What's going wrong?

Yesterday there was a bomb blast at Mecca Masjid, old city, Hyderabad. After the blast agitators attacked police and police use their latis, water, plastic bullets and then real bullets. Some people died because of the balst and some as a result of the firing.

While watching the news, one thought stuck me. Why did the firing happen and how the terrorists achieved their objective of inflaming communal fire so easily.

Some points that came to me:

1. Most of the irrational and mob behavior is due to lack of education
2. Human race had been using the unique endowment of reason very well by learning, storing and passing knowledge and finally setting up institutions to pass on the wisdon to future generations.

Some of the channels for passing on knowledge and wisdom that I could list out are:
1. Formal Education system
2. Religious teachings
3. Political system
4. Public Administration
5. Family and peers as a channel
6. Economics and trade as a rationalizing agent

Apart from these we have so many open channels through which a person can aquire lot of knowledge and wisdom, such as, books, internet, movies and media.

But from what we has been yesterday, we have to question the effectiveness of these channels.

First , access to formal education is becoming restricted due to costs attached and certain part of the society is unable to access them easily. The economics part of the education is placing constraints on this channel

Second, religious channels are slowly loosing their basic principles and are becoming and more and more power centres rather than hep human race to live peacefully. All the religions agree on the basic principles of life and there is no conflict. But when it comes to the modalities there are lot of differences and peopl seem to be stuk to the modalities rather than focus on the principles. At the end of the day we are all living beings and we would like to live. When it comes to life and death there is no religion. Any religion that asks you to give life or take life is not a religion. As a living being the first goal should be to live. Second goal should be to let others live and third goal could be to defend yourself when your life is in danger, which again emanates from the first goal. Most of the religious institutions are in the mode of building their base rather than actually helping people to live and let live. Members from every other cult/sect or whatever division they have claim that they have best way to reach god and therefore they are superior than others. If you are uperior you don't need to proclaim, others will realize it soon and follow you automatically. If you have to tell people and use force to make them agree where is your greatness.

The political system that has been created by the society to support the society has forgotten the reason for its existence. It has become a self-serving system. A leader does something considering only whether people will vote him or not. If they have elected you once they believed in you once, do whatever you believe is correct for sometime, if you are going wrong, you will be told not just in one way. We hav media, we have courts, we have internet and blogs too. Politicians have stopped inspiring and leading people long long ago. Instead they are being led by their selfish motives.

Public administration that was supposed to inject intellectuality and rationality into the society stopped having any life and has become a mere machine. A rubber stamp in the hands of political system that will only create the necessary impression based on how forcefully you hit and where you hit it. A clear example has been the land grabbing for poor movement started by CPM in Andhra Pradesh. All the administrators had to say was that the government was thinking and they are waiting for them to come out with a decision. Isn't it your responsibility to push the government for a decision when you feel it is important. Can you just say that I gave my advise but I am not responsible for waht evetually happens? Administration has become a mechanism and nothing else.

Family and peers are becoming counter-productive these days. Parents are encouraging children to win at whatever cost. Every other person is born great and has to prove his/her supremacy in whatever forum possible. Peers add to that pressure. Slowly the family and peers are also giving away to societal pressures and are beoming less and less influential in driving the right kind of behavior.

Finally we come to economy. It has been claimed that the success of human race over other species can be owed to the trade and specialisation. I personally believe that economics is the only force that can bring in rationalization to human behavior and show them where they stand. But the issue with economics as a process is that it is very slow to bring in any change and a lot more time to reach equilibrium. It took almost 200-300 years for India to reach a reasonable state of equilibrium in terms of financial opportunities.

But it is going to take a lot more time to reach equilibrium in the knowledge part of the wealth accumulated by humans. I think we all can make it happen fast and I urge you to think in that direction.

If all human decisions are economic decisions, what about voluntary blood donation?

Today I donated blood at a camp organized in our office. Though I never came across a critical-for-blood scenario, I just walked in and and quickly went through the process. I also found that there were amny others like me. I was wondering what are the forces that drove these people including me. Though I have strong feelings about help and support to those in need, I never encountered a scenario where blood was life-saving. Few points that motivated me and my colleagues could be:
1. It was facilitated. None of us had to make any extra effort to do the blood donation. If we had to go to a Blood bank even if it is a kilometre away, I doubt anyone of us would have made the effort to go there.
2. The emotion attached to the act. After donating the blood I suddenly recalled some of the moments I experienced as a kid at my native place. Crow was the common bird that used to co-exist peacefully (not at all times though) with humans. If a crow, whatever reason gets injured, immediately I used to see that atleast a hundred gathered around and used to shout continuously until the injured crow recovered. On all other occassions it is very common to see one crow snatching food from another crow. Somewhere we all have that unity factor running through our blood and we feel very happy when we help someone and I feel this is of basic nature to all of us

In one of the recent training sessions, the facilitator, Air Cmde Parvateesam, mentioned that all our decisions are economically motivated. Though I could fully agree with that statement, I kept silent at the point but promising myself to examine it in different situations. The above blood donation situation provided me an apt situation. Initially I felt that there is nothing economical to this decision but slowly realised that there were many economic aspects intertwined to the situation not only from my side but also from the future beneficiaries of the donated blood.

After this analysis I realized that economic factors are so intertwined with human life that whether I agree or not, all my conscious decisions are indeed economic decisions.