Back to the Future or the 'Bitter Tastelessness of Shadow Fruit'?

Abstract

This paper is a comprehensive survey of the alarming deterioration in the morals, values and mental health of individuals and societies right across the globe. In fact this decline is really the true globalization of the day, not so much equitable distribution, meeting of minds and so on. The author explores numerous reports and writings of researchers, poets, thinkers, policy-makers, journalists and intellectuals, and uses all that to deliver a shattering knock to the complacent and smug modern citizen—Western or Eastern. For remedies against the modern consumerist-materialist global epidemic, Bhattacharya falls back upon classical Eastern and Indian thought. This corpus offers timeless wisdom, the seers having accurately forecasted today's human predicament and having laid down the blueprint for sane living.