Dystopia

Avatar is a great movie. Read this interview to see what it took James Cameron to make this movie. The tenacity of the film maker is unbelievable. All that effort to just make a movie? But I will tell you that it was worth it. Of course, its already profitable despite its astronomical $430 million budget but the movie also represents the brilliance, the same kind for which you admire something like the Taj Mahal.

The premise behind Avatar is about Humans trying to plunder an alien inhabited moon of its natural resources. The concept is not new. Colonialism bears a striking resemblance. Heck, its happening even now.

The alien species while not technically advanced are portrayed as highly spiritual beings who live in sync with the nature around them, respecting its elements and other living beings.

Somehow, their 'quality' of life seems to be better than human's in spite of our modern ways of living. In that sense, it seems we are headed towards "Dystopia". And this begs the question:

Are we any better off now than we were some thousands of years back, when we were still hunter-gatherers?

Maybe in a myopic view, its tempting to believe that we have come far along. But in the big picture, our species are like a virus. Except, viruses are smarter. (viruses tend not to kill their hosts, for good reasons.)

As some great man said: "Civilization has less to do with advancements in how we do things and more to do with how we think."

“I don’t know which is the greater task: to decentralize a top-heavy civilization or to prevent an ancient civilization from becoming centralized and top-heavy. In both cases the core of the problem is to discover what constitutes a good civilization, then proclaim it to the people and help them to erect it.”

—Gandhi