A friend tells me, “That does not bother me. I am not concerned. It is what I need that bothers me. That is my sole concern….. I don’t even know how to fulfill my needs, why should I be thinking of world’s needs?”

He is being honest, but he is also losing the point.
He cannot see that by synchronizing his needs to what the world needs, he can make use of thousand-fold energy to work towards the fulfillment of his needs.

How much energy can you put on your own to make your dreams come true? How far can you reach on your own? Can you reach the stars? No, you cannot. But, if you work in a team, hand-in-hand with the rest of the world, one day you may. If you have reached Moon and Mars and Venus, then there is hope that one day you may reach the farthest star.

This is what the “World Today Needs”!
Team Work, Collaboration – Joint-Effort based on the Awareness of Interdependency. Mere Joint-Effort without such awareness should be called Joint-Venture. And, no Joint-Venture lasts for ever. For something lasting, we shall need Joint-Effort, not Joint-Venture.

Joint-Venture is based on master-slave relation. If you do not like the phrase master-slave, you can change it to any other phrase. You may also bring in the Labor Union between them. Employer-employee or whatever other term you use, at the end of the day, when it comes to distribution of the wealth, the arrangement has not changed for centuries. The master gets major share of what is produced or the result thereof, and the slave gets a small portion often decided by the master.

This kind of arrangement, Joint-Venture, may still be viable for limited companies, for small businesses, and small scale industries – but when it comes to World-Affairs, the arrangement does not work.

It may have worked in the past, and the masters may have benefited out of proportion from such arrangement……. but, for how long, and at what cost? More often than not, such ventures end with dispute and a bitter taste in the mouths of employees as well as employers.

Joint-Ventures also gave rise to colonialism.
The British and the Dutch and the Spanish, the French and the Portuguese – all of them came to Asia as businessmen. And, they started businesses, joint-ventures with the local rulers and the elite few. First they posed as friends, later as masters and rulers. And they liked the later, they preferred it to the earlier role. In order to hold on to it, they made the slaves dependent on them. That is but natural, in this kind of venture – in this kind of relation. Without being dependent on the rulers, the slaves would not remain slaves.

But such dependency could not last forever, for slavery is not natural to human nature. Freedom is. Slowly but certainly, the friends-turned-slaves realized their basic nature. They became aware of freedom as their birth-right. Such realization, in turn, gave them strength to fight – fight for freedom, for their birth-right, and against slavery.

By creating dependency, we also create much unpleasantness, fights, even wars. As a result of such dependency once created – our world today inherits disputes and conflicts from the past that seem to be never ending.

We created a Jewish Nation and made it dependent on us – but never thought of a State for Palestinians. We divided India into pieces and let those pieces scatter to be picked by any passer by to own. We supported the making of Lebanon without considering its impact on the neighboring Syria and other countries. We made unpopular kings rule in many Middle-Eastern countries, made them dependent on us, and played with them as a puppeteer would with his puppets. Result? Al Qaeda….. The growing sense of dissatisfaction toward our policies has given rise to terrorism, terrorist activities and organizations.

But more about that later, now we must return to our subject, to our question: “What the world today needs?” Interdependency, and not dependency – that is what we need. That is what the world today needs.

It is silly to even consider my need above what the world needs. I am part of this world. My need is just one cell that exists in the body of World’s Needs. This one cell better be in line with what the body needs. For the body has the capacity to throw away what is not needed by it.

Above all, why should I have any “individual” need? My individuality can only make sense within the universality of this world. I need food, I need clothing, I need housing, I need certain amount of comforts, I need decent sex and health. To fulfill most of those needs I need a job, I need regular income – but are all those needs my own? No, those needs are shared by each and every person living in this world.

If only I can see this point, that my so called “individual” need is not really individual and that it is universal, it is the need of every other person – then I cannot but initiate Joint Effort towards the fulfillment of all those needs. Then, I shall “venture” upon such “Effort”. Can you imagine the amount of energy that such joint effort is possible to create? Tremendous, it is beyond anyone’s imagination and guess.

Such energy cannot but result in something great. One does not have to think about the result anymore. Like a ripe fruit, the result falls into your basket by itself.

What happens if we do not work in a team, as a team?
That is not the question. The question is: Can we work otherwise? The question is how to work in a team, and as a team. Like it or not, we have to work in a team and as a team. We have to put in joint efforts, and the spirit of Interdependency is what we need. That is how we should be working as a team. Failing which we become failures….. We are left out….. In the meantime, the World keeps revolving, without us though…..