 "<b>Lunch with BS:</b> Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev")
This is the first time I am meeting a mystic in my two-decade career as a business journalist. It is rare even for Lunch with BS, which has hosted politicians, actors, business people, authors, activists, you name it. Naturally, I am curious to explore why he thinks it is normal for a spiritual guru like him to be in the midst of the suits at the capital's Taj Palace Hotel, host to this year's business-government annual shindig, India Economic Summit.
"See, the objective of all business strategy is expansion. And you can expand by either conquering or embracing," says Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, who grew up in Mysuru, wandered across the country in his Yezdi motorbike, stayed in jungles for weeks together and at one time caught snakes for a living. "And if the business of all business is human well-being, it is mine too."
In his view, his job is making people - including businessmen - change from within. "For when the context changes, the content will follow." A recurring theme in most of Sadhguru's lectures and work, nicely curated by his Isha Foundation, is how spirituality is nothing but a technique for "inner well-being". And if he can change even a handful of the 2,500-odd business people who control over three-fourths of the world economy, and, therefore, the influence they wield on people's lives, the world will be a different place. Spirituality to him is "fundamentally a process of inclusiveness", wherein you realise that "the nature of existence is such that you are not an exclusive entity but an inclusive process". And his work with businessmen "inclusive economics".
The leading lights of India Inc, such as Ratan Tata, K V Kamath and management guru Ram Charan, are regulars at his much sought-after leadership workshops. Sadhguru is a regular fixture at the world's most high-profile CEO event, the World Economic Forum at Davos. So how many businesspeople has he been able to change? He says, "Seven or eight have changed 'fundamentally' and another 30 or so 'somewhat'."
In a recent Huffington Post blog, Sadhguru has argued that businesses need to be viewed as engines of human well-being. "In the next two decades, the economic leadership is poised to play a far more important role in the world than the political and military leadership, leaving more than 50 per cent of the population out if an active involvement in the economic process does not make good business sense. It is extremely important that individuals in key leadership positions are firmly established in an inner experience of inclusiveness," he wrote.
So is mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) "inclusive economics"? "Well, I am a spiritual leader and I can tell businesses to invest in CSR, not the government. The government should provide certainty in taxation," he adds. No wonder businesses have embraced him as one of their own.
The lunch is served, and truth be told, it is nothing much to write home about, with the macchi tariwali somewhat on the watery side.
Now here is a spiritual guru who says he hasn't read the Hindu epics, ever. So what does he make of the bevy of business consultants and authors who are forever borrowing from the Mahabharata, the Gita and the Ramayana to help explain business strategy? "I see no harm in using the epics; after all, they are part of our culture," he says, adding that he may have not read them per se, but knows the stories all right.
Hearing about his formative years and how he metamorphosed from a kid "who did not know anything, so paid attention to everything", to someone who seems to have answers to everyone's problems, I ask… suggest rather… that he could be a gifted individual. "There is nothing called gifted, you have to work at it," he counters in a genteel, disarming manner. "In those days, there were many young people like me (searching for meaning) who found expression in either drugs or in communities and many died young." As for him, he worked to develop his "sense of inclusiveness".
He started on yoga early in life, at 11-12 years of age, says the founder of Isha Yoga. "Since I used to lead a very active physical life, I had a voracious appetite as a young man." But once in college under Mysore University, Sadhguru would park himself in the library all day and skip lunch. "You can't imagine what skipping lunch meant for me at that time," he says, giving a glimpse of the sacrifices he made to school himself.
"People say I am very disciplined. For me, integrity is the most important thing. And I see around me that many people are innocent of integrity - like keeping to time." A stickler for punctuality, I find this point interesting. How exactly does one define integrity? I go back to his speeches at the Isha Foundation and this is what I find: "Most people don't understand what is integrity. People think 'if I don't rob someone, I have integrity.' No. Integrity is a certain coherence between what you say and what you do, and what you think and how you feel about life around you. It is not just in your actions. Integrity is in the way you are and the way you carry yourself. If you don't bring it there, integrity will be a burdensome exercise where you have to somehow hold it. You do it only when others are watching you."
Without integrity you cannot build trust and without trust, no one gets to be a leader, believes Sadhguru. I can't help wishing the multitude of young people I interact with in my day's work bear this in mind as they occupy themselves with career growth with an eye on the corner room job.
We are just into the lunch, and I am told we have another 10 minutes or so to wrap up because Sadhguru needs to be back at the summit for his session. "Well, we are still in my childhood years," he informs his minders in jest. "I roamed across the country for a year-and-a-half and came back to Mysuru and started to share this sense of inclusiveness. The first session was with seven people," as he comes back to where we left the conversation.
In his early twenties, he would be dead seen in anything but Levis jeans. "Once I rode as far as the Nepal border on my Yezdi and was turned back as I did not have a passport. At that time I did not even know what a passport is." He has surely come a long way.
"See, the objective of all business strategy is expansion. And you can expand by either conquering or embracing," says Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, who grew up in Mysuru, wandered across the country in his Yezdi motorbike, stayed in jungles for weeks together and at one time caught snakes for a living. "And if the business of all business is human well-being, it is mine too."
In his view, his job is making people - including businessmen - change from within. "For when the context changes, the content will follow." A recurring theme in most of Sadhguru's lectures and work, nicely curated by his Isha Foundation, is how spirituality is nothing but a technique for "inner well-being". And if he can change even a handful of the 2,500-odd business people who control over three-fourths of the world economy, and, therefore, the influence they wield on people's lives, the world will be a different place. Spirituality to him is "fundamentally a process of inclusiveness", wherein you realise that "the nature of existence is such that you are not an exclusive entity but an inclusive process". And his work with businessmen "inclusive economics".
The leading lights of India Inc, such as Ratan Tata, K V Kamath and management guru Ram Charan, are regulars at his much sought-after leadership workshops. Sadhguru is a regular fixture at the world's most high-profile CEO event, the World Economic Forum at Davos. So how many businesspeople has he been able to change? He says, "Seven or eight have changed 'fundamentally' and another 30 or so 'somewhat'."
In a recent Huffington Post blog, Sadhguru has argued that businesses need to be viewed as engines of human well-being. "In the next two decades, the economic leadership is poised to play a far more important role in the world than the political and military leadership, leaving more than 50 per cent of the population out if an active involvement in the economic process does not make good business sense. It is extremely important that individuals in key leadership positions are firmly established in an inner experience of inclusiveness," he wrote.
So is mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) "inclusive economics"? "Well, I am a spiritual leader and I can tell businesses to invest in CSR, not the government. The government should provide certainty in taxation," he adds. No wonder businesses have embraced him as one of their own.
The lunch is served, and truth be told, it is nothing much to write home about, with the macchi tariwali somewhat on the watery side.
Now here is a spiritual guru who says he hasn't read the Hindu epics, ever. So what does he make of the bevy of business consultants and authors who are forever borrowing from the Mahabharata, the Gita and the Ramayana to help explain business strategy? "I see no harm in using the epics; after all, they are part of our culture," he says, adding that he may have not read them per se, but knows the stories all right.
Hearing about his formative years and how he metamorphosed from a kid "who did not know anything, so paid attention to everything", to someone who seems to have answers to everyone's problems, I ask… suggest rather… that he could be a gifted individual. "There is nothing called gifted, you have to work at it," he counters in a genteel, disarming manner. "In those days, there were many young people like me (searching for meaning) who found expression in either drugs or in communities and many died young." As for him, he worked to develop his "sense of inclusiveness".
He started on yoga early in life, at 11-12 years of age, says the founder of Isha Yoga. "Since I used to lead a very active physical life, I had a voracious appetite as a young man." But once in college under Mysore University, Sadhguru would park himself in the library all day and skip lunch. "You can't imagine what skipping lunch meant for me at that time," he says, giving a glimpse of the sacrifices he made to school himself.
"People say I am very disciplined. For me, integrity is the most important thing. And I see around me that many people are innocent of integrity - like keeping to time." A stickler for punctuality, I find this point interesting. How exactly does one define integrity? I go back to his speeches at the Isha Foundation and this is what I find: "Most people don't understand what is integrity. People think 'if I don't rob someone, I have integrity.' No. Integrity is a certain coherence between what you say and what you do, and what you think and how you feel about life around you. It is not just in your actions. Integrity is in the way you are and the way you carry yourself. If you don't bring it there, integrity will be a burdensome exercise where you have to somehow hold it. You do it only when others are watching you."
Without integrity you cannot build trust and without trust, no one gets to be a leader, believes Sadhguru. I can't help wishing the multitude of young people I interact with in my day's work bear this in mind as they occupy themselves with career growth with an eye on the corner room job.
We are just into the lunch, and I am told we have another 10 minutes or so to wrap up because Sadhguru needs to be back at the summit for his session. "Well, we are still in my childhood years," he informs his minders in jest. "I roamed across the country for a year-and-a-half and came back to Mysuru and started to share this sense of inclusiveness. The first session was with seven people," as he comes back to where we left the conversation.
In his early twenties, he would be dead seen in anything but Levis jeans. "Once I rode as far as the Nepal border on my Yezdi and was turned back as I did not have a passport. At that time I did not even know what a passport is." He has surely come a long way.