A silent death of civilization

One evening I was traveling to my ancestral village 3-4 kms from my home town. While returning it was a little dark. A few flies hit my glasses. I slowed down. It suddenly reminded me of my childhood. When I was in 2-3rd std , 7-8 yr old; these flies were plenty in number around my house, especially in rainy season. But they have disappeared without anyone's notice. 20 yrs later I am realizing it, because I saw a few of them. Now you might be thinking why am I getting emotional about  some miniature flies. 

The thing is, we are also in the same race as of their's. They failed in the "struggle for survival"; so they perished from an area. The same is happening with human race. The materialistic lustre of 21st century civilisation had blinded us. We are not able to see what's happening beyond our vision. We are killing each other to survive. 

My mom used to say that when she was a student, there were pen doctors. Along with time, prices of pen declined. They perished. I don't know if they shifted to any other profession or simply depended on others for their survival. Tractors replaced bulls from bullock cart and farm fields. I don't know if farmers are feeding bulls any more as they have become a liability. Walmart, big bazaar, reliance fresh, D-mart and other shopping malls took away business of millions of shopkeepers. Now Amazon, flipkart are taking away business from these shopping malls. Consumers are getting benefitted but the profit is getting consolidated with few multi billion dollar companies and their owners instead of being distributed among a million shopkeepers. 

Auto and taxi drivers killed the job of rickshaw-walas. Now uber and ola took away jobs from auto and taxi drivers. Changing job is easier said than done. If a rickshaw-wala is not able to feed his family, what else profession shall he try? Shall he get into MBA or CA? what's feasible for him? Well, there's barely any option. Change is difficult. But when the rate of change is high; a big portion of civilization fail to cope up with it. This is why demonetization broke the backbone of rural economy in our country. 

90's and early 2000 gave birth to software industry in our country. Thousands of software engineers got job. They created lakhs of softwares which replaced millions of manual clerical job. Very soon software jobs ll be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots. Where ll the 4 million IT professionals be rehabilitated, when the industries start firing employees?

Internet has enabled students to listen to good teachers from across the globe. The problem is, now one teacher ll have lakhs of students and hundreds of average teachers ll have no students. Precisely " survival of the fittest ".

We have to acknowledge and accept the simple fact that, in a class only one student can be a topper. If we are making a system where only the topper survives, then a majority section of our population ll be left at nowhere. 

We are living in an age where population is increasing; intellectual capacity is increasing but job vacancies are decreasing. No wonder cracking UPSC today has become several times difficult than it used to be a decade back. The story does not end there. We have new competitors, the machines and in near future genetically modified human babies, who ll be superior to normal human beings in every aspect of life. 

Is this what we meant to achieve with development of civilization? Are we raising kids only to make them realise that they are losers? If that so is the case, going ahead we ll have higher suicide rate, higher alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, riots for jobs. A generation ll live constantly in fear, anxiety, anger and frustration. If that so is the case, they ll not be able to camouflage that they are happy; the way our generation does on social media. 

What needs to be done, has to be done. We have to secure a world for the average people. Otherwise in the race for "survival of the fittest" we ll be left behind with only Adam and Eve. 

Written by

Gupteswar Mahapatro