Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the Whole Earth is Kin

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

The miracle of life:

Walking along a road in my small town, sometimes I would marvel at the way a certain patch of land would come alive in a certain season and then seem quite lifeless at other times. For instance, there was this piece of land left unused by the owners.

During the rainy season, pools of water would collect there, and then green algae like plants would fill those pools. Soon, one would be able to see small creatures playing around in the pools : tadpoles or frogs, other tiny creatures that remain inside the water like fish, flying insects that seem to sit and float on the water surface, and so on. More plants would grow and float in the water, flowering, prospering.

Occasionally, if the paddy fields with fish ponds at some distance get flooded, fish also enter the water of these pools. Thus, a whole eco-system of plants and animals would be created. And then, at the end of the rainy season, the pool’s water would gradually evaporate in the sun, be all gone one day, and the plants would wither away and the creatures would not be seen any more.

The whole eco-system just disappeared. Later you may see little boys running around and playing in the exact spot where the water creatures used to swim and the plants prospered. All that you would see now would perhaps be the dust disturbed by the running and the jumping of the kids. Where did all those living things go?

It is just possible, nay, it is inevitable, that this earth, so full of life now, will one day become a barren desert with no plant life and no animal life and may simply turn into barren rocks and earth and polluted water. May be billions of microbes and cockroaches will live on for some more millions of years, but not the fish of the water and animals of the land and the birds of the air as we know now.

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the Whole Earth is Kin

So many things may cause the end of life on earth : some catastrophic cosmic event in the distant future, a big nuclear war tomorrow, or just the sun dying out millions of years hence. But while we are here, how do we treat our lovely home, the earth? How do we treat life itself?

There may be doubts about the existence of God or a soul, but there can be no doubt about what the most valuable thing in the universe is. It is life. We know that for life to be possible—for life as we understand—there must be an environment conducive for the sustenance of life. We are here today, creating art and culture, doing scientific research, talking, laughing, quarrelling because the earth has sustained life for so many millions of years.

We exist because the earth exists. It made life possible; it sustains all life. The earth has been seen as a goddess in so many cultures, and has been called by different names—Prithvi or Bhumi Devi, Gaia, Terra. The Greek idea of cornucopia—the horn of plenty—can be associated with the abundance of nourishment that our earth provides us with.

However, disasters caused by human beings can destroy our beautiful earth and all living things on it right now. One big nuclear war, and everything can end in just a few moments. The earth can become one big grave. Only human good sense can prevent this, but who can rely on the good sense of a creature that has already amassed massive amounts of material that can destroy everything on earth?

Our callous, unthinking habits are killing the earth:

Even if a nuclear war does not wipe out all life on earth, we are already killing the earth, slowly strangulating her with plastic and debris and all kinds of toxic and unnatural things. In an astonishingly short span of time, modern man has started destroying the earth—the soil, water and air—to such a degree that it is becoming increasingly unlivable today.

Extraordinary levels of pollution have affected the oceans, the soil, the very air we breathe, and global warming and climate change are grim realities of the day. You don’t need to do postdoctoral research on environmental science to understand what is wrong. The basic problem is our apathy towards what is happening to our environment. If you just look around, you will notice this apathy.

Let me present a few snapshots of a few things I saw (and they will perhaps remind you also of things you see regularly) in the normal course of my days on this beautiful planet of ours. Walking on the footpath by the side of a large, shallow water body in a university campus in Assam, I see some girls busy taking selfies with the water body in the background. It’s a sunny day, and the waves are shining brightly. No wonder the girls can’t resist taking selfies.

However, as I look into the water, I am appalled to see lots and lots of non-biodegradable waste : cold drink or health drink (none of which gives you good health, by the way) cans, plastic bottles, polythene bags, pieces of thermocol, ribbons, laces, broken pieces of plastic…..all kinds of stuff. On the surface, especially from a distance, everything looks fine.

There are the large rain trees and other trees by the side of the waterbody, and the bright sun makes the waves glisten ever so brightly. But just go close and look into the water. You will not see a single fish, possibly because of the toxic nature of the water which is rather dark in colour, but you will notice a massive number of things thrown there by passersby.

Most of these are non-biodegradable waste materials. Remember that this is a university campus and a university is supposed to be a knowledge-campus! If this is the way educated people treat their environment, where is there any hope? Sure enough, there are waste bins in the campus, and some of them are overflowing with waste, but people are throwing waste into water nevertheless.

Then I walk away from the waterbody and walk towards the university hospital and then back to my department.

On the way, I notice that both sides of the roads are littered with the same stuff that is choking the water body : lots and lots of non-biodegradable waste. May be some of the people who litter the campus like this sometimes go on trips to places like “the cleanest village in Asia”, write about the nice time they had there, and then come back to litter their own campus again.

The ironies of cleanliness and sacredness :

By the way, a few years back, my wife and I stayed overnight in one of those famous “cleanest” villages. Everything looked nice and pretty. We had arrived in the later afternoon, and checked into our quiet homestay. In the evening we walked around, looking at the clean houses and streets, making friends with little kids some of whom sold things like boiled corn and roasted groundnuts to tourists.

We visited the village church, too, and again observed how clean the environment was. After spending the night in our nice little cottage, we went on a morning walk, and then we discovered a “secret” of this clean village that tourist magazines don’t talk about.

After exploring all the lanes and bylanes of the little village we also tried some paths that were obviously not taken by tourists in their strolls, and we came upon a place where heaps and heaps of garbage was thrown down the hillside. Clearly, the villagers kept their own homes and streets clean, but threw all garbage down the hills. How can a place be truly clean if the garbage disposal system itself is not proper?

Then there are places that are designated sacred or holy : the sacred groves of Meghalaya, the holy river Ganga, the Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. I have occasionally visited such sacred places, searching for the beautiful and the divine. The sacred grove near Shillong looked very beautiful indeed, and we explored inside the grove with a local young man.

However, I was somewhat surprised by the complete lack of bird song in the forest. Where did all the birds go? Why was the silence a kind of deathly silence? Did locals hunt the poor birds?

Then, as we came out of the grove, at one place I saw lots of charred grass and bushes—a whole patch of black, charred remains of the plants. I asked our guide if he knew what had happened to burn so much of the grass and bushes, and he said that a film crew was busy shooting some scenes in that area, and some kind of accident during the shooting had caused the fire.

Originally, people following the old Niam Khasi religion had used the sacred groves for their religious and sacrificial rituals, so the sacred groves have been regarded with some respect by most people. If activities like film shootings and other commercial activities are allowed there, the sanctity of the groves will be lost.

The whole earth is sacred, but if we are not even able to maintain the sanctity of places particularly marked as sacred, how will we understand the sacredness of the entire earth?

We also visit the holy Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu quite often. Tamil Shaivite tradition considers this hill as God Himself, and indeed people have worshipped this hill for millennia. Since it is an extremely rocky hill (and one of the oldest hills on earth, according to geologists), it used to be quite without any vegetation, but afforestation drives have now made it green to some extent.

Walking on the hill is pleasant now because of the green cover. However, the last time we went there, I took a route different than our usual rout down to the town, and at the place where the hill nearly ends and there is a human settlement, I saw heaps of garbage.

Since Arunachala is sacred and is worshipped, its cleanliness should have been the first concern of the devotees, but it seems we Indians can easily disregard such things as garbage by the side of the holy vigraha (idol) we worship.

So many of our Indian rivers are nothing but huge garbage areas. Read Sankaracharya’s soul-stirring prayer to the Ganga and the Yamuna and then go and see those rivers today. They are choked with industrial waste, corpses and all kinds of rubbish. We worship rivers, and then go on to pollute them. Can there be any greater madness?

Guwahati : What could have been, and what is:

Guwahati is one of the few cities in India endowed with so many rivers and other water bodies in and around the city, but just look at the condition of the water bodies. Rivers like the Bashishtha and Bharalu are unimaginably polluted. It is true the government needs to be pro-active in keeping the city clean, but if you notice the behaviour of the people living in the vicinity of the rivers, you will feel that no government can keep Guwahati clean.

All kinds of dirt, filth and non-biodegradable stuff are thrown into the water day and night, without any respite, choking the rivers. How can we be so callous?

If the rivers had remained clean, Guwahati would have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As for other water bodies, the plight of Deepor Beel is enough to understand that we as a society and our governments have not shown the least concern for the health of this massive water body near Guwahati. May be over 90 per cent of the original Deepor Beel has been destroyed by commercial establishments, people’s houses, railway tracks and what not.

We are the problem:

The selfish creatures that human beings are, most of us care for nature only when we see how it is useful to us, how it benefits us in different ways. This anthropocentric attitude constitutes shallow ecological thinking, while deep ecological wisdom involves understanding the value of nature in itself. We need to care for all things in nature because of their intrinsic value, because we cannot replace what we destroy.

And then there is the concept of reverential ecological wisdom as discussed by UK-based social activist Satish Kumar—that we need to have a sense of respect, reverence and wonder for nature. Satish Kumar’s idea has not become very popular may be because he is not a proper western theorist and because he draws his ideas from eastern wisdom.

However, we have seen what the culture of western modernity with its focus on technology and capitalist trade has done to the world. It is high time we understand the value of Hindu, Jaina and Buddhist attitudes of unselfishness and ahimsa.

It is high time we realized that the world, after all, is just one big family : vasudhaiva kutumbakam.

Images from different sources

(Sanjeev Kumar Nath, English Department, Gauhati University, sanjeevnath21@gmail.com)

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