In the contemporary current intellectual discussions that happen in India, there is often a lack of, or at least an inadequate importance that is put upon the role that social media plays in our current consciousness. It's seen that they do discuss it, but they hand-wave it as a technology—that it is there and it has some influence. But we rarely see that in Indian discussions. We rarely dive into it—of what the problem it is creating or its benefits.
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Questioner: Namaskar, Acharya Ji. First of all, massive respect for you. I was mainly touched by your work through the Earth Festival, and the things that you talked about Karma were very interesting to me, and I hope you will revisit them today, which I am looking forward to. I am a PhD student in my fourth year in the design department, and I am mainly working with educational games, and how we can use games to harness some sort of education.
Because I’ve seen a lot of village children learning vocabulary through playing games like PUBG and other things, so I thought why not try to, you know, intentionally harness that. My question to you: so, I was reading somewhere that Chanakya in Arthashastra—and I might be mistaken, so sorry about the specifications, apologies about that—pointed out the fact that a king, if he needs to be successful, and who wants to rule his kingdom successfully, not just with dictatorial absolute power but successfully, he or she needs to pay attention and extract the power of alcohol.
Acharya Chanakya did not pass judgment on whether alcohol is good or bad, but he did understand that a tool which is powerful has to be understood by the person who is leading the kingdom. So, that is when I was struck with the idea that ancient texts might have knowledge that was written in olden times might have some answers or some insights into the contemporary problems that we have.
