by Jayaram V
When it comes to the question of counting your family members, you may count
yourself, your spouse, the number of your children and other dependents to calculate the exact number. You may perhaps increase the scope further to include your parents and paternal and maternal grand parents in the list, if they are alive. If you are kind enough, perhaps you may add the parents and grand parents of your spouse also. Since we think in terms of the present, there is nothing wrong with such an approach.
But let us assume that you have to consider the previous 40 generations of your ancestors as a part of your large family, or say extended family and also the previous 40 generations of your spouse.
How big do you think your family would become? Make an intelligent guess.
Think again. 10...100...1000...10000...100000...1000000..1000000000?
We all are proud of our families, our ancestry, our genes and our family
heirlooms. In many parts of the world people are particularly inclined to
identify
themselves with a particular family, group, community, caste, race,
tribe, religion or region.
It is normal on the part of people to extend themselves and be part of
something, bigger and larger than themselves to experience a sense of
belongingness. It is natural when people identify themselves with a nation, group, caste, race,
team, institutions they works for or they own. However, unfortunately, in
the process of doing so, most of them cultivate a very narrow minded view of their racial or ancestral back ground and become prejudiced against other groups and communities. Based upon their limited vision, they tend to generalize and draw wrong conclusions. They do not know that if we consider just forty generations only, the total number of ancestors for each of them would work out to about 555 billion ! If you add the ancestors of the spouse of each individual the number would go up to 1110 billion or 1.1 trillion !
If you do not believe this, please click here to verify the calculations yourself. These figures show that if you go back to just 40 generations, your genome is made up
of genes from about 549.8 billion human beings! Starting from 2000 A.D., this covers a period of about 1000 years only, assuming a period of about 25 years for each generation to produce the succeeding one. Imagine what would be the number if you stretch the time still backwards into the remote past of say 5000 years.
The human beings said to have evolved on earth at least a million years ago. If we take these million years into consideration, imagine how many trillions of people might have contributed to your present gene pool, and the blood of how many trillions of people must be flowing in you!
Were there this many people at any point of time in the history of the world? The world population today is around six billions only. Guess what could have been the population of the world about a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago?
Hinduism believes in the concept that the whole world is one large family. So does many other religions. But do we really believe in this fact and act like so?
