Throw your life away

Throw your life away

You'll lose it anyway

So find something -

a cause, a person, a group, a hope -

And give your life away.

It wasn't yours to begin with.

-- By Vyom, Recasted 7:20 AM 9/25/2006 after the Original 3:08 PM 8/31/2006

Reflecting on Muda (Japanese for waste, futility, purposelessness)

I was reading "Natural Capitalism, and I stopped on the word, "Muda", part of the title of Natural Capitalism, Chapter 7 ("Muda, Service and Flow") which also connects its meaning with the content of Chapter 3 ("Waste Not").

"Muda" was not the first word I pondered and mused. This book "Natural Capitalism" is so engagingly well-written that, paradoxically, I have difficulty through-putting it through my mind. There's hardly a sentence which doesn't ring bells of associatve resonances and I am diverted into listening and savoring those sounds. That is how successful the authors have been in writing this book.

So as I pondered and mused over the word , I wondered if it had been accurately rendered in the Roman script. Do the Japanese really pronounce it to rhyme with "coulda" as in the colloquial "I coulda dunnit"? Then it came to me--an "echo":

There's a word in Sanskrit (and several Indian languages) "Moodha." It connotes stupid, uninformed, irresponsible, slow, unintelligent, wilful, proud, deaf, lacking consciousness / conscience / sympathy, being unresponsive or insensitive etc. etc.

Ghamachchhanna drishti ghamachchhannamarkam,
yathaa nishprabham chaati moodha

For an Indian like me, every time I come across something said with considerable brilliance and apparent originality, my unfortunate focus is to first make a connection with something said in the past--to cock my ear up for a time-skip echo--and then to communicate it in a manner which, at best, is only tangentially relevant and at worst, is tiresome even to me. Still the addiction is so hardwired, few can kick the habit. I only hope some catalyzing good can come out of these imposition.

For instance, a shloka-shubhaashitam in Sanskrit could be of interest to the advocates of resource-productivity and the opponents of Muda / moodha-behaviour, or biomimicry. It goes :

Amantram aksharonaasti, naastimoolam anaushadham
Ayogyah purushonaasti, yojakastatra durlabha

"There's no sound / alphabetical letter which can't become a mantra,
there is no rooted plant which can't become a medicine
and there is no human who is incompetent.
All one needs is appropriate design and organization"

In my frequent moments of quiet frustration with the current situation here (which, in Bucky Fuller's words, "Teach us to assume, as closely as possible, the view point, the patience and competence of God"} I have commented elsewhere,

"Instead of inventing and producing what we need, we get into the habit of inventorying and debating what our ancients left behind them. Since our culture prides itself in being hoary, the inventorying never gets done. Someone, somewhere, appears to always leave something out and count goes back again and always to the Vedas."


-- From a letter Vyom Akhil sent to the authors of Natural Capitalism, Sunday April 9, 2000

World History Primer: Governance, Prosperity and Service in the next millenium

Under the overlay of oligarchies, plutocracies, monarchies and anarchies which obsess historians, there was, at the level of the vast, sparsely populated countryside of the World's Old Cultures, Consensal Governance with its many diversities and variations. There was little paper-shuffling. No computer-assisted bureaucracies manned remote but powerful Control & Command Centers (CCCs). Consensal Governance was human scale. It focused on equilibriums, not equalities.

The change from local consensual governance to commanding and controlling CCCs first occurred in the geographical harshness of tribally attenuated, pagan Europe. To neutralize the marauding local looter-aggrressors, the tyrannical alliance of the Fiefs and the The Church scaled up Governance. The affairs of the populace began to be affected by Power siezed and vested in their remotes CCCs. It took a while for the fermenting upheavals to culminate in insurrections, beheadings, revolutions and, finally, the general acceptance of Majority Governance, aka, the "Lesser Evil."

After this, however, Colonial Greed + Industrial Enterprise + The Zeal To Protect The (so-called) Rights & Freedoms from those remote Fiefs-&-Church CCCs, over-individualized the people, tempting them away from the Responsibilities and Disciplines inherent to living under local Consensal Governance. Enterprise, Politics and Bureaucrythen helped give larger-than-human-scale Lesser Evils in Europe a spin which, in effect, progressively internationalized its Regional Plunder-&-Protection Rackets which cunningly legitimized themselves under Majority Governance Guises. Greek "roots' were "located' to support the notion that "to govern' meant "to control and steer" and fancy social contracts were constitutionalized to hoodwink the people in the interest of the club-&-boardroom manipulators.

Families, communities and academia, instead of producing socially-skilled, self-disciplined citizens, began churning out rainbow-chasing taxpayers, jobbers, entitlement-jockeys and "escape artists" adept at rights-agitation while winking at their social responsibilities. Meanwhile, nominal governors of these European Rackets which had, by then, spawned across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and were cracked up to be "Representatives of The People" or otherwise, had only hero/martyr paradigms to establish their man-made Rule-of-Law at these large, inhuman scales. The audacious--and scientifically now shown as fallacious--presumptions were
(a) Nature was "Wild' It, therefore, needed to be conquored and tamed.
(b) Natural man was a "Savage' who must be schooled, civilized and "saved," and
(c) God & Creation were imnherently chaotic calling for Order & Organization.

Under a hallucinatory paranoia of Progress and Development, predaition and destruction were prosecuted world-wide with arrogant expedition. Strip mines wounded the Land; its forests were "cleared" into oblivion. Rivers damned by dams. Mountains, blown apart. The Oceans were emptied of their teeming life to become sloship waste-dumps. Even the Air was ceaselessly incinerated by constant injecting of toxic-pollutants. As a crowning example of DoubleSpeak, Anti-bio(tics} were heralded as Life-sustainers. All that the hoary heritage of humankind had held sacred and in reverance was trashed and trivialized under the motto:

If it moves, shoot it down. If it doesn't cut it down.

More fat to the fire, these Euro/US micro-macro "management" examples became models for the new "nations" of these World-Shepards.

Recent histories are packed with "leaders' who successfully committed hero/martyr follies--and by those who tried and failed in correcting those of their flamboyant predecessors. Majority Governance cannot be scaled up any further without scaling up its unacceptable and unsustainable evils, too, to create worldwide amity, stability and prosperity. Localized Consensal Governance, aided by zero-cost, on-tap and non-judgmental, globally inclusive, nondiscriminatory, cooperative and relevant communication, now appear to be a more realistic alternative. For this, notions of prosperity and value based on (a) gun-running (b) Purveying of Planet-inimical techno-fantasies and (c) mindless, expensive and inefficient patterns of consumption--these need to be urgently jettisoned.

Prosper(ity) isn't derived from a Shakespearean character, nor does "Government' have Greek roots. The Sanskrit "Paraspar" is approximated by "mutual' while "Guru + mantra" suggests an advisory function in Statecraft. For advice to catalytically and sustainably function in the desired direction of Wellbeing for All, carrot-&-stick games, latently threatening "messages" and exhibitions of techno-destructive prowess are counterproductive. One needs only, say the ancients, the moral force of true, patient and loving care which is transparently motivated by an equation which puts "Self" at the bottom of the heap where it really belongs. In fact, that is precisely what Sarva (Everyone) + Sva (Sel) or Sarvasva from which "Service" is derived means.

--Excerpt from a letter Vyom wrote to "educate a friend." This segment was entitled, "a one-page primer of world-history for relevance in Governance, Prosperity and Service in the 3rd millenium A.D."