Mohit Sewak

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His Holiness, Pandit Sri Sri Ravi Shankar at

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Great Lakes Institute of Management

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Today, the 26th of November, 2009, His Holiness, Pandit Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ji (also called Guruji), blessed the green campus of the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, with his divine presence. The occasion was the inauguration of the MILK (Meditation and Inspiration Center for Living and Kindness).

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MILK (Meditation and Inspiration Center for Living and Kindness)

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Guruji began the session emphasizing upon the need of innovation and creativity. He said that when we talk about management, we confine ourselves to controlling (managing) what has already been created. But, life will be too dull, and in short, lifeless, if there were nothing new. It would be like a dead body, beautifully decorated, and dressed, and being taken to its grave. The only thing that can infuse life in this dead body is creativity and innovation, and hence all should rise up to take the risk of creating/ doing new things.

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Sri Sri telling about 7 areas of excellence for India

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Guruji also took the opportunity to highlight the importance of meditation in our life. He was of the opinion that we, Indians, should rise up to take the ownership of whatever belongs to us. To illustrate his point, he said that there are 7 areas, namely:

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1. Vast Variety of Food
2. Dresses and Jewelery
   
3. Meditation and Yoga
4. Ayurveda and herbs
5. Historical Monuments
   
6. Dances
7. Values and ethics

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which are our core competencies. But, since we are not taking a collective ownership of our precious belongings, outsiders get a chance to exercise their claim on it. For example, the Market for Yoga, and Yoga related products in United States alone is $28 billion, and 90% of it has been claimed by local American residents. Right from books on yoga, to yoga mats, none are made by Indians there, and we share only a minuscule part of the market that should have been entirely ours.

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Sri Sri on Innovation

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Guruji also observed that though, we Indians, have immense talent, but we fail to market ourselves and our talent, and that is the reason why, despite such great, non-replicable assets that we have, our market share in international tourism is pretty low.

On this point I find great similarity in the thoughts of Guruji, and Dr. Bala V. Balachandran (Padmashree Holder, and Dean of Great Lakes Institute of Management). Dr. Bala also recited similar reasons when he was inquired about his motivation behind visualizing Great Lakes as the Institute for “Excellence in Marketing” in India.

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His holiness also offered to answer any question that the house had had for him. All devotees made the best use of this opportunity, and asked all those questions which were troubling them for a long time. Some of the questions that were asked to Guruji, with the answers that he gave for them are:

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Question: You have highlighted the importance of innovation and creativity, but with that comes a lot of risk and uncertainty. Its only after numerous failures that a successful new technology/ product is evolved. So how should one manage the failures that comes as a by-product of striving for innovation? How to rise up after each failure and restart the journey to discover something new?

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Answer: The answer to all this is Meditation! One fails in his pursuit of creativity, and discovering the non-existent, only because of lack of intuition and foresight. With meditation, not only one attains the highest degree of intuition, but he also gains the strength, to rise after every failure, and the serenity to keep himself composed even after the most frustrating failure.

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Students presenting their doubts before sri sri

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Question: In Bhagwad Gita, Lord Krishna says that one must not care about the result of his work. But if we do not think about the fruits that follow our hard work, then what will motivate us to do that hard work.

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Answer: Lord Krishna’s preachings have been the most practical ones of all. He did not say not to care about the results. He only urged you not to get distracted thinking about the outcomes of your task.

For example, when a racer, in a 100m race keeps thinking about his opponents, and his relative position with respect to all his competitors, he is not able to concentrate fully on his performance, and that is a sure recipe for a non optimal results, if not failure.

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Sri Sri clarifying Students’ Doubts

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Question: (With reference to the above answer)There are some school of thoughts that say that you must always be aware of what your competitors are doing. Because if you don’t see you competitors you will be like a bridled horse. You will end up making the best calculator of the world when the world has moved to computers. So how do you reconcile the two school of thoughts?

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Answer: It is really tough. But you have to strike the right balance between being aware of others, and being focused at your own work. Meditation can help you in this. You have to manage your expectations and ambitions, and align them with your ability. And this should help you in deciding the correct equilibrium point between the two approaches.

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Sri Sri being honored with a Ponnadai

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Other eminent guests that had come for the inauguration are:

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Khurshed Batliwala or ‘Bawa’:

Director of World Alliance for Youth Empowerment, an NGO which addresses and provides sustainable workable solutions for the contemporary issues faced by young people fo our times.  Under the guidance of Sri Sri, he has designed the YES!+ series of courses that inspires youth the world over to realize their self identified aspirations. Bawa did his maths from IIT Bombay. In his own words, he decided “it was better to teach people meditation and make them happy rather than teach them mathematics and make them miserable”!

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R. Prasanna:

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A South Indian Carnatic musician who is one of the very few people who play the south Indian musical art form of Carnatic music on the electric guitar. He not only plays carnatic music but is also a jazz musician. Some also categorize Prasanna’s music under world fusion. Prasanna received a Bachelor’s degree in Naval Architecture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1992. In 1999, He was awarded an Honours Bachelor’s degree from the Berklee School of Music majoring in Classical Composition and Jazz Composition.

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Vinod Kumar Menon:

Director of Sri Sri Centre for Media Studies, director of Sri Sri Institute of Management Studies, teacher of meditation for 20 years, currently propagating the need for human values as a solution to conflict among people.

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GRK Reddy:

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Chairman and Managing Director of MARG Group.  A Post-Graduate in Commerce and a Honorary from Kellogs USA, Mr. G R K Reddy began his career in 1985 in the Merchant Banking industry where he gained rich experience in advising and structuring financial closures. Later in 1994, he moved to the construction industry and promoted the MARG Group. He envisaged that ” Space Creation ” will be a critical factor to drive the Indian economy.

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Rathish Babu:

CEO of SAE College in India and is a part of the SAE International chain of colleges, the largest media college in the world. He is on the academic board of IGNOU, Dibrugarh University and SAE Asia for Media and entertainment studies. SAE runs 7 campuses in all the metro cities. of the country. An engineer by Academics and a marketer by profession, he has over 18 years experience in Marketing, Direct Sales, Operations and Scale management in the fields of IT, Networking and Media& Entertainment industries. Rathish has worked directly and indirectly with corporate companies  as HCL HP, DEC – USA ( now Hewlett Packard), Siemens, Calcomp , John Deere etc to name a few. Rathish’s interest are in the areas of technology, Reading, networking, traveling, studying human behavior and adaptability and thought leadership. His aim is to encourage the youth of the country to form groups which will further the knowledge of traditions, change management using local resources albeit with a bent of science. He likes poems of Rudyard Kipling and management books which maps history to current management practices.

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Kiruba Shankar:

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CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd . He is Director of Wikipedia India. He has 13 years of experience in the Internet space. Prior to this, he was Associate Director at Sulekha.com. He is a technology columnist at New Indian Express and Business Standard Newspaper . Kiruba loves teaching and has taught at Asian College of Journalism, IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore. He is the chief organizer of TEDxChennai.

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After the question-answer round with Guruji, all proceeded to plant saplings at the Green Campus of Great Lakes Institute of Management.

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Sri Sri Proceeding to plant a Sapling at Great Lakes

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Picture Courtesy: Aravind Rajgopalan

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Affective and Cognitive Factors in preferences

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— Robert Zajonc and Hazel Markus —

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Food preferences changes from place to place. Humans by birth don’t like chilli pepper. But in the case of Mexicans, they like chilli pepper once they mature. If it is possible to change an innate aversion to something like chili pepper, then it should be possible to change almost any attitude and any preference.

Significant affective factors such as parental reinforcement and social conformity pressures, identification with the group, machismo and so on. This paper, “Affective and Cognitive Factors in preferences” by Robert Zajonc and Hazel Markus, stresses on affective factors. In doing this, the authors do not intend to negate cognitive influences on preferences nor minimize their importance. Cognitions that have generally been taken to be the very basis of this preference can actually occur afterward – perhaps as a justification.

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Acquiring preference through Exposures

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When objects are presented to the individual on repeated occasions, the mere exposure is capable of making the individual’s attitude toward these objects more sensitive. This is called as Exposure effect. When confronted with a familiar object, the individual was said to experience a warmth, a sense of ownership, a feeling of intimacy.

Preferences acquired in infancy and childhood are formed primarily on affective basis. By the time the child develops an extensive knowledge structure about chili peppers – i.e. before he learns to discriminate among them, identify various subtle features and discover all their uses – his preferences for them may well be completely established.

It is possible to change preferences by cognitive means alone only in early stages of preference formation, because even when a preference has been built up from cognition, its affects may become partly and fully autonomous and independent of the cognitive elements that were originally its basis. Social psychologists have tried to see what information could be given to a person so that he would become fond of some item. They asked how should this info be imparted and for best results, who should do it. Needless to say, the method of attitude change by means of persuasion has not met with a great deal of success.

It is quite reasonable to say that when a person “stores” affect, what he stores is the motor tendencies and other somatic manifestations. The behavior patterns are hard to change and hard to overcome by persuasion. The headphone experiment (where people said that they heard better when nodding than when they where shaking their head) proved that attitudes can be changed by simple things and he approached properly could be improved to a great extent. Motor basis of preferences says that change in preference can be accomplished by attention to motor correlates.

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