{"id":67207,"date":"2012-12-31T11:38:51","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T11:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=67207"},"modified":"2013-01-04T03:46:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T03:46:53","slug":"it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds\/","title":{"rendered":"It Is Time To Un-\u2018Develop\u2019 Our Minds"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n

We are a few hours away from the year 2013.\u00a0 The world has not ended and the signs are it will not.\u00a0 Strangely, the end of the world sometime in late December was the most looked forward to event of the entire year, beating by a fair margin the Olympics, the US Presidential Election and the T-20 World Cup.\u00a0 Well, it looks like Doom\u2019s Day prophets have called it a day. For now.<\/p>\n

A calendar year is ending and a new year beckons.\u00a0 It\u2019s naturally a moment to look back and look ahead, to think about the what-have-we-done and also the what-should-we-do.\u00a0 If the whole world\u2019s-end hoopla taught us anything, it must be that we are collectively ignorant.\u00a0 We just don\u2019t have the ability to predict.\u00a0 And if anyone is to be blamed it is ourselves.<\/p>\n

Now it is not the case that the world has been spared natural disasters.\u00a0 Earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, droughts, floods, famine, epidemics and such are not unknown to the world.\u00a0 Our ancestors saw and suffered.\u00a0 \u00a0They also knew war. And the wars they fought, won and lost, were nothing like the conflagrations the world has known in the past century.\u00a0 What they didn\u2019t have then was \u2018development\u2019.<\/p>\n

There was a time when we had seasons: when we knew when it would rain, for how long, in what quantity and where.\u00a0 We knew about inter-monsoonal rains.\u00a0 Again, our ancestors knew enough about rainfall and where the rain would fall and where it would not.\u00a0 So they planned for drought.\u00a0 They built sophisticated irrigation systems.\u00a0 They knew enough about ecology to be circumspect in how they engaged with the natural world, especially since they were equipped with technological know-how capable of causing much destruction to ecosystems.<\/p>\n

\u2018Development\u2019 changed all that.\u00a0 \u2018Modernity\u2019 changed all that. \u2018Modernism\u2019 and \u2018Develomentalism\u2019 changed all that.\u00a0 Capitalism<\/a><\/span> and Communism<\/a><\/span> in their various articulations changed all that.\u00a0 These things spawned hordes of profit collectors and do-gooders (some na\u00efve, some now) who wanted to modernize and develop societies that were deemed to be archaic and underdeveloped.<\/p>\n

Things that worked were called \u2018traditional\u2019 or \u2018crude\u2019.\u00a0 Values and customs that built civilizations and sustained societies were tagged \u2018heathen\u2019.\u00a0 Those who did not require salvation were sought to be \u2018saved\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 And when it became clear that \u2018the good life\u2019 comes at a cost (environmental degradation to the point of ecosystem collapse and frenzied competition for resources resulting in wars), the do-gooders, so-called, said \u2018people need to have choices\u2019.\u00a0 They should, in other words, be able to choose between 10 brands of footwear, each brand offering a range of choices for the \u2018sophisticated\u2019 consumer.\u00a0 The consumer, at the end of the day, is much like his or her less needy ancestors, endowed with just two feet.<\/p>\n

But everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell come with three tags: loba<\/em> (greed), dosha <\/em>(envy\/hatred) and moha<\/em> (delusion\/ignorance).\u00a0 They come with an invite: \u2018Come, embrace and embrace tight!\u2019\u00a0 Delusion is a pernicious operative for it persuades us to destroy all that we have in the belief that this is a necessary condition for obtaining what we don\u2019t have and didn\u2019t need but have come to believe we must have in order to secure meaning in our lives.\u00a0 We throw away what we have (traditional knowledge, climate-specific seeds, ethics of giving and sharing etc) to obtain membership in a throw-away society; so that we can be called \u2018developed\u2019 and \u2018modern\u2019, where the tag-giver deliberately leaves out the obvious suffix, \u2018fools\u2019.<\/p>\n

The world did not end as predicted, but there are many worlds that are ending or rather are being \u2018ended\u2019.\u00a0 That process should be stopped.\u00a0 We have \u2018developed\u2019 for quite some time now and have very little to brag about.\u00a0 Perhaps it is time to undo certain things. Perhaps it is time to un-develop.<\/p>\n

*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation<\/a>\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/a>\u00a0.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":44732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\nIt Is Time To Un-\u2018Develop\u2019 Our Minds - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It Is Time To Un-\u2018Develop\u2019 Our Minds - Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[…]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-12-31T11:38:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2013-01-04T03:46:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Malinda.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"336\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"413\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/it-is-time-to-un-develop-our-minds\/\",\"name\":\"It Is Time To Un-\u2018Develop\u2019 Our Minds - 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