Humanity is said to have made tremendous progress today because life seems so much more comfortable these days than it was a few centuries ago. People today can travel fast by automobile and airplanes, whereas only in the last century they were travelling by horse-drawn buggies and bullock carts. If we go back to ancient times, people had to travel on foot. Thus progress is commonly understood as an increase in living comforts through scientific inventions, which have eased our lives not only physically but also intellectually. The invention of paper has helped spread the ideas of scholars.
People can now engage their minds reading novels and other literature.
Thus, scientific discoveries may be credited with tremendous advance that humanity has made in the physical and intellectual realm. All this, to Sarkar, is not progress. To be sure, it has resulted in a great change in the mode of living, but he denies this to be progress because most scientific discoveries have created problems which were non-existent before. Even in the intellectual sphere, there is much available to keep the mind occupied, but people today suffer from emotional problems and neuroses that did not afflict them before. Increased comforts in physical and intellectual spheres have been accompanied by deleterious side-effects, and who is to say that progress has really occurred in these realms.