Clashes of Times

I've been studying Hinduism in religion class and just watched this TED talk by Devdutt Pattanaik, who is an Indian mythologist and writer. Before becoming a mythologist, Pattanaik worked as a businessman, and when he worked with people from the West, he noticed clashes between the concepts of cyclical (Hindu) and linear (Western) time. A great example that he gives is the encounter between Alexander the Great and the gymnosophist, an ascetic. Alexander asked, "What are you doing?" and the gymnosophist answered, "I am experiencing nothingness." When the gymnosophist asked the same question, Alexander answered, "I am conquering the world" (linear time and obsession with "progress"). They both laughed, each one thinking that the other was a fool. The Western thought of living one life influenced Alexander to do as much as he could in his lifetime. On the other hand, the Hindu thought of living infinite lives influenced the gymnosophist to do nothing because his actions wouldn't change anything in the cycles of his life. We can relate this clash of times with the conflict between African concepts of time and linear time. According to our reading, Africans value the adjacent past and distant past, and the future doesn't exist to them because it didn't happen. But in the linear concept of time, the future is what we look towards. There's no looking back. European colonists probably thought that a concept of time besides a linear one didn't exist. Speaking of looking back, I think the plagues of the West's obsession with "progress" is one of the reasons why Eliot wrote The Waste Land. In addition to WWI, colonialism was definitely one of those plagues.