That's what everyone wants; growth!

Isn't growth the sweetest word a dictionary has?

Life is growth, and growth is life. Lifeless things don't grow. Only the living grow, right from the most primordial molecules of life, the nucleic acids, DNA, and RNA, to the most complex known organism the humans grow and grow and grow. One fertilized egg cell becomes two, and two become four, till a baby is born that continues to grow into a mature state. Nonhuman life forms at this point stop growing as an individual but reproduce more babies that repeat the story of growth. Humans, on the other hand, continue growing. They grow in their knowledge, their wealth, power, and prowess. Knowledge, wealth, and power are all manifestations of psychological cravings, and the socio-political economy is a result of complex random interactions between individuals' psychological motives.

Societies and nation-states grow. They grow in their production and consumption, which today are measured through many indices. The most common of these indices is Gross Domestic Product, the GDP, which is nothing but the sum of things bought and sold domestically. GDP is the total of the goods and services exchanged in the market; not all the goods and services that are produced. All the goods and services that are created and consumed without being traded in the market are omitted. For example, the delicious porridge that a peasant mother makes in her kitchen from homegrown cereal and milk of her pet cow and feeds to her children is not counted, while the candy they purchase from a shop is added up.

Different governments administering different countries chase sustained high GDP growth and proudly show it to their constituencies and the world to prove their success and achievements. Another parameter of the economic well-being of the country is thought to be the stock price index. The higher the price at which shares and other financial instruments trade in an economy, the more robust it is believed to be. Growth in GDP, increase in share prices, and a growing number of billionaires, what else an economy should aim to achieve?

But is growth always happy news? If you reply in the affirmative, you probably have never known someone who has cancer. I wish and pray that no one among your friends and relatives ever gets plagued by that dreaded disease. You can, however, see a picture of people having visible growing tumors on their bodies on the Internet; search Google or Wikipedia, and you will find many. Cancer is very much an instance of growth. Some cells of the patient's body start growing unchecked; in the process, they consume all the nutrients and starve other normal body cells. Often they interfere with and suppress cells of vital importance for living, and the patient dies slowly and painfully. Another less bizarre instance of killer growth is obesity. Thousands of people die directly or indirectly due to this uncontrolled fat growth in the body. You can think of many more examples of killer growths.

Why these growths kill? Because they are uneven. They are lopsided. A part grows excessively, while others starve. What is the cure? The cure is an even distribution of growth. Every aspect of the organism must grow at the appropriate (though not necessarily exactly equal) pace and salubriously benefit from the overall growth of the organism. If and when this happens, we call it development, a healthy development.

I hope this must have become clear by now that growth and development are not synonyms.

Shouldn't we, the people, then make it incumbent on ourselves to remind our elected representatives to take pride in the development and human happiness indices in place of mere GDP, stock price index, and number of billionaires growth, which, more often than not, could generally be misleading?