As the industrial society has extended its tentacles in every corner of the world,

rural communities remain poor and behind urban places, and suffer a slow death
under the shadow of industrial economy. The centralization, standardization, and
synchronization loving industrial economy draws the society’s juice to the
metropolis where trained people, energy, capital and state power are
concentrated. Rural communities have no such offering for people to return back.

The Jimirghat Bridge over Kali River had broken during the Maghe-Sankranti fair
of 1978. This meant that Kali stood supreme on the route to Kathmandu from our
mountain village. In the midst of torrential monsoon rain, we took a risky
adventure of crossing Kali, which was roaring with massive flood water, on a
single log canoe ferry. The risks and difficulties of our journey were
overshadowed by our excitement for new experiences. Our first ever bus ride the
next evening from Naudanda to Pokhara also remained forever memorable. In
the evening of the third day, we took our first step to Kathmandu city, the
gateway to future for aspirants. Its notable impact was a realization that we in the
villages were so far behind in the race of time.

Kathmandu was the most prized place to which educated Nepalese from
everywhere flocked, a sharp contrast to our almost entirely illiterate village. The
city had so much more individual freedom: no bondage of tradition, no need for
daily prayers before eating, and no one cared if we did not show up in the
classes at the university. More economic activities, types of professions,
economic classes, educational levels, and cultures lived in one place. So many
options just for stove alone: wick stove, pressure stove, coal stove, sawdust
stove, and even electric stove. They came in some standardized sizes and
shapes, produced in factories. A village Chulo took any size or shape, but burned
a standard fuel - wood. The city had plenty of choices of things, even the shoes
came in large varieties. In the village, all of us walked barefoot. A few people like
my father owned their pair of locally-made shoes, which they wore a few times a
year on special occasions. Village life was stuck to a small and precarious
agrarian economy, poor education, poor facilities, lack of suitable opportunities,
and poor knowledge of outside world.

In the villages, we used to unite by clan, locality, and the village itself. Outsiders
were immediately known and who is going to belong with whom was
predetermined. Members were obligated to uphold community values and to not
digress in their own unique paths. But in the city, those notions mattered less
compared to other shared qualities like situation, profession, ideology, workplace,
and social class. People of different places, social castes, and ethnic groups
fused here much better than in the villages. Individuals followed more of their
natural will in choosing  their group belongings. There was low mutual
interdependence at the person to person level. Average people navigated their
way into a large and complex system using their own devices, but accordingly
found superior professional opportunities and intellectual freedom.

As new entrants to the city, we were willing to give up anything we knew in order
to be in tune with the new world we had come in contact with. We also
discovered that even Kathmandu was very poor compared to other countries --
we were hungry to know and experience why others did better than us. Thus we
competed fiercely for better opportunities, and some of us ultimately emerged in
cities of industrialized countries.  More developed places we went, more money
we made, higher we developed professionally, better houses we lived in, and
more choices of material and services we enjoyed, and better public facilities like
schools, hospitals, roads, and parks we accessed. Not to mention, we became
legally equal to other citizens of the new places, became part of the new social
order, prized neutrality and non-discrimination, and sought humane treatment to
all. We exercised individual freedom, were not tied to anything specific, and were
as unnoticeable as everyone else. We experienced more modern and efficient
societies governed by professional, impersonal, and codified system. We
blended in a modern mass society as its members, equal in standing with the
rest. Everything appeared so very normal and good.

With the passage of time, we realize that something was lost along the way.
Even an industrial society is not a truly free society that liberates us from all
bondage. A person builds relationships and survives in subservience to
generalized rules that reign above all. These relationships together form a
symbiosis to give a sense of a system that treats all persons equally and without
discrimination. The difficulty is that it cannot treat the individuals individually.
Sooner or later an individual person realizes that the system was designed to
serve the impersonal and homogeneous mass.

Because rule must be placed higher than a person, generalized code can turn
people into winners and losers in a mass society because all the tricks to winning
and losing can be embedded within and in between the rules. Those who can
influence or manipulate the rules in their favor turn up the winners and the rest
become the losers. Through the application of democracy, we try to make all
citizens equally influential. Elections are held every four or five years, but the day
after the election, those who are able to influence the elected officials or to
exploit the vantage of rules become the winners at the expense of the rest who
toil for daily living. That is the reason why even the significant gains in reducing
the human gap made through struggles of the past are being wiped out slowly
and surely. Amidst many-fold rises in productivity and wealth, a person today
lives to work and does not work to live. People spend more time nursing their
stresses than on the thoughts for enhancing the richness of the society.

We as individuals lose our significance for the sake of building a mass identity,
and gain non-discriminative treatment at the expense of connectedness and
richness of living. But seated deep inside each of us is a person that is reluctant
to accept oneself as an anonymous member of human species. Therefore, we
become bothered by the incompleteness of the system in which we live.

After all, the most complete place we came to belong to could not complete our
quest for finding a place of true belonging. Our belonging to this mass society
has been by a virtue that “we all belong” in a general sense. Ours is a legalist
belonging in a society that acts like a collection of a large number of independent
and equal people where an average individual is neither significant nor
insignificant. Even in a neighbourhood, we live in individual dwellings without a
sense of personal connectedness with people living next to us. While being
entertained in theaters, people sitting next to one another may have no
connections and may not interact with one another.

What we lose in the process is the personal sense of belonging where we

physically interact with one another and the worth of personal existence. The rise
of mass society has cost us the community where its members are significant,
courageous, and robust. A mass society offers so large a community that it is not
a community anymore because its members are strangers and insignificant to
one another; they are servile, delicate, and risk-averse.

Those of us who grew up in rural communities have an imprint of not only the
downside of rural living but also its upsides. The biggest of the upsides are the
courageousness of people and richness of community spirit. There everyone
knows everyone else and has a personalized way of greeting them, like Kanchha
Ba and Thuldidi. And deep inside, we love to belong to places where everyone
knows us and human connections are strong. But that is possible only in small
places and that is where all people know and come for help when someone runs
into trouble. In a big city, an impersonal and specialized department called police
will be called in times of distress or even during accident. People living in
adjoining apartments may not know the distress of their neighbour.
It seems that there never is a perfect place of residence in the entire world. Great
hurts emerge from where there is great happiness, and great pains dwell amidst
great pleasures. The more connectedness there is, the greater are the courage
of individuals but also greater are the ignorance about outside world and the hurt
when the connections run under stress. The more freedom there is, the greater is
the trauma of insignificance and loneliness. The same individual fuses and
diffuses in the mass at the expense of identity and self-worth.   

Every time we move to a new place, we seem to lose something dear while
gaining something else. Although food in the city was cooked in too many types
of stoves, it tasted so much better in the village. Although people in past spiritual
societies might have lived under less stress, people in modern industrial societies
live longer, produce more, and face negligible physical hardship. Although a
modern man may go to movie theatre to watch a performance rich 3D movie, a
participant of a Rodi in a Nepali village would certainly come out with a greater
and richer quality of fun. Thus the quest for quality of life cannot just stop as yet,
or never should.

As the industrial society has extended its tentacles in every corner of the world,
rural communities remain poor and behind urban places, and suffer a slow death
under the shadow of industrial economy. The centralization, standardization, and
synchronization loving industrial economy draws the society’s juice to the
metropolis where trained people, energy, capital and state power are
concentrated. Rural communities have no such offering for people to return back.

Ironically, however, the industrial economy is slowly clipping its own tentacles.
The spread of Internet, computing, information, technology, distance-education,
and other mind-intensive and labour-sparing technologies have opened some
escape doors from the monopoly of the industrial economy. They are
demolishing the barriers of physical distance. Soon rural communities could
remotely access the same knowledge as that accessed by the people in the
metropolis. It would then be possible for rural people to intellectually and
technically be in lockstep the urban dwellers. People with rural roots would have
opportunities to reconnect with the places they left. The daring may return while
continuing to participate in productive knowledge activities. The technology-
assisted collaboration would allow them to create virtual cities that thrive on
knowledge economy while physically living in connected and agile communities.
Proliferation of knowledge and creativity would offer “the best of both worlds” in
rural communities, while simultaneously raising their economic and pedagogic
health.

When knowledge barriers are broken, rural communities that are in the decline
today could offer not only the physical connectedness among its people and
agility of a small group, but also wither the size disadvantage through productive
inter-linkages with the world. Innovative communities could then offer alternative
living with less stress and respectable quality of life to people of knowledge
alienated by other economies. Using the knowledge as the capital and power, it
would be possible to convert the monsoon waters that made the river like Kali to
go wild into an agent for transforming agrarian communities into agrarian-
knowledge economies and into places for knowledge pilgrimage. Let the crossing
away by people over Kali be converted into reverse crossing of knowledge and
attraction to the very land that people had left. After all, the future will be there
where people recognize the power of knowledge and ride on its wave through a
path of lifelong learning and innovation!