Once the modern management movement entered this country dating back to the 50s it was quite often that a teacher and scholar of management studies would turn to Hindu philosophy to draw lessons for application. These are relevant even in the complex structure of corporate realities today.
Prof Sitangshu Chakraborty, who left the comfortable but unrewarding arms of a British ex-managing agency some 30 years ago, to teach the countrys budding management aspirants at IIM, Calcutta, has also progressively turned to his cultural roots to extract paradigms for his students. And he seems to have attained great success in this objective. He now presides over the Management Centre for Human Values within IIM, where he teaches representatives of the cream of corporate India.
It is, therefore, prudent to look at this book from an intensely personal angle. The author lays a lot of stress on going back to ones roots. In his words: The capacity to distinguish between constructive and disruptive change requires prior acquaintance with the deeper roots of ones ethos and culture. More intellectual knowledge, statistical data, or interview information from people mostly out of depth with their own cultural ethos will not suffice. The strength of experiential conviction is necessary.
Increasingly today, the problem is to find people in corporate situations who are brought up with exposure to their own cultural roots and values. In the absence of such a priori acceptance of priorities, will the message of the Vedanta make a breakthrough?
In these days of globalisation, Vedanta-based values will surely have to make a sympathetic assessment of values of those brought up according to Islamic or Christian faith. However desirable it may be to universalise the teachings culled from the Vedanta philosophy, ultimately one will have to find in that same school the lessons of co-existence with alien cultures and roots. To illustrate this view, the authors chapters are replete with quotations from Tagore, Shri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda.
In a few illustrative case studies, the author has highlighted the dilemmas and choices of modern managers in diverse matters like rewards, overtime, transfers, personal growth, debt settlements. He has analysed them by using Indian theories and concepts of ethical development. However, one has the feeling that the ethical and moral values of any established religion would, in its essence, have supported the same view that the Indian analyses show. (There is even a chapter on the highly publicised ITC case of recent years, but the author leaves the subject with mere reporting and passes no value judgement, leaving the reader to infer his own!).
Ultimately, the whole issue is one of meaningful modernisation. In India, we have for long confused modernity with westernisation and have paid a high price for it in every sphere of activity. To be modern in its essence means to have a crucial ability to collect every bit of relevant information in respect of a situation or objective, and in the light of that knowledge and its analysis, deliberately and consciously choose the right path or method.
One agrees with the author that in that process of decision-making, the ability to go back to ones roots and cull from the accumulated wisdom of the Vedanta what is relevant and applicable, is the height of modernity. It is an invaluable asset for one brought up in its culture.
By the same token, other factors must also be taken into account. Ultimately, one suspects, couched though the sayings may be in different languages, metaphors and imagery, the message for ethics and human values at its highest level is universally the same as Aldous Huxley in his The Perennial Philosophy established decades ago. It is heartening that in one of Indias premier management training institutes, stress is being laid on those values and that such exposure is being encouraged by Indias leading corporates.
