Emotional poverty: the phantom issue

We constantly hear people, politicians, intellectual-jerk-offs, diplomats, students et all, talking about poverty in our country. While all of them talk about economic poverty, seldom does anyone pay attention to the emotional poverty our country is saddled with.

For a country with a billion strong, emotional deprivation and poverty is far more a serious issue than it is ever recognized. A country full of people with voiding relationships, under-achieved aspirations, unconquered dreams, ailing self-image; and all at the cusp of hyper modernization of the society, economic liberation, and fundamental shift in the sense of rights and wrongs.
While everyone is celebrating the new India, the so called “affluent” India and pushing the nation toward a hyperbole; little does anyone fathom the likely impact of such rapacious appetite. While at an individual level, this madness for more, more for self, might bear fruit, well at least in the short run; taken on a larger canvas of a community, state, or the country it is likely to take us to the next frontier under-prepared, under-equipped, and to an extent brittle. A generation with strong sense of over-achievement thrust on them, delivering to this end with their misplaced sense of emotional stability. Most economic modalities fail when people are not able to cope up with low phases, when at the slightest of storms their backs bend.

Analyzing poverty from both economic as well as emotional standpoint might yield us a better grip on this problem that plagues our nation. I put forth some extremely rudimentary set of equations that might field as childish or even prudish, but nonetheless encapsulates my vague yet stirring thoughts on this topic.

• Economic poverty + Emotional poverty = Crime
• Economic prosperity + Emotional poverty = Decadence
• Economic poverty + Emotional prosperity = Value for sustenance and linked growth orientation
• Economic prosperity + Emotional prosperity = Self actualization and spiritual evolution

Strangely, many of us oscillate between the four states at some point or other. Sad to know in this restless generation of ours, keeping to one’s axis, stable, and steadfast is no more a vital consideration. Only if we were more giving and less volatile, our country could realize more from what it already has.

I am, here, offering no solution or actions. I am not qualified to do so. But I do feel, and so I write. I am one of you.