Sometimes I feel that all of us are becoming slaves to the western influence... and this is not something new... it has been there historically and is still existing today, albeit in a different form...
Moreover, I see it evolving with the times...
- In the Medieval times (when the balance of the world started shifting westwards), we had physical slavery... with people being transported across the world as slaves...
- Then came economic slavery through trading companies setup by European nations...
- These trading companies started ruling and colonising the countries.... political slavery... European conquests all over the world... India lost its self-respect during that rule...
- Next, there was a wave of independence movements and people threw away the shackles of politics that were binding them. This is referred to as Independence in the modern sense... "self-rule"
- The greed of human power led to some sort of "military slavery" wherein, the world got divided into different blocks of military might and weaker nations had to align themselves with one of the blocks...
- With the cold war ending, military slavery has also retracted back... Now, it is the era of Globalisation... another display of economic might...
Today, I feel that we (at least India) are fast moving into an era of "
intellectual slavery" which is disguised in the form of us
- working for multinational companies (anyone working at an MNC should be able to connect to what I mean... the kind of work that is repeatedly given to Indian teams and we happily take it under the impression of "learning from them"... the fact that it is they who drive the work and not us... that decisions are "communicated to you" rather than "taken with you")...
- working on research problems that are defined by them... under the comfort of "economic viability"... (how many researchers here work on developing solutions based on the society's needs? how many technology products are even customised to Indian needs?)
It is also being coupled with a slow but sure movement towards "
cultural slavery" (how else can you explain most shops celebrating Christmas with greater fanfare than Deepawali?)... all driven by economics...
Where is all this headed? I can only hope that we do not kill our self-respect, by blindly aping the west, this time too...
“The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted"
-- Frederick Douglass
-Mohit
