Dear Colleagues,

Synthesis through self-awareness and spirituality is the new mantra at some of the management schools in India

They speak a new language on the management campus these days: Sanskrit. The buzz words in business circles are no longer TQM (Total Quality Management) or Kaizan. They are Ahm Brahmasmi (I am God) and Tat Tvam Asi (Thou art That). And for the aspiring managers, the new Bible is the Bhagavad Gita.

In its '90s avatar, Indian spirituality is sashaying down corporate corridors, ready for business. The quest for self-awareness, once confined to mystics and spiritual adepts, is bursting out of secret places to fertilize mainstream business activity. By now it has gone well beyond the mandatory yoga and meditation, the only indigenous concepts to have gained corporate acceptance, albeit disguised as stress relievers, in the past few years. The gloves are finally off.

Industry is boldly mining the depths of Indian wisdom, the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, looking for a framework springing from Indian roots and thought. "It is time we rediscover our own ethos and cultural context if we are to give meaningful and relevant management education," says S.K. Chakraborty, convener of the Management Center for Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta.

At the Himachal Futuristic Communication Ltd. (HFCL), Delhi, managers and senior staff tune into fortnightly lectures on Indian philosophy. Alacrity Foundation, a premier construction company in Chennai, practices human values such as integrity (reportedly, they have never given a bribe), trust, and the welfare of others. Industries like Excel and Nirlep also encourage worker participation and try to create a stress-free, familial work atmosphere.

Much of the credit for this new synthesis of spirituality and materialism goes to the resurgence of some spiritual organizations and their new found popularity among urban westernized professionals. The Mount Abu-based Brahma Kumaris regularly teach corporate clients the value of listening, tolerance, adaptability and decision-making through the practice of Raja Yoga.

Two other programs that have made steady inroads at the corporate level are the Rishi Samskruti Vidya Kendra's (RSVK) Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY) and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living course.

Management consultants, many of them Vedantists and swamis, are also entering the fray. Swami Someshwarananda, founder of the Vivekananda Centre for Indian Management in Indore, outlines three reasons for developing an Indian style of management: "To have an appropriate management style in India; to show how ethical values help in every aspect of industry and business; and to show that a great achiever can lead a peaceful life."

Suresh Pandit, a productivity expert, endorses the use of Indian concepts along with the standard western practices. "There is power in the concept, which often brings about a total change in attitude," he says. But the greatest catalyst for this change are the management institutes which have designed their curriculum In line with eastern thinking.

Some spiritual organizations have themselves entered the field of management education. Mata Amritanandamayi Math has opened the Center for Value-Based Management Education at Ettimadai, Coimbatore in India. Maharshi Mahesh Yogi's organization has five centers of management study in the country. The emphasis here is not so much on spiritual and ethical principles as on expansion of consciousness through meditation, yogic techniques and creative thinking.


The Calcutta IIM's capitulation to this new thinking through its Management Centre for Human Values has given the changeover much-needed credibility, even among hard-core champions of western empirical thought. The center came about, admits Dr Chakraborty, when managers attending the Executive Development Program questioned the absence of concepts from Indian philosophy in the curriculum.

Says he: "Management in action is a holistic process. Nowhere in our education, least of all in our management training, is it taught so. We are told to be rational and to concentrate on analysis. This fragmentation of the mind into analysis/rationality and emotions sets up a gap in our values." A growing number of autonomous management institutes have consciously veered in the direction of IIM.

The rest of the article can be viewed at http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/work/corporate-management/management-schools.asp

Regards,

CHRM

"To win...you must stay in the game" - Claude Bristol

If you accept the law of karma, you can come to appreciate that most problems are brought about by the results of actions done in this life and in past lives. A stomach problem or cancer, for instance, can be understood as the result of past karma. Or you may say the problem is hereditary or genetic, which is just using a different model to explain it. Either way, it is the same thing. Going one step further, you might ask why you were born with these particular genes? Why should you be in this situation? Why do you not have a different set of parents? If you ask a biologist these questions, he or she will give up and say, "Go and ask a Swami. This is not my field!"

We say that there is a natural selection of parents that takes place in accordance with certain laws. If there is such a thing as the soul surviving death, there must be laws that govern the huge network of possible combinations which determine the soul's next birth. Many aspects have to be arranged - time and place of birth, parentage, social position and culture, economic situation, and so on - all of which affect, in some way, the child who is born. In this way, each person has a particular type of karma.

Karma is a huge network of laws which operate purely mechanically. From the standpoint of karma, your stomach ache may be a result of either past karma done, long ago or more recently. It may be due to any number of reasons - overeating, alcohol, or the condition of your mind - all of which can be viewed in terms of either the immediate or remote past.

If you worry about it, you just add more to your misery. Therefore, worrying is useless. The past has already happened and cannot be changed. I accept it and then I pray. Certain damage may have been done to my stomach because of past events. If so, is there anything I can do about it now? Yes. I can pray, "Let this prayer produce results that will neutralize the past karma."

The law of karma is subtle. We do not know our past karma. We only know that when something occurs, it may be due to past karma. When extraordinary events take place and we cannot immediately account for the causes, we fall back on some past karma to explain them. Perhaps you win a lottery and call it good luck, or you lose something and call it bad luck - all of this may be past karma at work. In spite of all your efforts and plans, situations that we call bad luck keep happening. Karma may be unfolding every day. What you are doing right now may be due to past karma. You just cannot see it.

Even a heavily indoctrinated atheist explains events in terms of luck. Whenever he catches a bus, for instance, and he is the last person on before the bus starts off, he says, "How wonderful! What luck!." Similarly, when he misses the bus, he calls it bad luck.

People do miss buses in life - and there are a lot of buses. No matter how carefully we plan, at the last minute something can happen which we think of as bad luck. When such events happen, they indicate the existence of something subtle that we are not able to put our finger on. We do not know where it exists, what it is, or how it unfolds. We only know that it keeps happening and there is some pattern to it. That "something" is explained by the law of karma.

Warm Regards,

Sujith

Dear Sujith & Colleagues,

After having discussed on the synthesis of spirituality and management and a brief explanataion by sujith of the 'karma' factor, let us read this story which explores the karma (destiny), paap (sin) & the punya (good deeds) factor more deeply.

There is a story about two boys who were traveling to a neighboring village. On the way they happened to see a Temple. One of the  customs is that you should not pass a temple without offering your prayers. One of the boys went into the temple but the other walked on saying, "I won't go to the temple because I don't believe in all that."

While leaving the temple, after having the darshan of the Lord, the first boy stepped on a scorpion on the temple doorsteps and got stung. He held his toe and shouted and screamed for his friend.

As the second boy was walking, he saw something lying on the ground. He picked it up and found it to be a gold coin. Hearing his friend yelling, he ran back to find out what happened. The boy said,

"This is the prasad, gift, from your Lord. You went into the temple and got a scorpion sting. Do you know what I got for not going to the temple?"

He showed him the coin.

For going to the temple you got a scorpion sting. I didn't go to the temple and look what I got. Why do you go to temples? It is useless.

The boy was already stung by the scorpion, but his friend's words stung him much more. He felt what had happened to him was unfair, and he became very sad.

At that time a sadhu happened to come their way. This boy called him and requested his help, saying that he had a scorpion sting and it was burning. The sadhu gave him some medicine to relieve the pain. The boy then asked him, "Maharajji, I went to the temple according to our custom. I have real devotion. As I was coming back I got this scorpion sting. My friend just walked by the temple and he found a gold coin on the road. What justice is this?"

The sadhu was an astrologer. He asked the dates and times of birth of both the boys. He calculated everything and told the boys all that had happened in their lives. He described past events, their parents and at what age they died, and how many brothers and sisters each had. As what he said was true, both of the boys had to believe him.

Then the sadhu said to the boy who had a scorpion sting,

"You should have had a very poisonous bite of a cobra or perhaps an accident of some kind, but you got away with only a scorpion sting."

To the other he said,

"You should have gotten a huge treasure, but instead you have to settle for one gold coin."

The purpose of prayer is to eliminate or neutralize one's daily wrongdoings and the Lord extends His help to us when we pray. That is why prayer is prescribed throughout the day - at sunrise, at noon, and again at sunset. Even though you may have committed no wrongdoings that day, there is always past karma unfolding each day. Every person's karma is a mixture of the results of good deeds (punya) and wrongdoings (papa). Punya means that conducive or pleasant situations will unfold and papa means that painful or unpleasant situations will unfold.

To deal with the papa that is unfolding daily, minute by minute, you have to keep gathering punya that will neutralize it. Prayer does this. Prayer is not just for gaining mental clarity. By producing unseen results, it can also take care of previous wrongdoings.

Life is nothing but a mixture of punya and papa. Therefore, we find both the pleasant and the unpleasant happening all the time. We know only too well that we do not dictate all life's terms, and we may even develop our own personal philosophies to help us deal with this fact.

Sometimes everything may be going well, but the car will not start. Or the car starts, but stops in the middle of the freeway in the dead of night, six miles from a gas station; it would have been better if it had not started in the first place. Such situations may be due to omissions and commissions in the immediate past or may be due to old papas which you want to neutralize or tone down. One unseen result can be counteracted by another unseen result. This is the purpose of the unseen result of prayer.

Suppose you fall asleep with your pockets stuffed with cash and credit cards and you dream that you are starving, that you have had nothing to eat for three days, and that you have no money. What use is the money in your pocket? It cannot even buy you a Coke you need dream money. So also, to neutralize the unseen results gathered from previous wrong actions you need the unseen results of prayer - Excerpts from an article by Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Prayer is efficacious. You may say, "I have been praying, but nothing happens."

But I would say, "If you did not pray, a lot of other things may have happened."

Any  members to take this topic ahead from here...

Regards,

CHRM

"To win...you must stay in the game" - Claude Bristol