Some time ago a student of architecture brought
me this book titled “Boomtown 2050.’ It is about the Australian city of Perth
written by Richard Weller, an Australian architect. In Australia, a country
where one of the most abundant natural resources is land itself, cities have a
tendency to sprawl. This tendency is even more severe in Perth, an isolated
city on the continent’s western coast, making the growth pattern unsustainable.
The book talks about several possible growth trajectories and suggests one that
is perhaps the most optimal. What I found most striking about the book is that
it is not written just for the experts. With full page color picture on every
other page, sparing text and easy narrative, the book is a delightful read to
even someone who has no particular connection to either Perth or Australia. The
book seems to be a colorful invitation to fellow Australians to think about
these urban issues and make an intelligent choice for future generations.
Coming from a city where little to nothing has
been done in the wake of devastating floods a few years ago, an attempt to look
three decades ahead into the fate of a city seems almost dreamlike. But this
culture of looking far into future is not new in the developed world. In case
of corporates planning for future is a
matter of survival; in case of government
planners it is job definition; but even
popular writings from the developed world often present a thorough-going
intellectual effort to reach out to farthest borders of the future.
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov painted a
future world when the humanity has colonized not just the moon, or other
planets in the solar system, not just the nearby stars like Alpha and Proxima Centauri, not just the
millions of stars that extend all along the Orion Arm, but the entire Milky Way
Galaxy. Vast galactic empires were built, “star wars” ravaged powerful stellar
kingdoms, with the whole empire throbbing through cycles of growth and
decadence like the their puny earthly counterparts. These developments occur,
in the imagination of the master writer, something like 25,000 years in the
future!
If a forethought that stretches out to twenty-five
millennia does not boggle the mind, this one surely does. In the ’60s, Soviet
engineer Nikolai Kardashev thought about future civilizations of mankind and
classified them based on their energy utilization levels. The first is Type I
civilization, also called a planetary civilization, that can store and exploit
all the energy available on its parent planet. Then there is Type II
civilization, a stellar civilization, that has learnt to exploit all the energy
present in its parent star. Type III civilization, an energy guzzler of galactic
proportions, can tap into sources of energy from all over its parent galaxy.
And when, in what embraceable future, is our
humanity going to nimbly hop over these stages of infancy, childhood and youth?
According to the physicist and futurist Michio Kaku, we are expected to become
a Type I civilization in a couple of centuries from now; Type II will take a
few thousand years; and to reach Type III – be forewarned - you must be
prepared to wait for about 100,000 to a million years!
The developed world became what it is today
because, at some point or other, those societies were consumed by the fever of
progress, what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls the “progressophobia.” Any
number of thinkers of nineteenth century Europe were preoccupied with the
thoughts of an ideal future society, of the perfectibility of human condition,
of a future world free from strife and malady, offering the possibility of
infinite progress. (It is ironical, however, that all that hope was stifled,
and progress stymied, by two deadly world wars in the following century.)
What is the popular thought in India
preoccupied with? A return, an impossible regression to some fabled Ramarajya?
Even today, if an Indian writer of Indian languages wishes to write about
something noble and worthwhile, it will be almost always about Vedanta or Gita,
the myths, the epics, our great traditions – in one word, about the past, about
the years that were dead and gone. It is almost never about the future. In
India, the past is an obsession and the future an illusion. I recall the tender advice of the Jedi master
Quigong to his little disciple Anakin Skywalker, from the Starwars saga: “Your focus determines
your Reality.” If we are obsessed with some obscure past glory, rubbing our
eyes hard to penetrate the foggy and uncertain folds of past, our present will
continue to be the same – foggy and uncertain.
The fate of a country cannot be determined a
small number of exceptional people, however competent they are. What the common
man feels and thinks, the average Indian, the one among the crowds, is what
goads the country along its wobbly progression – more so in a democracy. There
must a whole section of India that grows
the guts and good sense to shift the attention from the past and focus on the
future. This section will dream up a future India, free the country at last from
all the scars of the past. This section will be the “massive barrier breakers
of Immortality” to echo Sri Aurobindo’s words from Savitri. By the pressure of
their thoughts and deeds, the dream of a lovely India will hasten to become
Real.
(Previously published in The Hindu blog)
https://www.thehindu.com/thread/reflections/hey-india-the-future-is-that-a-way/article28261533.ece
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