Water, Water Everywhere

And not a drop to drink...

Samuel Coleridge brilliantly presents a dilemmatic situation (reference-Ancient Mariner) roughly two hundred years ago, and governments today use it to mislead their innocent people every other day.

Yes! I am referring to the predicament of widely acclaimed “water scarcity”. We the people are forced to believe that water indeed is a scarce quantity. There are advertisements, there are hoardings and there are public awareness programs initiated not just by the governments but NGO’s and many others. And as the awareness grows, this mantra spreads like an epidemic to every part of the world, to every corner of our brain. Even the educated fools (including you and me) blindly start believing the fact that water is indeed a scarce quantity. You might already be thinking what nonsense am I talking about, water is definitely scarce. But is it?...

According to scientific data nearly two-thirds of earth that we abode is nothing but water and a famous law states that all matter is essentially conserved (considering Earth mass in our case). There even exists a water cycle which maintains a balance in the world. Thus if water were to become scarce both this cycle would be dying out and mass of water on earth would be decreasing, which I don’t believe is the scenario. Water is a resource that is abundantly present and can sustain ever growing human population for next hundreds of years to come. Hence, start believing that water is not scarce but definitely precious and mustn’t be misused.

Then why cry, why this sham? It is because economies of today run on the fundamental power of scarcity. Those of us who have studied economics would know that only if a resource is scarce (and has a market at the same time owing to its multi-utility property) does a person get to sell it and make profit out of it. Thus if one is able to convince you that a particular item is scantily available you wouldn’t hesitate a bit to loosen your pocket in order to buy even a meagre amount of it. Our subconscious mind will be constantly edging us that we have to pay our hard-earned money (in most of the cases) to the ones who are providing us the privilege to consume that particular scarce item. And there it is... exploiting this philosophy by proclaiming that water is scarce, people (government and the multi-national companies) are successful in selling us a resource which is indeed not SCARCE. Imagine if they started selling it to us and we knew that it was abundantly available in the world, would we ever buy it? Never. A hundred years ago if Bisleri and Aquafina were to come in the market there would have been no takers. But today they are multibillion-dollar enterprises. This all is part of an endeavour wherein the purpose is to extract every penny you have (and wish to save for the future) to be given away on the daily necessities which definitely you cannot live without. In this way these people have confirmed a never dying-up source of income for themselves. And we, we pay for bottled water, we pay for using water to bathe, to cook, to wash and what not. All in all, we don’t give a damn whether or not we should actually be paying for something that is even worth the effort.

You know what... if we continue to live in this state of oblivion, the time is not far when we shall have to pay even to breathe an ounce of air. It just needs excessive propaganda and a few cunning minds, and another scarce quantity would add into our list of daily buying needs. And doomed as we already are we would buy it happily and live merrily, watching the world with closed eyes.

To be continued...