The Dark Side of Consumerism: What Landfills and Nursing Homes Taught These Indian Villagers

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


The Dark Side of Consumerism: What Landfills and Nursing Homes Taught These Indian Villagers
Glamorized consumer culture has serious side effects—and to help people in remote Indian villages understand this, one filmmaker brought them to the West. Here’s what they thought of the dark side of Western lifestyles.

by Sven Eberlein
posted Sep 27, 2013


Before the Indian Army built a road to Ladakh in 1962, residents of the Himalayan desert region known as "Little Tibet" had been little exposed to outside ideas. Making a living in one of the highest, driest, and coldest inhabited places on Earth was never easy: Rainfall is less than four inches a year, and in the winter the temperatures go below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But Ladakhis have nevertheless lived an abundant agricultural life that allows them to thrive physically, culturally, and spiritually.

With the building of the road came a flurry of outside influence: material goods, centralized government, and tourism. By the time author and filmmaker Helena Norberg-Hodge first visited the region in 1975, Western pop culture and rampant consumerism were already making it difficult for Ladakhis to sustain the life that had nurtured them for so long.

"There was this romantic picture of Western consumer culture portrayed not only in media and advertising, but also in schoolbooks that made rural small town life seem backward and primitive," Norberg-Hodge says, describing the shift in attitude among Ladakhis—largely fueled by media exposure—that was making people feel inferior about their modest traditional ways. While the appeal of a modern lifestyle full of instant gratification is understandable, Norberg-Hodge says that there was a clear lack of information, especially among Ladakhi youth, about the realities of life in the West. The underbelly of Western society was still largely invisible in developing countries during the pre-Internet and reality-TV era.

For years, Norberg-Hodge had arranged month-long tours for Europeans to live and work on Ladakhi family farms, to help Westerners connect with what she describes as a less destructive way of life. She also hoped they would relay to the Ladakhis a more complete picture of the impact of conventional development in other parts of the world, such as the long-term effects of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on soil and agriculture. But after watching the transformation of Ladakhi society toward a more Westernized, glamorized lifestyle, Norberg-Hodge had another idea. Her nonprofit, International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), began sponsoring Ladakhi villagers to go on "reality tours" of their own, to experience what everyday life is really like in places like Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/what-landfills-nursing-homes-and-malls-taught-these-indian-villagers

[Mnemosyne]

1. This paragraph says it all, imho:

"People live right on top of each other in a building and they don't even know each others' names. When someone comes to stay they make such a fuss over things like bed linen."