Why is India poor despite so much religiosity and the West so properous despite its materialism?

From: akash

In India people have so many gods and religious things going, still people in India are so poor.They lack even basic necessities to live. But if we take on the other hand people in the west, they don’t worship any gods but still they are materially so well off.How do you explain that

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
question from akash in india people have so many people in india are so poor they lack even basic necessities to live but if we take on the other hand people in the west they don’t worship any gods but still they are materially so well off how do you explain that there is a general principle that when people are doing dharma they will get artha and kama and this is an underlying principle that applies to both india and the west at the same time we need to understand clearly what do we mean by dharma by artha as these words are talked about in the vedic context so dharma is not just any religious activity that a person does according to one’s own mental concoctions in india as you have rightly pointed out lot of religious things are going on but how many of these religious things are scriptural is a serious question much of popular hinduism today is a diluted contaminated and distorted version of the traditional sanatan dharma taught in the vedic literature of ancient india so i will explain these words diluted, contaminated and perverted diluted means sanatan dharma at the highest level talks about pure devotional service where one surrenders one’s life to god but most people in india who are practicing religion practice a very diluted version where god is just a small part of their lives and their connection to dharma is just very superficial and nominal may be chant, may be bow down to god in the altar in the morning chant a few names or few mantras and then get along in materialistic life just like everyone else so they are not at all following the traditional dharma even if they are not outright irreligious it is diluted then there is contaminated contaminated means so much nonsense is going on in the name of religion today we have many imagined deities which may be as blatant as temples where film stars are being worshipped or temples where politicians are being offered bhoga or there may be imagined goddesses like santoshi ma who is created by a movie and people are so gullible that they start worshipping imagined goddess just who is the product of a movie scriptwriter director and producer imagination so if we start worshipping imaginary gods and goddesses then how can we expect real results and thirdly we also have distorted versions of sanatana dharma distorted means instead of worshipping god people are worshipping human beings as if they are gods and some of these god men may be moral and may be doing some philanthropic work but some of the other people are unfortunately very exploitative and by worshipping people who are self-seeking and materialistic and even sinful how can we expect to get the dharmic result of artha by this so Shilpa Prabhupada would say that modern society is a society of cheaters and cheated so much of what goes on in the name of religion today is cheating and there are people who also want to be cheated in the sense that they just don’t use their intelligence and discrimination to seriously evaluate what they are doing many times people just go by a herd mentality and if some particular god or goddess is being worshipped or some particular human being is being exalted as a great saint or as an avatar people just indiscriminately follow that trend so therefore the religious propensity in people has to be directed scripturally and for that we need scriptural education and the Krishna consciousness movement is doing its best for that purpose just as in technology if I don’t know how to operate a machine properly then even if I am there and the machine is there still I won’t get the result from the machine if I am using a toaster to say make bread into toast but if I don’t know how the toaster operates and if I just fiddle around with it then what is going in is not correct what is being done with the machine is not correct what is coming out is not correct so to some extent the mechanism of karma and dharma that governs the world is like this we have to do things properly our karma has to be according to our dharma for us to get the phala of artha so if we are doing something according to our concoctions and that is not scriptural then we can’t expect results so this answer is from the philosophical perspective at a practical level we can see that there is a lot of mismanagement that is happening India has natural resources India has the capacity to be prosperous and to be able to feed its huge population even with its available natural resources but unfortunately those resources are being misused and abused because of corruption and that also brings its reaction so in general the results that we get in this life are a combination of our past karma and our present karma so if I jump off a ten story building then if I break my head or break my hands that is just the result of what I did in this life so in general if we have to have the country prosper then we need to have good administrators so Vedic culture was not just about performing dharma performing dharma is important but along with that dharma of the Kshatriyas is to manage the country properly and we see that the Kshatriya kings in Vedic times were doing both things one is that they were doing their religious activities they were ensuring that their people were doing religious activities but at the same time even at a material level they were taking care that people were getting the necessities properly and things were managed properly so that they could get the necessities when Chinese travelers came to India during the time of Chandragupta Maurya and Chanakya they were impressed by the sheer organization of the kingdom the efficiency and the effectiveness of the management systems so they had come to study Buddhism to India and they were distressed to see that Buddhism was dying in the land of its birth but they were impressed by the material management so we have to see the adversity in India from both causes one is because of the dilution, contamination and perversion or distortion of the Sanatana Dharma and second is because of the mismanagement and corruption of the current leaders as far as the west is concerned we need to understand the definition of Artha properly for India we discussed how we need to understand the definition of Dharma properly and see how Dharma is actually not being performed as far as the west is concerned Artha does not just mean a huge amount of money Artha means holistic prosperity so holistic prosperity leads to some sort of satisfaction even at material level so it comes from sufficiency of natural resources it comes from satisfying relationships it comes primarily from a peaceful mind so as far as the west is concerned does it have that? the relationships among family members are pathetically weak in the west the generation gap is huge and the children don’t care for the parents and the parents can’t handle the children and the husbands and wives are quarrelling and they have divorces and in many cases people are married 2,3,4 times and children have the trauma of multiple mothers and fathers sometimes and these are not extreme situations these are to a large extent the mainstream situations in America so without relationships just having a profusion of money is not a sign of prosperity and most importantly what about peace of mind? people may have comfort but they cannot have peace of mind and they do not have it so sometimes the actions of the law of karma may not be immediate or they may not be apparent Krishnamurti Bhagavatam describes how in the 7th canto when Hiranyakashipu performed a lot of austerities and then when he was ruling the universe he had disrupted the whole universal order and he was having all the material enjoyment in the world and even in the universe available for himself but still because he had not controlled his senses because he had not mastered his desires his desires were his masters and he lived constantly dissatisfied so when people live materialistically under the control of lust anger and greed then even if they have huge amount of material resources and facilities for enjoyment still their minds will not allow them to enjoy their minds will make them constantly be craving for more and more and more so how do we understand that the best is actually not having artha because as I said there are no family relationships, there is no natural way of living people don’t get proper food to eat they have to eat packed food which is often irradiated and leads to multiple diseases, nobody gets hot food to eat over there nobody has very warm and satisfaction relationships or very few people have that and moreover the mind is constantly agitated because of excessive materialistic infatuations so still we may wonder ok all these may be true but still the west does seem to have technology it does seem to have a lot of money and at some level it does seem to have some prosperity yes so as I said even Ravana had the golden Lanka but how long that is the question we often see history from a very non-historical perspective in the sense that the west’s prosperity has just been very recent now if we look at America it is probably among the youngest countries in the world which has become a leading power it is just 300-400 years old as a country and if we look at the initial people who had come to America they were the Protestants who were persecuted by the Catholic Church in Europe and they decided to sail off to America to set up what they felt was the proper Christian civilization and many of them were pious if you look at the founding fathers of America they were in their own way religious they had their own conceptions of morality according to the Bible and they were doing their dharma according to that understanding so dharma is not just a Vedic concept it is a generic concept so many of them were pious and that piety naturally leads to the result of prosperity but the image of the grossly materialistic west which is bombarded through Star TV and other such channels is actually a very recent phenomenon the unbridled materialism in America primarily started after Second World War when prosperity became widespread due to the way the Second World War played out and then people started throwing morality to the winds and got involved in indiscriminate sexuality and untrammeled materialism or even hedonism and in just 50 years there have been disastrous consequences of that so there is an article on this website called Please Doubt so how spirituality does not ask for blind faith but it asks us for intelligent doubt so in that article I quote from the book by the American researcher and author Dr. David G. Meyers The American Paradox Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty so since 1960 if we compare America to around 2000 turn of the century and thereafter 2005 then since 1960 the divorce rate has doubled the teen suicide rate has tripled the recorded violent crime rate has quadrupled the prison population has quintupled the percentage of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled depression has soared to 10 times the pre-WWII level so all sociological parameters are indicating that American society is in a down slide and even if one doesn’t accept religious morality where one says that okay free sexuality it’s not bad if there is free mixing among men and women even if there is free marital cohabitation, living together that’s not bad we are not talking about moral parameters over here we are talking about objective sociological parameters that do not require the acceptance of any religious conception of morality no religious sense of morality is required to understand that divorce is traumatic for people that suicide and crime and prisoners and babies born out of bedlock and depression are terrible so we should not get illusion that America and the West are prosperous in terms of holistic prosperity no they are not so the rule of Kala is that Kali Yuga has to progress and the rule of Karma is that every action has to produce its reaction so how does material nature integrate these two if people start getting their reactions to their actions immediately then nobody will perform any bad karma but then Kali Yuga is an age when people want to perform bad karma and they want to get themselves blinded to anything that reminds them that their actions will have consequences they just want wholesale unrestricted gratification of their sins so Kali Yuga is especially meant for facilitating people of this kind so they have the desires and Kali Yuga allows them to fulfill those desires by providing an arena for that but still that doesn’t mean the law of karma doesn’t work anymore the law of karma, the law of actions producing their own reactions still works but only thing is that the working of the law of karma may become in certain times delayed or may become invisible that means that in order for the law of kala, in order for Kali Yuga to progress and people to try out their material fantasies the law of karma will become invisible in the sense that people may not immediately at first sight see that the western people are suffering now again, we don’t want to generalize and there are religious people in the west also but the primary images of the west that are fed to India are of the religious and hedonistic west not of the non-religious sorry, non-religious and hedonistic west so the consequences are of bad karma of wholesome sinfulness are being witnessed by the west and only those people who look beyond the skyscrapers and the smooth roads and the fast cars and the jazzy technological gadgets only those people who look beyond these to the actual lives of people will see that their lives are emotionally psychologically scarred and sometimes even ruined so therefore the law of karma is indeed operational over there also but the reactions are sometimes delayed and sometimes invisible at least to the gross eye but they are there this is how the west to understand that it is not exactly prosperous it is having only a shadow of prosperity that is making people illusion so that they can play out their fantasies and become instruments for Kali to bring about Kalidas rule over here of course they have their desires and Kali is using their desires and social environment is created in such a way that they start imagining that their desires have no consequences and that’s how they go on with their untrammeled materialism but all actions have reactions and this principle applies both in the east and the west but Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita the ways in which the system of action and reaction proceeds is profound and sometimes inscrutable for us but we can get a broad understanding of the patterns in which these action reactions are playing out and I gave an understanding of this by seeing in a more holistic context what actually Dharma means and how that is not being practiced in India and what Artha means and how that is being practiced in America now another reason for American efficiency to compliment what I said for India the appearance of American prosperity, the reason for that is their efficiency at a material level the Americans and Europeans also to some extent, west in general are good at management they keep their cities clean they have their traffic well ordered and they have a basic civic sense of responsibility and because they are materially managing well so as a matter of the course of nature things will get managed well and there will be a semblance of neatness, goodness and prosperity if I leave my room in a mess I don’t have to bring forth the law of karma to say that the room is in a mess because of some bad karma the bad karma is my own carelessness and taking care of myself on the other hand if somebody cleans his room nicely, then yeah he cleaned the room nicely, that’s why it’s nice so because they are materially managing well that material management is having its visible effect so just as we can understand that a pious person if he is careless his room might be unclean and a vicious, immoral, sinful person if he cleans his room his room might be clean so just the cleanliness or the orderliness in and of itself does not reflect the person’s overall morality or adherence to dharma so we have to understand that the situations that we encounter in this life are a dynamic combination of both past life and this life karma so yes there is order and there is efficiency much more and much better in America than in India and that is because people have taken up responsibility over there for doing that and where credit is due, credit should be given so Indians unfortunately lack that sense of order and civic responsibility and because of that India is suffering whereas in the West they have imbibed that culture they may not have morality but they have some basic sense of civic responsibility and a sense of orderliness and punctuality and cleanliness at least at external level and because of that overall their country seems better managed and that is just the result of the way things are managed in this life so in this way we can understand the seeming orderliness and prosperity of America and the poverty of India