Sow some love

[1]

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

India is a country where we have 365 festivals for 365 days of the year. Our whole culture revolves around celebration of some kind or the other. If today is ploughing day, it is reason for celebration. If tomorrow is planting day, there’s another kind of celebration. Harvesting, of course, is a major event in our rural life, which we celebrate as Pongal or Makar Sankranti.

But in the last 20 years, the life of a rural Indian has gone down terribly. Old systems have broken down and nothing new has come up to support him. For example, during Pongal, farmers would put make-up on their bulls, paint them colourfully, and walk on the street with pride. But today he is ashamed of taking out his two bulls, simply because he has attended school till the fifth standard. You don’t know what kind of damage this is doing to his life — there is nothing else for him to do, agriculture is his livelihood, and yet he yearns for another life.
Agriculture as a remunerative pursuit can be heartbreaking. Joyless agriculture leads to farmers’ suicide and other oppressions. When people worked on the land with a deep connection to it, there was a different feeling about it. The wonder about our country is, though we have almost no agricultural infrastructure in rural areas, our farmers are producing food for 1.2 billion people. This is a feat that our farmers have achieved on the strength of our traditional knowledge which is now being eroded and for which we will pay a very heavy price. If our ability to produce food for one billion people goes away, we as a nation could break up.
So rural revitalisation is very important. This is not something a government can do alone. A government can change policies and give a certain impetus, but it cannot change each and every individual’s life.
People keep asking me, “What to do? The government does not have resources.” Today, corporations have become so large that they are nations by themselves. Each industry can take up one taluk in the country to set up training, education, healthcare — not as charity, but as a long-term investment in India’s future. If they do this, in 10 years’ time we will have a fabulous human resource. Industry has to partner with the government, NGOs and the concerned people to this end.
We always think that India is huge, that it has 120 crore people. That is not the way to think. Think of one district and get down to transforming it. For too long we have been talking about change half-heartedly, without any comprehensive policy or action plan. It’s time to make it happen.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an internationally renowned spiritual leader, is a visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker.