Even the atoms in matter are not atomised. They function at different levels of collective – molecules, compounds, and then the higher complexities. Every single speck in this universe is tied in a universe of relationships. We as individuals, are not individuals.
Our individuality exists within a large, and then even larger collectives. So the problems we face as individuals are actually the reflections of the problems that exist in our collectives.
In continuation with the last week’s column on the problem of drug addiction in Kashmir, I feel compelled to talk more about this correspondence between an individual and the collective.
One of the problems with our collective, at the moment, is fading out. We seem to have disappeared. This is a dangerous state of affairs, and it needs a strenuous effort to explain this state of affairs to ourselves, and then find ways to restore the collective.
It is not such an easy task, particularly when the willingness to look into the face of the future is not so strong. What can help us, as a people, to restore ourselves, and generate willingness to re-think, is to meet each other as plain human beings, in unencumbered human surroundings.
The most effective ways to gather ourselves as a collective, with which we can correspond as individuals, is to nurture those unburdened human relationships. By unburdened, I mean not to make our relationship subservient to economic, political, or ideological comforts. Let’s meet, and greet the human in each other.
If our neighbourhoods act as plain human settings, where families interact, where friendships flourish, where individuals are not alien to each other, we can begin to re-emerge as a collective. The danger in this already settled state of fading out, is that our human relationships are fast dissolving in the ‘market’ settings.
What we call as uptown, posh colonies, are graveyards of human bondings. What used to exhibit intimate human interactions, our old localities, are also changing in terms of how the younger generations relates to the older. In our schools the relationship between teachers and students has degenerated. Even the families are not so rich when it comes to parent-child connect.
In such a situation if our children are falling prey to drug addiction, where is the element of surprise! The problems like drug addiction do not go away if our solutions are only individual specific. It is like a pandemic; unless the virus that is in the atmosphere is gone, or we all develop immunity to it, we will have victims after victims.
To save our children from dangers like drug addiction, our society has to undergo a process of repair at multiple levels – family, neighbourhood, schools, mosques, and institutions that are embedded in society, and flourish within society.
Through a vibrant, productive, meaningful and caring web of relationships our collective and our individual need to correspond with each other. Right now, our individual and our collective are asynchronous.
The condition outside seems to kill our individual, and the individual seems to inject poison in the collective. It is a two way production of death. We need activation of the locales of human interaction, and a parallel effort to detoxify the content of our relationships.
But how does that happen? We need ordinary people in our midst with an extraordinary character to become connectors. We need ordinary people with generous heart, munificent mind, and kind disposition.
If we have a good number of such ordinary people, God will gift us with some extra-ordinary few who can fashion us into a lively, purposeful human collective. Along the way we would pleasantly discover that our problems, like drug addictions, disappear one by one.
Right now we are like an individual that has lost hope, that has lost purpose. When it happens to an individual – no purpose, no hope – drug addiction is a natural fall out. Generate hope, build purpose, and you restore an individual.
As long as there is purpose, there is life. No matter how hard it gets. We have children in our families, teach them this lesson. We have students in schools, treat them as your children.
Drug addiction is not the problem of an individual, but something that presents itself through individuals. Absence of purpose at a collective level, makes our children vulnerable at individual level.
As elders we can bequeath two treasures to our children. An atmosphere of lively human relationships, and a purposeful individual life, connected organically to the collective. That is how individual are saved, and that is how human societies flourish.
There was a German thinker and statesman called Rathenau. When Germany became a republic at the end of the First World War, he held the portfolio of economics in the new government. This was the time when Germany was one big lump of stress.
Rathenau grappled with this situation. He was especially worried about the German youth. He tried to place his fingers on the their pulse, and probe into their minds.
Then he wrote a book, The Way of Economics. In that book he underlined what Germany needed urgently. He put it in a line, addressed to his youth -“One and only one is your urgent need: Cultivate the soul”.
This is the moment when we need to invest all our energies into this cultivation of soul. And it happens through education – only education.
Author is Opinion Editor, Greater Kashmir
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK
