Growth and development are different concepts. Growth is external. Development is much more internal, and it is for the sake of my own inner experience that I get into everything external. Whatever I do, morning till evening, it has to be something that gives me fulfillment.
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Questioner: Acharya Prashant ji, I want to start by asking you, first congratulating you about a recent award that you have won. IIT Alumni Association has awarded you, for outstanding contribution to national development, your alma mater, IIT Delhi. From that, I just wanted to pick up and ask you: what do we understand from national development? What is national development? Is it making your country the super economy, number one economy in the world? Is it about your growth engines? Is it about your GDP, about the trillion-dollar economy, or so and so forth? Or is it also about how aware the people of that country are?
Acharya Prashant: Nation is about the people. It's not about land in the first place or possessions or the economic output. It's about the people. So national development is about the deepest kind of welfare of the people of the nation, that's what it means. But there are many layers to it and many dimensions to it. The word "nation" itself has started carrying several kinds of meanings.
First of all, development is for human beings and begins from within. And all the external kind of growth that you just mentioned is for the sake of inner development alone. This is something that we very frequently ignore. We think that buildings or bridges or ports or airports or schools or grand institutions or grand armies or a thriving economy are for their own sake. No, they are not for their own sake. They are for the sake of the individual — the human being. So whether or not those things are succeeding has to be determined by only one factor: what influence are they having on the individual citizen? Because it is the individual citizen that is at the center, the heart of the nation. Right?
