'Society' is the English word given to the sanskrit' word 'SAMAJ'.Our literature defines SAMAJ as;
Samam anajanti iti samajah, i.e. society is a mechanism in which everyone is inter-related and inter-dependent. The basis for taking everyone together is mutual relation referred as 'sambandha'. The factor that fosters the interaction between the society and the mutual relation is called 'Yajmani'.
We have a culture which is based on yajmani so that the sambandha is well established and maintained so the samaj remains a strong entity of a country. Example of the yajmani are the various festivals that are observed by our samaj. We always have seen whether it be during plantation (ropai) in the month of asar or harvesting during the month of mangsir, the samaj had a mechanisucem to work in collaboration to help each other. This collaboration used to bring people together but when the people were induced to crave for materialistic thing and most of all the innovation of 21st century -profit, people became more materialistic and greedy and started emphasizing on the machines and less on collaboration .
This led to shift in focus of samaj from 'yajmani', as a means to establish and maintain relation, to 'sadhan' means or machines, as they reduced the human effort at one part but people were so much attached to it that they were not aware when they have separated from the yajmani and sambandha.
Now the people who were updated with these sadhan, had an advantage so, they started focusing on the profit. Then people realized that if they are alone they don't have to share the portion of the pie with others, which is in their plate. This concept led to gradual change in our social family structure, i.e from joint family system to nuclear family.
By then, the samaj whose focus was on inter-dependent and inter-relation, sambandha and yajmani was changing to 'means' and profit. The self sustainable society was hit with the another innovation called 'profit', which is in terms of materialistic possession than on relation and values, which we inherited.
The evidence of which can be found today if we look look at our generation then, its not surprise to find each person busy with his/her gadgets then in social interaction.
Means- or the 'sadhan' are created to make life easy by human but we at present are so much obsessed with it that we have almost erase the essence of interaction and basis of human relation and values i.e sambandha and yajmani,
These means definitely have made us profitable in terms of materialistic possession but gifted us loneliness in terms of human core values. The over emphasis on the 'sadhan' which led to 'profit' and then 'greed' helped us a lot to move toward the individualistic society.
And today, we all are alone even in crowd with our gadgets.
:)
