Inclusiveness - A way forward for economic well-being of Bharat

Bharat is a spiritual culture, but that does not mean people just sat with their eyes closed. These are not people who stayed home. They went across the world. If you look back, some of the oldest docks in the world were built in this land. Lothal in Gujarat – something like 5000 years old – was a port on the Sabarmati river, near the Arabian Sea, that could berth and service ships in any season. Their understanding of the tidal movement, the ocean, and the river was so fantastic, they built it in such a way that it never gathered silt.

A much older port, down in Tamil Nadu, is Poompuhar. The structure went down when the ocean level rose by many meters. The first navigation to any part of the world happened from here. There are records and legends of people reaching South America, and the exchange of cultures and people there. It is just that when invaders came in recent times, their essential goal was to obliterate history because people rise and fight only when there is pride about something.

Largely, most of Indian history that you read today was written by the British, and they made it in such a way that nothing is more than 6000 years old. So, all history was limited to that time span. But otherwise, India has been a land of enterprise going back far beyond that, with people trading beyond their own borders. Through the silk route, trade happened extensively to West Asia, though that term is no longer used today. Everyone calls it the Middle East. The westernmost part of Asia is what you today call Palestine, Lebanon, Israel and that region. There was very active trade with West Asia and the northern part of Africa.

Till about 300 years ago, about twenty-five percent of the world’s economy was India. A major fraction of the international trade went through India. In 250 years, we were really robbed and became one of the poorest nations in the world. Today, there is a resurgence of enterprise in the country but there are many systemic problems, which they are trying to clean up now.

Most of the time today – in the process of managing a business or an industry – people are destroying themselves, and the situations of life around them. It is very distressing to see that all management education is about a hundred years old, and it all comes from that one Mr. Taylor (Frederick Winslow Taylor) who wrote all the fundamentals of management, and the same things are being taught by every top university in the world, even today, with small modifications.

This was a very a brutal way of doing business. It was okay for the East India Company, when they came to trade with a gun behind them, and if you don’t do their deal you are dead. This is a different kind of trading. Things have changed today in the world, and people have to understand that any transaction between people – whether it is the market place or marriage – is sustainable only if it is beneficial to both the people. If it is only beneficial to one person, it could sustain if you had put a gun to someone’s head, but that is not possible anymore. That sort of business is still being done a little bit, but gradually, as years go by, it will not work.

If we want a gentler and more compassionate economic process, it is not charity, but inclusiveness that is needed. If there is no sense of inclusiveness in individual human beings, there is no way that the systems they create, or actions they perform, will lead to inclusiveness. If individuals do not experience this inclusiveness, they end up creating very exclusive processes.

This is of utmost importance now, as for the very first time in the history of humanity, we as a generation, have reached a place where we have all the necessary resources, capability and technology to address every human problem of nourishment, health, education, well-being – you name it. Only an inclusive consciousness is missing. The very basis of what we refer to as Bharat is this inclusiveness.

By: Abhishek Sharma