Spiritual Marketing

I was shocked to see the luxurious web site and marketing of school of bhagavat gita. I wonder how in such a short duration of time a spiritual organisation could grow world wide and establish its roots all through the world-- I think infosys took about 25 years to spread around the globe and establish itself ( of course that is when you are doing it ethically)
Browsing through the web site it felt as though they are advertising for a hotel chain --the rooms in the so called ashram looks more like a 5-star hotel than a place of retirement.
But i liked the strategy used by the people behind this. The world is running after luxury and comfort. The world also needs peace and spiritual realization.So it is easier to wrap vedanta in luxury papers to attract the crowd.

The marketing techniques is a must-learn technique from here. The licence of sanyasam these guys use to influence everyone-- The highness , Abdul Kalam are a few mentioned in the site -- is just amazing. For an ordinary man striving for a genuine cause , he would never be able to even cross those big gates of 'Democracy'.

But i must admit that i totally awe the demand for spiritual leaders in our society.People dont even check the credibility and worth of the 'leaders' before falling at their feet.

The educated goes to schools, colleges, works for 20 hours a day, competes with the best of brains, deals with the ups and down of economy, runs away from recessions .... while these saffron coated monks take the short cut of just learning a few books of vedanta and making fortunes out of it.
A good knowledge of Bhagavat Gita and a few references to Upanishads and vedas and good oratory skills is all that is needed to make ur own ashramas and your own spiritual establishments.
To be successful you need to be a lil different from the rest of the familiar monks who are already doing great in the field. You need to appear to be more lateral and 'rational' and with a new outlook to attract the crowd. To drive more income you can even run a travel agency under this veil.. There are too many spiritual destinations and enough rich people in India to derive abundant profit out of these projects.

Well , just check their site and you will know what i am talking about.

Nothing to write

It isnt that I don’t have anything to write these days. But I choose to just keep them in my word pad most of the time. And of everything happening around me most of the things are either against the company policy or they are too personal to write about. So I choose to just talk about it to my husband on our drives back home than to type them all and upload to blogger.
At the org level there are too many crazy changes which just whirl around on our tables. Everything is so shaky and unstable that something that is today is sure to be out tomorrow-- Is that what they call Growth ??. The whole system lives in statistics and I am tired of hearing these percentages.


As I am typing this I can hear a lady X from the client side shouting for some issues. That lady X I have been hearing her unpleasant angry voice for the past 3-4 years… the lady who works round the clock to keep her position in office. I really feel pity for her ( and I hate the way she talks as if we are cattle tied in her shed). And worse … I feel pity for the guy working like a dog to get an appreciation from her.

Rest in Peace

Most times we take people for so granded that we don’t realise what trouble we give them in their daily affairs. Perhaps we are so focussed on our own business and our own schedules and deliverables that we tend to forget the rest of the world.
Today I saw a mail that our receptionist died of cardiac arrest. As much as I wondered what could have made a less than thirty year old guy to die of heart attack I was also feeling bad for giving him a bad time every morning to connect a list of US and local numbers for our onsite calls. With so many teams asking the reception to connect and conference numbers across the globe the job of a receptionist would have been really tough. I have never given it a thought until today while trying to figure out how difficult his job would have been.
He was only a voice at the other end of our conference calls and most of us have not even seen him. Today ,reading his death news I can still recollect his voice at the other end of the phone connecting conferencing and reconnecting a hundred calls we ask him to connect.

The magician steps out.

I am glad that one National Fraud has mortally come to his end. I hope more stories of fake cheap miracles won’t spread the news about him anymore. It was only earlier this week that I read about scent and perfume oozing out of his statue when he was hospitalized. His godliness is a highly networked one which is beyond our imagination. Whatever be the logic of the network it is definitely a profitable business. Be it for the witnesses who sees gold and silver balls spitted out or for the owners of status where ashes and perfumes ooze out. Like it is said ‘Pothujanam kazhutha’ there will be hundreds and thousands of people who want to take a look at the ‘Miracle’.

He is one of the ‘sages’ who transformed the classical image of simplicity, spirituality and sacrifice of sanyasam to luxury, power and authority .
He has for sure a long string of national and international celebrities as followers. Some of them even move in a collaboration using the sentiments of ‘Ashramam’ as a tool to convert their millions of black to white currency. Well the Indian law does not give any tax regulations to ‘Spiritual organizations’ and as per the law even the multi millionaire swamys are classified along with beggars.
Tax and other legal formalities are always the ‘privileges’ of common men who should strictly abide and live by them.



Now the master of such a black world is mortally no more. All his proclaimed powers of divinity hasn’t helped him ease his sufferings at his death bed and he has left the phase of earth inspite of all efforts of his followers to bring him back.
Well , I am not trying to mock mortality here. The exploitation in his name will follow and after 1000 years there might even be a religion after his name.
But all that matters is where that soul of him that escaped his thin fragile old body has gone to… With no media flashes and spectators around , with no gold and silver balls hidden in his throat to spit any more , with no one to fool and nothing to fake i am glad the soul escaped from his identity for ever.

The New template

I liked this new template of blogger. It is offering more designs than what it had when I started blogging.
I was almost glued to the old classic canvas template. But this one isnt bad either.

So trying this new look ... words in fire !

Of Inaugurations ...

There were two inaugurations back to back… of the college I studied in and the company I am working for. About Barton Hill engineering college , I owe one thread of memory of being a part of the foundation stone laying ceremony . That was long back when I was in my second year and I remember us sitting in the ground ( where the new building stands now ) and wondering after how many years these plans would finally materialize. Yesterday was The day we kids were talking about then , when the buildings were formally inaugurated .



The construction of the building started during our last semester after which we could no longer see the ground as the ground we knew. The then Union members even mentioned in some of their SFI campaigns that ‘The ground is full of Garthams now ‘ in some context..
Well that ground with Garthams have grown to a five storey building though it took a long 5-6 years to look the way it is today.
About the inauguration of my office building .. that’s a different story altogether. What is there now is just a small portion of what is yet to come in the coming years. Seeing the sketches and outlines displayed here it sure is gonna be one of the best of its kind in the state. Amen !

Some changes !!!

Well it is time to sit back and think what has actually gone wrong ( or right ) with me over the past few months.
I am becoming that which I did not like to be once. Perhaps the system and policies are making me someone else without even my consent.
When I first joined a project I knew to meet people with a genuine smile. I knew to enjoy the project outings and team parties. I knew to enjoy the project and DC initiatives.
Here people are like the bits of colors in a kaleidoscope . The picture keeps changing- people change , work change , problems change. I never had the same people working with me for ever. Initially that was the most difficult part when I found it difficult to part with the people I was comfortable with.
Then it became a practice .
The long 5 years has taught me more to forget than to remember. I was forced to unlearn to fit into new structures and work methods. If I kept all those database and table structure in my head I would get confused with the new ones… So all those I learned for months I had to undo in a week to grasp new things.
As time went I learnt what people spoke and meant were not the same in a corporate world . There are phrases and jargon used over and again for decades to talk when there is nothing to talk. I could hear people talking for hours without making any sense. The group of people whom we could associate and could be friends slowly vanished. They were either moved to far off projects or were married away or went onsite . The immediate crowd became a pool of strangers talking jargon.

Eventually I had to be one among those jargon talkers repeating someone’s phrases when I had nothing to tell or when I did not believe in what I was supposed to talk.
The onsite time put me into a jungle of human species where the rule was to eat or be eaten. I could see people slitting throats and stabbing from behind and still smiling away proud. It is from there that I learnt to kill rather than be killed.
I learnt ‘justice’ was just another word in the dictionary.

By the time I returned I could no longer feel any bonds with any team around me. Office to me was just a space where I spend 9 hours to get my salary. People around became resources with whom I need to deal with daily to ensure the work is done. I don’t give them trouble like how others had given me.. at least not deliberately. But I don’t take any step to seem good to anyone. I have forgotten to smile from my heart to strangers. When I smile now it is the smile I give because I am supposed to smile when I talk to them in X , Y and Z situations.
I don’t feel any emotional bondage when I release one person and bid them good bye for ever. I have purposely toughened my mind not to feel too bad or too good for anything in office. Even those faces whom I have worked for years I can forget the next day as long as their replacement is good enough or even better.

Every time I step into my office I feel I am keeping the humane side of me outside the campus. And then when I walk out of the campus and step into our car , I start living again. I leave the jargon and work behind not wanting them to cling on to me even for a second outside the 9.xx hours I am supposed to live with them.

After all, sacrificing a 9 hours to live the remaining hours happy is a good deal I think .At least i am glad i have a life outside this office. I am just glad.