new job that they have got, the payrise they secured, etc. And so we go along filling our lives with all sorts of things yet never really being in control of much because we have transferred our own autonomy to a system that we feel it is quite reasonable to be a part of… and gradually things fall apart.

My conclusion, I suppose is that the vast majority of the world has been or is being hypnotised by the lure of acquisition and status in such a way that it forgets the value of the simplicity and connectivity that it once had. This connectivity, this local democracy, I imagine, may have been the gateway to a sustainable way of life and a sense of belonging in the cosmos. I like to hope that we are just drifting through a transitory phase in the history of humanity… or does our future involve an endless experience of alienation?

Funny where you'll find wisdom really.