Interdependence

 In one's lifecycle from birth to death a person goes through three phases

• Dependency on other, "you". Where one need someone else to feed him, someone else has to give bath and clean him. As he grows little more, nature of dependence will change but dependency will remain, be it physical or emotional or financial dependency.

• Independence, "me". As child grows into adult these dependencies weans aways, initially physical dependency reduces, then emotional or financial dependence. Person believes that he/she can do most of independently and doesn't depend on parents or siblings or friends for day to day things and probably for future also

• Interdependent, "We" Once the person start to understand how world work he starts to gravitate towards interdependence. One starts to think instead by himself what he can achieve working with others together in harmony and "We" steps into it. This unleashes much power to do bigger and complex things flawlessly.

In a jungle, a tiger with his brute power goes for the hunt and be successful few times and fails many a times but the wild dogs have learnt the art of hunting together and most of the time they have been successful. Similarly we, the Homo Sapiens, started to live in small communities, initially for hunting together and protection from other dangerous wild animals and slowly we started to get benefits of community living  and community learning, we moved from nomad life to settled life, we started building houses, farming etc and with time we reached where we are today.

In corporate world also we took this "We" or interdependent concept, started to make complex things to work. In today's world when we build and send satellites into space, the launch vehicle comes from different company and satellite from different one. Within launch vehicles or satellite different parts comes from different part of the world/companies. Companies teaches the culture of interdependence, different part of complex problems are done by different teams and within team also different members are assigned different tasks and in no time these complex tasks are done.

We in India has developed the culture of interdependence so well that each community or village could do most of things by themselves. Each village had potters who build vessels for all the needs, farmers for growing food, carpenters for making tools for farming or furniture and other house hold items, similarly everyone was has his role in village be it cobbler or ironsmith or vaids or local merchant etc. 

We reached to a level of co-operative living where people from different houses used to take responsibilities for different activities without any renumeration. For e.g. during the marriages it was common norm that the multiple members from neighbors were involved in activities like grinding grains or spices to feed all the guests during marriages, multiple folks were involved in cooking activities for all, multiple folks to take care of guests needs, hospitalities etc. There was no need to bring specialists to come from outside to do these activities. People were given activities based on their capabilities and they used to own the responsibilities given and tried to do them flawlessly. People used to find pleasures in these, ladies used to sing folk songs while running chakkis, cooking, washing etc and this time was used to chit-chat with others and strong personal bonds used to develop.

While in corporate world we are learning the concepts of interdependence but in personal lives we are fast forgetting the same. In the name of independence we are leaving interdependence. We have long forgotten cooperative living and now concepts of joint living are also going away and nuclear families or single parent are propping everywhere. Everyone is looking for independence from everybody else, children are looking for independence from parents and parents are looking for independence from children. Wife is looking for her own space from husband and same is for husband. Movies, daily shows,  media etc promotes this "Individualism" as the way forward and people have started believing that this is modernism and the way forward without knowing the ills of it. Now cases of depressions not only in elders but in kids also are coming at fast rate as they don't have friends or family members to talk to about the things concerning them, people are getting addictions to drugs and alcoholism is on rise as they don't know how to unwind their mind in the evening from day's activities. Fear have creeped in the lives of young generation as they don't have elders with them who have seen ups and downs in life

To improve ourselves and our lives we should continue to build on the good habits that we have, the good learning that we have, the good structure that we have, be it family or social. Yes, not everything which was meaningful yesterday is relevant today and we should continue to do binning and remove and leave out those traditions or habits and that should be done after carefully understanding the pros and cons and not following the rat race. 

In cities I hear from many parents that we are giving freedom to our children to do the things they want, to live independently, to live by themselves. Children are still in learning phase & they don't know the cons of independence. Parents should teach their children for being independent and learn decision making but not at the cost of interdependence.

Recently I watched one hindi movie, "Tu jhoothi main makkar", in that the hero says to her girlfriend that the source of the love, he gives to her comes, is his family, his parents, grandmother, siblings and child. We learn many things from movies, lets imbibe this also and move towards joint families, community living and cooperative living once again.