Believe it or not, there is another evil aspect about not wasting resources - or overusing resources so to say. Parsimonius use of resources can also result in less demand and less flow of money. Basically, the tendency of indians to save and not spend can result in bad economy. Biggest example is American economy which thrives on people spending not so prudently. Well, this argument may not apply to "food" directly (or may be it does, but since I have also been trained by my family to see wasting food as the worst evil in the world, so I do not want to think it does).
Again, we get into a very complicated question of whether it does any real good to have a bustling economy hurried up by consumerism. More wealth gets produced, resulting in more rapid growth of art, science and technology. What else does it pace up? We don't know. If someone makes a claim that it completely throws the human society off its noble track of attaining a 'sarve santu sukhinh', there's hardly a convincing way to refute it.
A quicker, bigger economy is not necessarily a better economy. We have often seen that things done at a slower pace are often done better. This may likewise apply to the human civilisation too. One thing is surely true. There are people who get benefited by a wasteful style of living; and many of them are those who also are in influencial positions. If they say that economy grows with more consumption, and it's the responsibility of each soul to contribute to that, some accept it because helps 'them' grow. The rest accept it because they just don't know how to refute such a high sounding word. The fact might be that this economy is a parasitic one which thrives on an increasingly large number of people to stay in a starving and ignorant state.
What I depict above isn't necessarily the fact. But it's a possibility.
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Believe it or not, there is another evil aspect about not wasting resources - or overusing resources so to say. Parsimonius use of resources can also result in less demand and less flow of money. Basically, the tendency of indians to save and not spend can result in bad economy. Biggest example is American economy which thrives on people spending not so prudently.
Well, this argument may not apply to "food" directly (or may be it does, but since I have also been trained by my family to see wasting food as the worst evil in the world, so I do not want to think it does).
Shipra
Again, we get into a very complicated question of whether it does any real good to have a bustling economy hurried up by consumerism. More wealth gets produced, resulting in more rapid growth of art, science and technology. What else does it pace up? We don't know. If someone makes a claim that it completely throws the human society off its noble track of attaining a 'sarve santu sukhinh', there's hardly a convincing way to refute it.
A quicker, bigger economy is not necessarily a better economy. We have often seen that things done at a slower pace are often done better. This may likewise apply to the human civilisation too. One thing is surely true. There are people who get benefited by a wasteful style of living; and many of them are those who also are in influencial positions. If they say that economy grows with more consumption, and it's the responsibility of each soul to contribute to that, some accept it because helps 'them' grow. The rest accept it because they just don't know how to refute such a high sounding word. The fact might be that this economy is a parasitic one which thrives on an increasingly large number of people to stay in a starving and ignorant state.
What I depict above isn't necessarily the fact. But it's a possibility.
A story showing that blatant consumerism is indeed not a universally accepted way of living:
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
We could still hang on and possibly avoid making the irreversible transition to that way of life.
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