I dunno if I’m a team player. I basically like to fly solo when it comes to doing some serious job. But I love the idea of team-play. From the soccer field to the music arena. How eleven players coordinate their actions and moves to score a goal. How several musicians spend hours on their respective organs to produce a masterpiece. Those are tremendous examples of team-play (according to me) and can only be contested by the bees when it comes to building and maintaining their hives. But since I dunno much about bees (the simple reason for that is that I’ve never been friends with one), I’m gonna return to humans again.
The reason I sat down to write this blog was an interview of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in a leading newspaper of my city. It was (to say the least) a highly informative interview that had references to history, recent politics and of course, Sen’s economic judgments! I cannot deny that the man is a genius economist (and the interview convinced me once again), but the drawback of him being a genius economist is… he is just an economist, nothing more than that.
Mr. Sen explained nicely why sparing farmland for industrial purposes is (in his words) "self-defeating". He gave examples of the last century when industrialization picked up in arable lands in and around London, Manchester, Lancashire and even France, Germany and the U.S.A. Mr. Sen claimed that using farmland won’t harm the former farmers if adequate measures are taken (and I completely agree with that). He also claimed that "When people move out of agriculture, total production does not go down". According to my limited I.Q., production has to go down when arable land is taken. And I think every friend of mine (both with limited or unlimited I.Q.) will agree with that. The worst part about Mr. Sen’s interview was, he never drifted for once from his economic point-of-view. But what he (and many others like him) fails to understand is that the world is not all about "economy" and "development" and "market strategies". Manchester, Lancashire happened in the (supposed to be a lousy joke, my I.Q. isn’t that limited) stone ages, Mr. Sen, when the term "global warming" was yet to be coined. But people like him still act as though there is no bigger aspect in this world than the "economy".
Figures say that the total food production is way insufficient in this world of increasing population. About a hundred years from now (when I will no longer bother anyone with my stupid jokes), the population level is set to reach a startling figure that will (effectively) ensure that humans have to return to the golden ages of "cannibalism". I thought that cannibals were cannibals simply because they liked the taste (Watch out, I’m about to throw up!!!) of human flesh. But the new "Golden Age" of Cannibalism won’t be taste-oriented; at least the experts say so. People may argue that in this age of breakthrough scientific achievements, it’ll only be a matter of time before we ditch the food we eat and start living on nutrition tablets manufactured in the laboratories. Well, thank god I chose to born at a time when I can still enjoy a delicious dish of biryani!
We are in a state of environmental crisis and anyone from a local-hooligan to George Bush (supposed to be two far points in an intelligence scale, the former being quite high) can confirm that. But this fact eludes everyone from the leader of the state, the leader of the opposition, to Mr. Sen himself. In their defense, Mr. Sen is, as I pointed out earlier, just an economist. The other two are… just politicians. They need not care for the environment, do they? That’s the job of environmentalists. Haven’t you seen their great move of introducing a stupid subject called "Environmental Education" in the kid’s syllabuses? Well, frankly, they need… absolutely need, to study those books first, before forcing the "children" to read them. Maybe they expect children to grow up and become environmentalists and then do something for this world, after they have done everything to damage it beyond repair!
The big men (and women), who have the power to bring a change in this world need to work together, as one! They can learn something from movies like "Ocean’s eleven", where we get an excellent example of teamwork. Around the world, the environmentalists are wailing at the top of their lungs to do something for the environment, and yet the governments are unusually silent. They need to work together, and it’s high time they realized that!
Everyday when I tune into CNN or any other news channel for that matter, the news of death due to starvation is something as common as Lindsay Lohan getting in and out of rehab and getting arrested. A big part of me says we should think about those people first! Job is needed desperately, in places like Africa, where people take awful steps to make a simple living, and anyone who has at least seen "Blood Diamond" knows what I’m talking about! But are jobs everything? One day, a time may come when jobs will be plenty, but we won’t have any food to eat. Industries will be abundant, but we won’t have a thing called "the earth" to live in. That’ll be a ‘little’ problematic, won’t it? You don’t have to blindly take my words for that, just visit any decent environment-related website… and tell me if I’m wrong! Not saying we shouldn’t have industries… just saying that industries should not be the priority, the environment and the future should!
Not signing off, never will,
-Jagannath (Jesse)
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