A few weeks ago, at the dinner table, my kid asked a very pertinent question. “Appa, you started working on the ICE engines when I was in kindergarten. Then you moved to telematics & connected cars. Today you are working in EV.  Is there an end to this journey?”

As any parent, I wanted to answer this as “development is a journey to an unknown destination.” Then I took a step back and wanted to understand myself. What is development?

I went back a little and saw that the Industrial Revolution in Britain killed the Chennapatna Toys in South India. Many of the policymakers then said it was an inevitable trade-off for development.

I wasn’t convinced, and then I went a little back in time, 60 million years ago. We were just apes jumping from one branch to another. Then, without warning, one day we suddenly decided to take to the grounds. We then started to walk uprightly. It was a development, but in due course, we lost some of our monkey abilities. The trade-off exists then too.

Move forward a little in time, and we found the wheel. Slowly, transportation wanted only one quality to improve: “SPEED”. We went from walking to chariots to steam engines. The journey did not stop there, from steam engines to supersonic flights to a space shuttle.

Jumping to another domain: communication.

From Kalidasa’s Meghadhootham to sending messages via pigeons to inland letters to telegrams to 56K copper line modems to WLL to fiber optics.

Does it stop somewhere? What has this connected development done—nothing but loss of privacy and individual hobbies.

To calm my mind, I turned towards our scriptures. What I found was that the same trend existed there too. The thunderbolt, or Vajrayudam, of Indra is built from the bones of Dadichi Rishi, who sacrificed them. When the Pandavas had to build Indraprastha, the entire Khandava forest needed to be annihilated. After further investigation into Gita, I found that nature has a constant struggle between development and extinction.

The bottom line is that one needs to understand and acknowledge that, by nature, one is both the eater and the eaten. It is a fundamental condition that cannot be avoided.

After all this, I asked my kid back, “Do you think that if Oppenheimer was blocked from discovering his idea of a nuclear device, would the world be safe? No, some Weiner Shuterberz would have found it.”

“So, what is the end, then, Appa?”

“The end is in self-realization; destruction and construction always go in parallel, but the entirety of this world is conserved.”