Participant: Pranam Sadhguru, my name is Kapil Dev Behl.
In our quest for a better life, growth and quality of life, human beings are depleting
natural resources.
We hear of younger generation blaming the generation for dwindling the planet of ecology,
environment.
Do you believe that human beings are heading towards water wars and disaster before we
come out from the brink?
Or do you have faith in human ingenuity… ingenuity?
Sadhguru: This is ah, see, we must understand this.
We're talking about all kinds of things.
Right now, they are negotiating hard in Paris, where India and the other countries which
are called as the basic countries; which…
essentially this is an idea that we been talking about for last twenty years, I've been speaking
about this at various forums, saying that let's talk per capita division of consumption
and carbon footprint.
If we do that, in India, we hardly have a footprint because most people are living in
shacks, they are not consuming really anything.
They are not leaving a carbon footprint.
The man disappears tomorrow, he's not left a footprint, all right?
But they want a different kind of thing.
This is a deal, which will… has to be hard negotiated, that's happening.
Leaving this aside, what you are trying to ultimately do is to curtail human aspiration.
You will not succeed.
Believe me.
There are people, I know in California homes, earlier they were driving Prius, now they
are all into Tesla.
But in their garage, they got two Ferraris (Laughter) or they got a big SUV, okay.
This is when they go to the office, when they go to social gatherings, they want to be seen
in electric car; when they go out with the family, they want to ram a six-cylinder car,
all right?
So I'm saying you cannot curtail human aspirations.The best thing is to curtail human populations.
At the beginning of twentieth century, we were 1.6 billion people, today we are 7.2
billion people.
In India in 1947, we were thirty-three million people.
Today we are 1.2 or 2.
…1.25 billion people.
So, three times, four times we’ve multiplied.
We are nice, but we are too many, we need to understand this (Laughter).
There is only that much human life that the planet can sustain.
And above all, because of technological prowess that we have today, we are consuming probably
what 10,000 men would consume a thousand years ago – one man, I'm saying.
One human is consuming what 10,000 human beings would consume a thousand years ago.
So when this is the case, the simplest thing is we must project or plan for a less population
in the future.
But right now, the United Nations predicts that by 2050…
2050, we will be 9.6 billion people, by 2075 we will be 12.1 billion people.
I want you to just imagine your life on this planet.
You and me may not be here, but if this projection becomes a reality, our children and their
children, do what you want, they cannot live well.
But anyway, if we do not consciously control this, nature will do it to us in a cruel way.
It's not that it… we will be allowed to simply spawn like this, something will happen,
all right?
Something will happen that we don't know how to handle and cruel ways of things will happen,
but the very pride of being human is, we can do what we want consciously.
It is something we need to take up, every world leader has to take this up.
The leadership on the planet… in this Paris meetings instead of going on talking about,
“How much will you consume?
How much will I consume?
What do you have to do?”
Why don't we say by 2050, we will be four billion, not 9.6 billion, why not?
All you have to do is that you should not reproduce.
People are talking about the economic dividend of having a young population, definitely it
is true, right now we have, we have to take advantage of that.
But this was a few years ago in 2006.
When we were at Davos, there were a whole lot of union ministers and others.
They were all gloating, “We are the youngest nation, we are the youngest nation.”
I asked a simple question, “Where are the old people?”
They said, “No, no, we are the youngest.”
“That is okay.
But where are the old people” (Laughter)?
In India, people don't get old, they die soon.
That is why we are the youngest nation, you better know that (Laughter).
We can make a… take advantage of the situation now, but we can't gloat about it.
It's not something that we created.
It is something that’s unfortunately happened to us; because in 1947 the average life expectancy
of an Indian was twenty-eight years.
Today, it's come to sixty-four, that is average.
But I'm telling you if you divide urban and rural, urban may be around seventy, rural
is around fifty.
Participant: Yeah.
Sadhguru: Fifty is not a time to die for a man.