A different kind of superpower Sadhguru

JRD Tata, whose family is among those responsible for building the basic foundations for Indian industry, was once asked if he wanted India to become an economic superpower. He replied, “No, I do not want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country.”

The aspiration that you want your nation to be a superpower is a very silly and childish aspiration which has caused immense damage to the planet. Today, people are actually making the argument that without nuclear weapons in the world, there will be no peace – which is unfortunately true right now. Me holding a gun to your head, you holding a gun to my head and both of us did not shoot – this is not peace, this is madness. Someday, somebody will shoot.

So this whole aspiration to become a superpower should go. Every nation should aspire for the wellbeing of their people; that is all that matters. For wellbeing, resources and other things are a little scarce, so there will be some competition. We will pull and push, it is okay. That will happen among human beings, but for that you do not have to pull out your gun, somebody else need not have a bigger gun and become a superpower.

I don’t want India to become a superpower. Our aspiration should be to become a sensible, gentle nation, which is wellbeing for itself and as far as possible, wellbeing for everybody in the world. I want India to be a country of wellbeing, where our standards of wellbeing are different from just a vulgar sense of wealth and conquest.  Conquest and robbery are not two different things. If it is done by an individual, it is called burglary. If it is done by a gang, it is called dacoity. If it is done by a nation, it is called conquest or regime change.

We have spent thousands of years evolving a spiritual ethos in this nation. India as a nation is very unique. There has been a certain sense of awareness and wisdom to this mass of people that we right now refer to as India, which is very hard to find anywhere else. You may find it in individual people, but a large mass of people having a certain unconscious awareness of many aspects of life is not there anywhere else in the world.

Power does not mean having the biggest army in the world. Power means that everybody in the world looks at you for guidance if they want to live well. People always looked east when they thought of living well. This culture has always had this power. So India should aspire to make every nation meditative.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan“, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.