This Website contain plethora of ideas with regard to developing our country. These ideas primarily revolve around exploiting “Infrastructure”?, “Education”? and “technology”?.
Undoubtedly, in sharp contrast to poor countries, the rich countries have abundant of universities, roads, bridges, electricity, hospitals etc. So, the solution to the poverty, at least at a very high level, is very intuitive: invest as much as possible in infrastructure, education and technology .As a result of this thinking, millions of dollars have been poured into not only in our country but also in other developing countries, in the form of donation, loan and charity, to enrich education and infrastructure.
Despite the obvious solution and these efforts, as a society we are unable to exploit these funds. The popular answer to this puzzle is: the donors themselves take back 50-75% of what they have donated. In case the question is raised if donors take 75% (a worst case) away what about the remaining 25%. Now the second flood of answers follows: Our government is corrupt. It is too bureaucratic. We don’t have good leaders.
Let us take a step back, and pose a few more questions to ourselves: Who are these leaders? Who are in our government? Aren’t these Nepalese? Aren’t these people products of our society? I am more and more convinced that we should stop blaming leaders and bureaucrats: not because they are innocent, but this blaming culture will lead us to nowhere. We must pause for a moment and think why as a society we could not produce great inventors, great athletes, great scientists, and great leaders so and so forth. Don’t we all must share the blame?
Raising this questions, at least will enable us to examine the fundamental reasons of our lagging. It is not the case that we have dearth of talents. Many students who were toppers in the class in Nepal had stood toppers abroad. There are many examples of entrepreneurs who could excel in the international cut throat environment. Unlike our neighboring countries, why our society lacks the capability to recognize this facts, let alone tap this enormous energy.
I don’t intent to say that we should not invest in infrastructure, education and technology-we must. However, one should bear in mind that in most developing parts of the world this obvious formula has not worked. Therefore, in parallel we should identify deeper underlying problems, make people aware of these problems and try to find solutions to these problems.
The primary reason why we are poor, although it will provide answers to a limited set of question raised earlier nonetheless, in my opinion, is the way to achieve “happiness”?. Whether it is West or East, whether it is materialistic or spiritual view, most of the time people do something in order to become happy.
In our society the mantra to become happy goes like “Santosam Param Sukham”?. Most of our spiritual teachings point towards this essence. This has a detrimental effect on our society. First it teaches you to be content with what you have. Next, when you start going deeper into spiritual understanding it asks you to renounce worldly belongings and essentially “desire”? to obtain more. It teaches that possession of worldly stuff will eventually lead to suffering. There is also an extension to this teaching that you cannot become reach by following a straight path. In other words, in order to become rich you have to be corrupt, smuggler, etc. As a result, it is not surprising that during my school age, I did not hear from anyone that I would like to be a successful businessman, not to mention about becoming the richest man in the world or country. In contrast everyone wanted to be either a doctor or an engineer.
There is nothing wrong with becoming doctors and engineers, however you need to generate affluence to build the country, and you need businessman and entrepreneur to generate the money. In addition, it is not necessary to be corrupt or smuggler to be rich. Once you become rich, at least you have choice to invest in society or yourself. Take Bill Gates for an example.
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