The recent global financial meltdown seems to be making news continuously for the last couple of months. We seem to be hearing horror stories from around the world; how it is impacting industry; how the economic slowdown will affect the nation’s progress; how families are shattered due to the crisis and how a few people have even committed suicide. As the impact of all this has started to affect SVYM in its own way, i found myself thinking on this and related issues. Suddenly it dawned on me that today we have many more crises than a mere financial one. The whole world seems to be obsessed with this meltdown more because we seem to use money and the economy as a measuring tool of human happiness. I feel that is indeed short sighted to look at only the financial implications. What man has successfully created in his blind pursuit of material consumerism is a larger crisis – unfortunately this is an invisible one and the human mind normally avoids measuring. We have the larger issues of deforestation, chemicalization of our everyday existence, poison in our food and drink, issues of both quantity and quality of water available for mankind, largely non-existent sanitation facilities for most of the world’s poor, an unmanageable energy crisis, issues of food scarcity and many more. All this cumulatively is a larger disaster happening quietly and reinforced each day by our own life style and greed. What makes it sad is the fact that this does not have to be so. If someone were to monetize the actual impact of this, i am sure the present financial global meltdown will look insignificant.
What seems strange and difficult to comprehend is the fact that mankind seems to be losing what we should actually be gaining; and gaining all that we should actually be losing. Even if the ingenuity and enterprise of man finds solutions to the financial crisis, will we all end up gaining money but not wealth?
– Balu
