To feel pleased to see someone else succeed, takes divinity. Lesser mortals are often courageous enough to empathise. Its devilish, inhuman however to draw pleasure out of someone else's failure. Yet, we see more and more people display schadenfreude, especially in the modern era. But that era is passe. The sooner we wake up to it the sooner will we truly be able to "make a difference".
In this era of communication and connectivity, globalised so to speak, whether it is economically or socially or even politically, our fortunes or even our misfortunes are related to those of the rest of the world. Especially those of our neighbours, peers, colleagues, even competition.
We have been witness to the fact that a bank failing in one part of the world can lead to financial tremors and similar failures across the globe. Job losses, financial losses, valuation losses, economic contrction is a harsh truth. Especially the scale at which it is happening is unprecedented. Unprecedented because maybe there were never so many humans on mother Earth - Crowded. Borrowing the phrase from Friedman's latest book which adds a few more dimensions to describe today's world - Hot and Crowded. Hot, because the environment is geting warmer. Crowded, merely because there were never so many humans. Flat and interconnected is what he had elaborated in the first. He should have added religion as another dimension.
As it was with competition, as it is with peers, similarly with neighbours, we are so interconnected that for happiness's sake, schadenfreude has to be lost as a word as well as a feeling. In Pakistan's stability and success lies safety and economic growth for India.
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