Recovery Under the Banyan

Mumbai—In an acutely ironic twist of history, the financial meltdown of 2008 coincided with the centenary year of Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), a brief polemical tract written by Mohandas K. Gandhi. On the surface, the essay deals with questions of colonialism and independence. But within his arguments on those matters, Gandhi embedded a deeper, more universal message—that command over our passions is the essence of civilization. Throughout 2009, while business and political leaders scrambled to reboot the global financial system, scholars and activists in many nations met to reflect on the prescience of Gandhi's text. It warned of a danger more fundamental than mere "irrational exuberance" or the "animal spirits" of overconfidence that John Maynard Keynes saw at work decades later. Gandhi would have seen the crisis of 2008 as the inevitable unraveling of a "Black Age" which equates civilization with bodily comforts and advances in technology. "One has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed," he wrote in Hind Swaraj.

This critique might seem overblown to policymakers, economists, and politicians—many of whom focus on reviving a broken system based on the assumption that individual pursuit of self-aggrandizement, with ever-escalating needs and wants, is the motive force for progress. When used in this mainstream context, the term "recovery" evokes images of a reversal of plunging lines on graphs—of stock performance, employment, GDP. Alleviating such immediate symptoms would return us to the comfort zone of business-as-usual. But what if we momentarily free ourselves from the need to be emotionally restored to familiar ground or a safe home? What if we choose to consider the recovery from a different place—a retreat, or ashram, separate from, but parallel to, the current discourse on the global economic crisis?

That discourse is understandably dominated by political and ideological disputes. What caused the crisis? Who is to blame? What regulatory regimes can best ensure stability while simultaneously spurring the growth of business and trade? Yet, just as Gandhi used a treatise on Indian independence to explore basic questions about civilization, so may we use the global focus on "recovery" to ask a more fundamental question: How do we define value?

Nurturing Values

While traveling through the fields and uncultivated lands that slope towards the banks of the Narmada River in central India, a visitor is likely to notice, every so often, a recurring feature of the landscape—three trees, planted close together, each in different stages of carefully nurtured growth. Bamboo shavings are usually placed as a protective fence around a fragile peepal sapling, more commonly known as the sacred fig tree. Fully grown, the peepal forms a broad umbrella of translucent maple-like leaves which create a soothing musical murmur in a good breeze. A few feet away, a similar buffer may protect a neem plant, whose slim pointy leaves and bark have for centuries been used to make medicines and pesticides. And at some distance there will be a fledgling banyan, whose aerial roots and ever-expanding canopy of deep green leaves will one day provide cool shade from the merciless tropical sun. Usually, all three saplings have been planted by the same person. Bringing this trio of trees to maturity is an ancient practice that defines, or at least symbolizes, value and purpose. For some, completing this task is a way of justifying one's existence—a payback for the bounty of nature. Others explain the plantings as a way of defining what really matters in life—simple joys rooted in nature's cycles which simultaneously foster deeper spiritual awareness and fulfill practical needs.

When I see these plantings, I'm sometimes reminded of a story told by David Korten, the American activist-intellectual and author of The Post-Corporate World. Sometime in the mid-1990s, Korten had a brief conversation with the minister responsible for Malaysia's forests. The minister, wrote Korten, "explained to me in all seriousness that since money grows faster than trees, Malaysia will be better off once it has cut down all its trees...