Well, it’s Murphy’s Law ( Not the one who’s still living 
). It could even be a corollary. If I go to a foreign state outside Mumbai, I will fall sick…
Anyways, that’s a long personal update. Now, I guess most of my friends know I’m ambivalent about religion. Really, I stand right between the atheists and the religious fanatics along the stark line of “Really people? So jobless?”.
But I love mythology. I love the stories, the characters, the morals and most importantly, the colour. But I never thought about its interpretation. I never thought of stories of Ram, Krishna, Jesus, Zeus and Hercules as an interpretation of the way people of that time actually viewed and understood culture and society. So God forbid, I definitely didn’t think about kings and management (though I still have an unread copy of Arthashastra lying in my book cupboard).
Then I saw this really interesting talk by Devdutt Patnaik (You gotta love his title – Chief Belief Officer, Future Group) at TED India
Interestingly, then CNBC TV 18 started this show called Business Sutra which was hosted by the extremely smart and the extremely cute and the extremely classy (Yeah ! You could say she was the reason I started watching the show – huge crush ) Menaka Doshi. As usual, I ended up missing every single episode on TV but I just recently stumbled across them on Youtube. They are pretty interesting episodes. And if you don’t really get the first one or two episodes, should definitely check out the third episode onwards. I love the fact that he says that everything is based on context and how he contrasts the Western way of doing business (and thinking) with the Indian mentality. In fact, he really reminds me a lot of the speech that Kishore Biyani gave at our B-school as well. Obviously, I don’t agree with it all or that everything they talk about is extremely idealistic but nevertheless, a different perspective.
And the best part ? Menaka really pushes this discussion forward really intelligently, including debating several points with him rather than just corroborating what he says….pretty smart ! (This statement may be biased because of aforementioned statement – hey, it’s not all emotional … she also broke the Ambani spat story, so yeah! She’s smart) Makes for pretty interesting watching even if you don’t completely subscribe to it.
Start here:
Ones I found interesting:
Disclaimer: Yeah, yeah I know ! It’s mainly Hindu philosophy.
Fave statement:
“The western world is obsessed with standardization but hamaara kya – swaadanusaar hai”…his response for context about why you can’t even compare the Ramayana and the Mahabharata
