TALKING ABOUT SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is catching up with the imagination of the present century. Has the wheel turned a full circle? Ancient India was known for spirituality. But with the advent of medieval and then modern, things started changing. The western education model that was popularised by Macaulay was an attempt to drive home the point that Indian spirituality was orthodox, unscientific and backward. It succeeded to quite an extent as science and technology became the language of the nineteenth and the twentieth century pushing spirituality to the back seat. But the twenty-first century appears to be different in the sense that spirituality is once again being talked about loudly. Open up any mainstream daily of English or Hindi and you will find a space dedicated to spirituality. And why just the main stream dailies. The business dailies realise that it pays to be spiritual. The electronic media is no different. Channels dedicated to spirituality are to be found commonly. Even the business management schools are finding the subject of spirituality too attractive to organise national and international seminars, conferences and workshops on. Noted economist John Keynes had once said that a man shall do all the rational things, but only after exploring all other possibilities. Is spirituality, then, that rational thing? Well, it might be. As emptiness and loneliness of people continue to persist despite full coffers, spirituality seems to be the refuge of large sections of humanity. Corporations, too, are talking about spirituality, with spirituality at workplace being a widely discussed subject these days. Taking all these into account there was an international conference organised by a reasonably well known management institute of Varanasi, the School of Management Sciences. The subject they had chosen was ‘Spirituality and Skill for Leadership and Sustainable Management’. While it may not be possible to summarise the deliberations of the conference within the scope of this column, the crux of the subject spirituality was certainly brought out by the eminent speakers that included management consultant, swamis, academics and bishops. This is important as the subject of spirituality is still surrounded by haze despite so much of talking. Spirituality is action. It depends on physical fitness, mental strength and spiritual elevation. Often as we indulge in the psychic extravaganza wasting a lot of valuable mental energy, we seem to lose track. Used properly spirituality is the skill for leadership and sustainable management that is so crucial in the present times. How to acquire this skill then becomes the logical question? It needs to be thought over and there is a hierarchy. From the body, that is the basic level we need to raise our thoughts to the mind that is the next level. It is from this level that we need to rise to the third level which is spirituality and it deals with the soul. Perhaps, why we go wrong is because the moment we hear the word ‘spirituality’, saffron and sanyasi are the two images that come to the mind. But spirituality is not just those. It is much more and sometimes much else. The essence has to be found in the concept of Nishkama Karma of the Gita or as the Western philosopher Kant has put it — moral rigorism, that is duty for the duty’s sake. So, spirituality has to be practised by doing the job one is supposed to do dispassionately. The topic of the conference could well have been spirituality as the skill for leadership and sustainable management.