Questioner (Q): What kind of change our education system needs to have so that our coming generations live together in peace and fulfilment?
Acharya Prashant (AP): Why? Why must you think about the coming generations? Is this not the language of the old matriarch, who first of all ensures that the women in the family keep giving birth, that the cycle of lust, pregnancy and procreation continues? I would have loved it, had you asked something about yourself. But tonight, I see that ‘I’ is present only once in your entire statement; you are talking in the language of ‘we’. I would have loved it had you asked something about yourself; I would have accepted it had you asked something about others. You want to serve the other, you want to liberate the other in your compassion, that is nice. But you have neither asked about yourself nor have you asked about the other. You have rather asked about the coming generations of kids. And if you are so bothered about the coming generations of kids then the first thing you would ensure is that kids keep coming.
Now you will have a quarrel with me.
We were in Bhopal yesterday, you know. The camp just concluded. They have created a place not far from the city where they have lions and leopards and tigers, all exhibited. And then I started reading about the conditions of these animals. And their numbers are rapidly falling. It is almost as if tomorrow they would be extinct. And in the place, I am mentioning, I found tigers, bears, leopards but no lions. So I just started reading a bit on lions and I discovered that in India lions are now found only in Gujarat, Gir. And that in the last two years itself, India has lost close to twenty percent of its total lion population. And you know why the lions are disappearing? Because people are having kids. The jungles have become so small. Half of the lions of Gujarat are living outside the protected areas. The protected areas are not big enough to accommodate any decent number of lions. So where are the lions living? Outside the protected areas. And there they constantly come in touch with populations, and populations are burgeoning. And these coming generations that you are so fondly talking of, they need land, their kids need food. So, every successive generation—every year—is cutting down trees. And that is bringing these animals in contact with man. And when an animal comes in contact with man, you know who would survive and who would be dead!
