Guest Column - Sitakant Mahapatra

Let us look at what is happening since we do not have peace in the world. World poverty cannot be attacked. Money needed for bread and butter goes into making of bombs. Unhappiness and starvation lead to war and tension. Wars destroy precious heritages of man. A major worry of Unesco is what has been destroyed across Syria.

What is happening is nothing short of a nightmare. One can sum it up by saying that absence of peace makes human health, happiness and heritage vulnerable. This year is the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, which were adopted in 2000 to address the many faces of extreme poverty and have guided much of the international development agenda ever since. This is also the beginning of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a new set of standard focused on 2030.

What kind of world will we inhabit in 2030? Two key factors influencing this outcome are the intensifying global environment crisis and the rapid pace of developments in science and technology.

Sadly, for some 1.3 billion people in the world today, the most pressing questions about the future are more immediate - will they be able to fend off starvation and the ravages of preventable diseases that continue to claim the lives of thousands of children and adults daily? Whatever changes the world undergoes in the coming decades, our progress can only be meaningfully measured against the welfare of these individuals.

Our responses in the present are greatly influenced by what we believe the future will be like. A dismal view leads to apathy and despair; an optimistic view leads to hope and action. As Noam Chomsky writes: "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so."

Steve Covey made the significant statement that the best we can bequeath to our children is creating in them an awareness of roots and their passion to be on wings. They recall to mind the twin images of a tree anchored to the soil looking like a goddess in a temple decorated with green leaves, flowers and chirping of birds; and by contrast a bird flying freely in the vast sky dreaming to see more of the blue emptiness. The tree draws its sustenance from the soil as its roots go deeper and deeper.

The dark soil is a society's tradition, it has lived history, its mythology and its past. The stronger the roots of the tree, the greater is the tree's capacity to withstand storms and look beautiful with leaves, flowers and chirping of birds.

Denial of our collective roots and all the yesterdays and preoccupations with today tend to make us forget that modern civilisation, as we know it today, and as we go up and down in the swing of the most dazzling technology - our roots are there in unsuspected regions of history and time, of ancient lore and life-styles.

Little do we realise that our today cannot be understood fully without the memory of the yesterdays, and our dream of tomorrows cannot be accessible to us unless we fly like a butterfly.

Unfortunately, our times have taught us a great annoyance towards mystery in any form. We have a complete distrust to hope and miracles. We have forgotten that miracles could still be happening before our very eyes, in the surviving continuity of our very ordinariness.

Today, we have much more knowledge about the distant galaxies than of the webs of our togetherness in community. We seem to know even less about our individual selves, our minds and instincts. We have developed several patterns of social networking but technology is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

It is the emotive journey of the imagination that delivers us from the continuous corrosions of our essential humanity. Literature seeks to restore dreams and creativity to life. It is a final act of achieving communities and through that ultimate peace for all individuals will come.

To a monastery in 15th Century Europe, came an impatient young man who questioned the head of the monastery whether they ever got bored in their steadfast and lonely mediations year after year. The head pointed out to the young man that a bird of beautiful plumage sitting on the branch of a nearby tree and singing. The young man was charmed and pursued the bird for a closer look as it kept flying away from tree to tree.

Finally, somewhat tired he came back to the monastery. He found a new head of the monastery who told him quietly: "Dear one, you took forty long years just looking at a bird." Someone brought him a mirror and he found to his dismay the hair on his head all grey and a few teeth gone. Then the monastery head said: "Dear one, if you could not notice the passage of forty long years in looking at a beautiful bird, how can one get tired in looking at the web of mystery surrounding life and seeking to find some meaning out of it.

(The author is an eminent litterateur)