Everybody is crying out about an impending slowdown. Headlines like those of the GDP growth plummeting, the stock market nose-diving, nobody buying cars any more, and so many thousands losing their jobs, are appearing everywhere. When an economy registers negative GDP growth for two or more consecutive quarters, it could be termed as a recession. The three sectors crying out the loudest – finance, real estate and automobile – their growth can’t continue forever. The sky can’t be clear all 365 days! 

Whose growth does the GDP indicate? If it is only certain sectors of the economy, crying wolf is no good. The wolf has already been here. It was silently feasting upon smallholder farmers and daily wage earners, when people were buying high-rise flats and cars, using EMIs. The loan default at Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS) last year was the trailer of the liquidity crunch film that is now hitting screens. 

Most of the GDP rise has come from consumer goods. Consumption growth has been aided and abetted by the rise in personal lending. How much you earn is no more the question people ask. How much you spend is what they are interested in. Money has lost much of its meaning as a means to buy services and products with credit flowing in the veins of the economy. Money itself has become a commodity in the era of financialism. 

Unlike in capitalism where money is used as capital to produce goods and services; in financialism, money is used to grow more money. Credit has penetrated every aspect of human life – from childbirth, schooling, and housing to holidaying, wining-dinning, and getting beauty treatments using credit cards. Living beyond one’s means has become the culture. So what happens when your salary that pays for the EMIs and credit card dues gets hit, or is lost altogether? Reality bites, it is biting now.  

Young people mistakenly thought that their higher pay packages, coming out of a larger GDP and the rising Sensex, were correlated with a higher quality of life and more happiness. High packages brought with them their own lifestyle trappings. A large number of the young people are now finding that this was true only up to a certain income level, after that the large income is indeed a trap of lifetime slavery to the creditors. Beyond a certain income level, additional increases in income do not bring higher quality of life.

Young French President Nicolas Sarkozy (b. 1955) in 2009 commissioned a panel led by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz (b. 1943) to examine the issue of recession as he found “a dangerous gulf of incomprehension between experts sure of their knowledge and citizens whose experience of life is completely out of sync with the story told by the data.” India is very different. Our leaders are know-all types and our experts can derive multiple conclusions on the same set of data. 

The inventor of GDP, Nobel laureate economist Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) was uneasy about a measure that treated all production equally. He wanted to subtract, rather than add, things he considered detrimental to human well-being, such as arms, financial speculation and advertising. But GDP as it is now calculated makes no distinction between the tariff of a hotel room or a hospital bed, the price of a bottle of whiskey or milk, and charity or gambling. The more the business, of whatever type, is seen as good.   

Robert Kennedy (1925–1968) famously took pity on GDP politics, saying, “It counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.”

The New India should not get trapped in the GDP game played by a few for the benefit of a few. For long, tax payers’ money was used to create wealth for a few – let some of them be sobered down. Many people abandoned their small towns and parents there to metro cities and opted for unsustainable lifestyles – let those be moderated. If the stock market falls, the nation will not fall with it. Three-fourth of the Indian people are living at a level from where only rise is possible. The crash of some peaks, and the bursting of some bubbles, as GDP declines will not cause an earthquake.

If this world is a machine, then who is the ghost in the machine? Who runs this world is an old question with answers that keep changing with time. Human beings used to be hunter gatherers in the early ages. Some of these people shifted to rearing animals rather than killing and eating them. A mix of these wandering people, upon settling into territories over time started calling themselves as nations, some strong and others weak. Wars were the next natural development. The principal cause of war, which was greed, was camouflaged by religion, ideology and imaginary conflicts. To stop some of this chaos, great empires were born – the Roman Empire, the Prussian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and many others. 

The First World War, which started as a war to end all wars, led to the demise of empires and the creation of Soviet Russia. The hurt pride of the Germans led to the Second World War and the end of the European era. A bipolar world dominated by the Americans and the Russians emerged. In 1990, with the implosion of Soviet Russia, America unleashed globalization to bring almost the entire planet into its control. This turned China into a global factory, and India into an intellectual slave provider, to achieve profit for the US corporations. It badly backfired and today, President Trump is trying in vain to reverse globalization. 

So, who runs the world now? Global corporations? Military power? It was believed that control over resources creates a symbiotic relation and balance that runs the world. But the newly brewed trade war between China and the United States; the exit of Britain from the European Union; the American Military Power shining in its impotency to establish rule over Afghanistan and Iraq, occupied decades back; and Iran, Turkey and Hungary staring back in defiance at their erstwhile mentoring nations, have all thrown up new doubts. Every time victory over terrorism is declared, bombs blasts at the most unexpected locations rattle this illusion. There is unease and uncertainty in the air.  So now, who is controlling the modern world?

Let us go to Neti Neti, ‘not this, not this’, line of thought of ancient Indian thinkers. Money does not control the world. All major international currencies are tied up in a tangle and no one is really leading. All ideologies and isms, are dead and in a great paradox, Communist China is today’s most capitalist country and the United States is promoting most vigorously, the rights of its workers and the interests of its locals over that of its immigrants. Religion is dead as a force, not only politically, but also in its role as a moral and social reformer. British journalist Catherine Nixey, working for The Times, in her book In The Darkening Age, narrates how nations following the Christian religion, despite preaching peace, had been violent, ruthless and intolerant. Lack of human development is glaring in most of the orthodox Muslim nations. 

It is important to look at the Vedic concept of Kali Yuga – the Age of the Dark for two reasons. One, it explains to a large extent the increased entropy, disorder and uncertainty of the contemporary world. Internet-driven electronic mass and social media have established a kingdom of lies and deceit over the human mind and an explosion of a mindless, unfocused generation growing up in every country of the world is imminent, in varying intensity and time lag. There was a Hollywood movie ‘World War Z’, sometime back, wherein zombies created by a biological infection almost took over the world but for the heroics of the protagonist. In real life, however, there is no protagonist and the end would unfortunately be different from the one shown in the movie.  

The world, the way it is or is going to be, will eventually end but humanity will survive; good human beings will remain alive. Therefore, the point is not to brood over what is wrong with the world, and to face the reality that there is hardly anything right with the world. The point is not to be passive and see the decay and degeneration of human values, but to connect with the Infinite of which this earth is a minute part and the human part, further a small part of the planet itself.  The Indian mind has always seen the Earth as Mother, humanity as one, and the world as a family – Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. 

A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Let us take that first step by connecting to the Infinite Intelligence centre inside our own body – our soul, or with whatever other word we may like to call it. A multi-layered system governs everything, whether it is our life inside, our life around and the world at large. The first step to know who runs the world is to know who runs you!

I have fond memories of celebrating Independence Day in school. We would apply white polish on our canvas shoes in preparation and rehearse with gusto, the chorus of patriotic songs. I have heard in rapt attention, many Prime Ministers’ addresses to the nation – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904-1966), Smt. Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) on radio and watched them every year after TV arrived in the late 1960s. Without any ideological prism, I enjoyed every Independence Day and heard the Prime Minister of the day speaking from the rampart of the iconic Red Fort, including the solo ones of Prime Minister Charan Singh (1902-1987), Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1931 -2008), H. D. Deve Gowda (b. 1933) and Inder Kumar Gujral (1919-2012).

The Nation is above political parties and leaders, whom I understand as products of their times and not as producers of their times. I saw Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri when he came to Meerut to unveil the statue of Gandhiji at Town Hall in 1964, from a distance. Through my association with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015), I could see from close quarters, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (b. 1932) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (b. 1950). I was awed every time in the presence of the respective Prime Ministers of India. 

The nation-building of India is still a work in progress even 72 years after its independence. We are still talking about homes with toilets, electricity, cooking gas and safe drinking water supply for every family. Of course, growth has taken place – the economy has grown, development indices like infant mortality, maternal mortality, and longevity are better than ever, but there is also decay – crimes and corruption are unabated, socio-economic inequality is dividing people, farmers are distressed and big businesses are eating away small enterprises like pythons in full collusion with the state. Our state-owned banks, postal services, government-run schools and hospitals are in their last existential phase.

What kind of a nation is India going to become? I wrote a book, India 3.0: The Rise of a Billion People, which was published earlier this year. Although it did not become a bestseller like any other good book, it was read by thoughtful people and was well appreciated. The job of a writer is to read the signs of time and share them with others through his work. The five books that I co-authored with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam spanning 1999 to 2015 did precisely that. We took the pulse of the people and recorded it for posterity. I wrote a 600-page tome on Dr Kalam to preserve his work after he departed and dared to write India 3.0 solo, just to preserve his dream of India for the future generations. 

Today, I want to transcend what Dr Kalam saw India become as a nation and try to see what it is actually becoming right in front of my eyes, to share the signs of my times with younger people. India is coming out of its self-imposed isolation and joining the global political order aligning with regional forces, namely China, Russia, Iran and Turkey. Whatever this development results into will be important for India. India is accepting the globalized economic order; our economy will work in the ecosystem created by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and their like. Our leaders will take their notes and brief from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) deduced trade strategies and war games articulated by global corporations. 

People who are educated, healthy and open-minded will flourish, whereas people who are blindfolded to whichever ideology they chose to be blinded with, will perish. India’s destiny is to be a market of more than a billion people and a provider of intelligent, skilled and hardworking people to the global economy. Globalization of the Indian economy took place in the last twenty years, is happening now, and will only happen in the next twenty years with greater speed, depth and breath. Steve Jobs (1955-2011) famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Each one of us has to lead our lives, our families and our communities by making our best efforts, and India will become a better country, let there be no doubt about it.

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
― William Somerset Maugham

Education and books play important roles in one’s life. They broaden one’s vision by giving one the wealth of experience and insights without having to undergo particular incidents. Books have been my constant companions as I moved on with life and their authors helped me see and understand better the enigma of human existence. I have never travelled without a book and my personal library is my most cherished asset. 

My first serious book reading was The Memories of a Cat written by M.N. Roy (1887-1954). I struggled to comprehend the book but read it fully nevertheless. Then came two novels of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) – Fountain Head, followed by Atlas Shrugged. Both the novels made me sceptical of establishment, particularly politicians and big corporates, for the rest of my life. Three books of William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) – The Moon and Sixpence, Of Human Bondage, and The Razor’s Edge inspired me to be a writer. In 1985, as if by God’s hand, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Fritz Perls (1893-1970) reached me, helped me immensely to sort out my migraine headaches and led me to other self-help books written by Wayne Dyer (1940-2015), Robert Schuller (1926-2015) and Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993). All these books helped me enormously to assist Dr APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015) write Wings of Fire in 1999. To be a good writer, you ought to be a good reader first. 

Then I read Alchemist of Paulo Coelho (b. 1947) in 2001 followed by all his books as and when they arrived. In 2004, I got The Glass Palace of Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956) and later read his other books – Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide. Three books of V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018) on India – An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now gave me perspectives of being an Indian. My thinking is deeply influenced by Carl Jung (1875-1961). His idea of Unconscious, Shadow, and Archetypes is very real and I could feel it inside me. His Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I must have read four times and every time, I gained fresh insights. I feel everyone must read How We Live and How We Die, two books of Sherwin Nuland (1930-2014) to appreciate the gift of life and the inevitability of death. 

My world view is broadly formed by Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) and Thomas Friedman (b. 1953). I have all their books, namely Future Shock; The Third Wave; Powershift; and Revolutionary Wealth of Toffler; and The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization; Longitudes and Attitudes; The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century; Hot, Flat and Crowded; That Used to be Us and Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations of Friedman. Amongst current authors, I admire Yuval Noah Harari (b. 1976) and his brilliantly written three books Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and 21 lessons for 21st Century. Thanks to a wonderful biography of Steve Jobs (1955-2011) written by Walter Isaacson (b. 1952), Jobs is my ideal of a creative engineer. When I use Apple products – my iPhone, my MacBook, and my iPad – I can feel the genius of Steve Jobs in them. 

I am rereading these days, the books of M. Scott Peck (1936-2005) – The Road Less Travelled, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil and Further Along the Road Less Travelled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth. He skilfully established the concepts of discipline and spiritual development and the forces of evil and grace in a scientific way. I am deeply intrigued by the idea of a Personal God, presented in timeless scriptures of knowledge like the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramcharitmanas and the tradition of Bhakti Saints, epitomised by Sant Tukaram (1608-1650). It is very helpful to see real and true guidance, support and solace coming from one’s inner being rather than from any of the external sources. A person devoted to a Personal God is indeed anti-fragile, not prone to errors, and is peaceful within himself, by himself. Such a person is in possession of what this world can neither give, nor take away. Wise people write books to help future generations learn from the earlier experiences of mankind. Evolution is a spiral, not a circle and books make that happen.

India has a rich tradition of worshipping a Personal God. In the Vedic tradition, God was seen in the Natural Forces – Sun, Wind, Water, and so on. Then came the Upanishads and the idea of God as an impersonal force – unseen, omnipresent, almighty, incomprehensible by man, ground of existence, absolute essence, etc., emerged.  The famous term ‘Neti, Neti’ – ‘Not this, not this…’ came into vogue in looking for God. Finally, starting with Shankaracharya, the idea of worshipping a personalized God, gained root. Even the Buddhists converted Buddha into a personal God. Jesus Christ too, became a personal God.   

In the Bible and the Quran, God is described as a personal creator, who talks with and instructs his prophets. Personal relationships with God may be described in the same way as human relationships, such as, a Father in Christianity, a Lover in Sufism, and a Mother in Hinduism. The Bhakti tradition of India created a Master-servant relationship between Man and God. Saint Francis of Assisi even saw Man as an instrument of God. Organized religion, later on branched out as commercial religion and the market for Personal God related merchandise boomed – talismans, idols, pictures, and so on.

What does a young person do with God in the modern world? Organized religion has greatly lost its appeal to the urbane, rationale and scientific person. The idea of an Abstract God remains vague and therefore, is not very useful in practical terms. So, how about understanding God as intelligence inside and outside of the human body? Everything is orderly inside the human body – the blood pressure, the heartbeats, the temperature, the digestive system, respiration… Everything is working most intelligently and for good. Outside also, an exact amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, days and nights, seasons… all is good and fully functional in the most ordered way.

Personal worship then becomes an alignment with this intelligence and not going against it. This means following the signals of your body, keeping it clean, free of toxins and nourishing it with nutrients, exercise and rest, staying connected to Nature, feeling the fresh air, staring at the stars, basking in mild sunshine, and floating in a water body, if possible. And most importantly, listening to your inner consciousness – the drives, intuitions, hunches – and taking note of the dreams that bring important messages every night from the depths of your inner world and in sync with the unknown, trying to make itself known to you for your own good.

In every major religion, Free Will is seen as a gift of God to Man, and it is this that distinguishes him as superior to every other living creature. In the Bhagavad Gita, Shri Krishna, after preaching to Arjuna about the three paths to reach him – the knowledge way, the action way, and the devotion way, gave him the choice to pick any one of them or leave all three – yatheccha si tatha kuru (Bhagavad Gita 18.63). In the Holy Bible, the predicament of human life is free will. “I don’t do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do (Romans 7.19). Dr APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015) used to tell me, “Free will is given to Man so that he willingly surrender it to God’s will.” Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) puts it so beautifully, “The goal of life is to match your heartbeat to the beat of the Universe.”

So, instead of signing off the concept of God as old-fashioned, fossil, dogma or making it a hollow ritual confined to ceremonies, understand it as an inseparable part of your being, real, palpable, operating upon you from inside and the outside, every instant, as Supreme Intelligence. An agitated mind is indeed noise, and emotions like greed, anger and lust, are like viruses hijacking your CPU that is connected to the evolutionary operating system Cloud – God.

The power of modern medicine in extending life is incredible! But the other side of the story of the quality of the extra years in life is dubious, if not dreadful. The 1950, the global average life expectancy was 48 years. It increased to 71.5 in 2014. Global average life expectancy increased by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016. If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, life expectancy at birth will be 80 years by 2050. By the end of the century, it will be 100 years. 

No matter how rosy this picture looks, there are two issues involved. The first is, what will people do with such a long lifespan? The world as it exists, is designed for productivity till 60 years, and in some intellectual occupations like science, academics, and the judiciary, it is 65 years. So one stops earning by that time and starts living off one’s savings, if there are any, or becomes a societal burden. If society itself is incapable of taking care of itself, old age is synonymous with pain, misery, solitude and agony.

I accidently changed my career from that of a missile scientist to biomedical engineering in 1995 when my mentor, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam inspired me to develop civilian spinoffs of defence technology. He was concerned about the high cost of imported medical devices, not being affordable to most Indian patients. I succeeded in making a coronary stent and riding that success, landed myself an opportunity to work with doctors since then. I do not want to sound cynical but the ringside view of the healthcare sector that I accidently got to have, was unpleasant if not revolting. 

I saw rampant corruption in the pricing of drugs and consumables. There are commissions at every stage in the supply chain without any value addition. Prescriptions are not honest and off late, even diagnostics  is linked to the terms and conditions of your insurance policy and your capacity to pay for your treatment. Like banks stripped themselves of the trust of the people who deposited their savings to earn interest, inefficiency mars hospitals in the government sector while the corporate ones are defaced by crass commercialization of medicine. 

As if by design, sugar and low grade fats are being pumped into our diets. Exotic chemicals are used in food processing to increase the shelf life of products and food adulteration has become an accepted norm of modern living, rather than some abhorred sin. The combined effect of all these have brought in a rampant increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases – diabetes and other hormonal disorders, hypertension, obesity, irritable bowl syndrome and autoimmune problems messing up with the respiration in a serious manner. 

It is common to see school-going children carry anti-asthmatic nasal sprays in their school bags, young men and women having cancers and heart disease, and by the time one is fifty, one is on a daily prescription for diabetes, hypertension and/or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Each of these drugs has its own side effects and a few years of consumption push you into some or the other systemic impairment and all this costs money which eventually goes into the coffers of global giants who make these medicines, own beverages and fast food businesses, hospitals and insurance companies. 

I found a lot of sense in the books written by Croatian-Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich (1926–2002). For Dr Illich, the world is suffering from too much medical interference, and a medical edifice has been built which is one of the threats to the real life of human beings – a threat which so far has been disguised as care. So, eat and drink industrialized food, breathe toxins and automobile exhaust loaded air, drink only bottled water as the normal one is indeed injurious to health and loaded with infectious microbes, get diagnosed for at least one chronic disease and become an entry in the Excel Sheet of a global conglomerate that spreads its investment portfolios in food, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and of course, the media. And do not look down upon them. They are indeed great philanthropists and regularly donate for human causes. They are not robber barons of the earlier centuries. They are indeed very friendly and painless, even as they stick to you like leeches!