Well justified as this rhetoric may be, each number also tells a story. It has been touted all over the world that India at 27 is such a young nation with plenty of opportunities and possibilities. There’s an interesting other side to it as well.
Carl Jung talked about midlife; we all go through it. He argued that transcendental function kicks in once you are at midlife; age of around 38-40. None of the old definitions of self seem to make much sense and one begins to question identity, beliefs, values, purpose, life’s work and so on. Jung went thru his own `midlife’ from age 39 to 45.
So, if India was a person, at the current rate of its aging process, it is nearly six decades away from transcendental function kicking in. Till then we continue to live in the `Ordinary World’ and keep `Refusing the Call to Adventure’.
That means, we wilfully ignore our social angst, we continue to not take charge and blame other people or systems for our circumstances, reject our internal feminine and create all masculine symbols of success, we become more and more competitive, arrogant and ignorant till such time we can take the stress and tension caused by it no more. It’s no surprise that our foreign policy has created a comfortable distance with communist Russia and a warm relation with a free market capitalist America.
My work often gets me to interact with young leaders and I have noticed that life at 27 is very exciting. There is a new found financial independence, power is experienced in newer ways, one begins to test success, start a family; acquire means; overall life is on a high. Shares my well-informed business strategist friend Ellina Rath that economists have always found a pattern that infrastructure building precedes institution building. In her words, “Infrastructure is availability of highways, networks and institution is the awareness, education of how to use it responsibly. India is currently building infrastructure on a new scale perhaps without an equal focus on institution building”. Same concept applies to individuals who are busy building infrastructure by buying cars, houses, lifestyles and are far removed from focusing on personal transformation. They are interested in personal growth so long as that help them achieve more results and wealth but overall psychological, spiritual growth is still far away. That journey begins in late thirties or early forties. Infrastructure and institution are best developed simultaneously but that rarely happens.
Recently, I travelled with three young leaders of an IT firm belonging to this age bracket. It was a long drive, so they were immersed in conversations that hovered around work, their material acquisitions, countries they’ve visited, food they ate, quizzing each other on technical competence, common people they knew, they even solved complex business problems, had razor-sharp views on industry, economy and so on. I experienced them to be very intelligent, agile, successful, highly experienced, learned and what have you. They all exhibited keen extroversion, so much so that at the end of our rather tiring journey they promised to hit their favourite pub and party all night. It was a different matter that upon reaching the destination two of them wanted to just hit the sack without even having dinner. That to me was a good sample of urban, industrial India around 27. High octane and burning out.
My own enquiry into India’s age from Jungian perspective threw up some interesting data. Consider this, Japan is 48 years old, Germany 47, Western Europe and Scandinavia around 44, USA 39. Afganistan 18, Pakistan 23, Sudan 17, Gaza, Palestine 19, Nigeria, Somalia 18. Clearly, development index is directly related to age of the nation.
USA at 39 is at crossroads. Victory of alfa male in Trump by a thin margin over a lady candidate in Clinton was an interesting fixture in the history. The suppressed and unheard voice, the pain and anguish of American people may seed an inner awakening. We may hear a stronger voice advocating conscious capitalism, subordination of self in the interest of community, perhaps significant changes in the economic model.
As for India, the process of infrastructure building is likely to make us more aggressive, competitive, lonely, exhausted and eventually disillusioned in decades to come. And that’s the way of life. A day will come when the Ordinary world will begin to hurt us enough for the inner Hero to finally awaken. But for that, we may have to wait till the average age moves beyond 35 years or so.
