Accelerating the Rise of India
Maharishi Veda Vyasa compiled the four Vedas, wrote the Bhagvad Geeta and Mahabharata and the Brahma Sutras thousands of years ago. His works offer valuable lessons on how the rise of India can be accelerated.
I recently published an article on how the wisdom of Maharishi Veda Vyasa can save American democracy. This article explains how Maharishi’s wisdom can accelerate the rise of India.
To elaborate, the defect levels in all products and services determine to what extent a nation is developed. Figure 1 is a qualitative plot of defects vs. nations.
India has to bring down the defect levels in all its products and services to comparable levels in developed nations if her vision of emerging as a developed nation is to become a reality.
Six sigma is a scientific methodology for reducing defect levels in products and services to their absolute minimum. In statistical jargon, such a state goes by the name, “minimum variance”. Thus, six sigma can be considered as a scientific framework for external excellence. Several references on six sigma are listed under Further Reading.
Now, my research spanning several decades has shown that the best of the best strategies for achieving external excellence, including six sigma, do not, and cannot, deliver minimum variance in the absence of an adequate level of internal/emotional excellence. Boost internal/emotional excellence and the performance will zoom.
This discovery ties external excellence to internal/emotional excellence, and the wisdom of Maharishi Veda Vyasa.
To elaborate, human beings are endowed with three components of the mindset: S, R and T.
The S component encompasses truthfulness, honesty, equanimity, and steadfastness.
The R component includes attachment, ego, bravery, ambition, greed and a desire to live.
The T component includes lying, cheating, causing injury with words or deed and sleep.
These three components lead to a scale of internal excellence with maximum S at the top of the scale, maximum T at the bottom, and all other combinations of the three components somewhere in between these two extremes.
The noble ones among us are towards the top-end of the scale, wicked ones towards the bottom, and the rest of us somewhere in between these two extremes.
When it comes to societies, we speak in terms of average level of internal excellence.
In the Bhagvad Geeta, Maharishi Veda Vyasa asserts that the three components undergo transformation over thousands of years (Verses 4.7 & 4.8). This means that the societal level of internal/emotional excellence too undergoes transformation over thousands of years.
As the average S component of a society increases, the society rises but the S component cannot rise indefinitely, and when it reaches its peak, the T component takes over and the society begins to decline. The T component cannot increase indefinitely either, and when it reaches its peak, the S component takes over and the society begins to rise again.
The transformation of the three components of the mindset leads to repeated rise and decline of societies over thousands of years. Figure 2 depicts the rise and decline phenomena.
The Bhagvad Geeta does not offer an explanation for why such a transformation should take place but we can be certain it does.
Figure 3 depicts the rise and decline of several cultures.
To corroborate the theory of rise and decline, we tabulated the data on individuals from several cultures (Greece, Great Britain, Germany and the United States) listed all 23 volumes of the 1993 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The plot for Greece is shown in Figure 4.
Being a Western source of reference, such data for India are not available in the Encyclopedia. A reconstructed plot of the rise and decline of India in the last cycle is depicted in Figure 5.
There is considerable uncertainty about the dates in Figure 5.
Reconstructed data on the rise of India in the present cycle are depicted in Figure 6.
Figure 6 posits that the turnaround for India in this cycle occurred in 1857, a suggestion that former President, the late Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam appears to share. The Rashtrapati Bhavan shared a plot of rising India, titled India Vision 2020 shown in Figure 7 (https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/20030317-president-abdul-kalam-envisions-an-india-where-knowledge-is-the-primary-production-resource-793296-2003-03-16). Figure 7 depicts India as a developed nation by 2020.
Much progress has been made in recent years, but the year 2020 has come and gone and India is not yet a developed nation. A major reason is that the nation has not yet realized the importance of internal/emotional excellence in national transformation. This article has explained how important a role the scientific framework and practices of internal/emotional excellence must play in India’s vision to emerge as a developed nation.
The scientific framework for internal excellence and the practices to enhance emotional excellence need to be combined with the strategies to achieve external excellence, such as six sigma, and introduced in all educational institutions, companies and organizations.
Internal/emotional excellence has nothing to do race, religion, caste, gender or national origin, and the practices to raise emotional excellence must be free from specific religious affiliation.
Of particular importance to nations is the idea that a relatively small faction of the population in meditation can make the wider world more peaceful. For a world population of 8 billion, this smaller number works out to be 9,000! Renowned physicist, Dr. John Hagelin and Dr. Tony Nader, MD, PhD (Harvard) have conducted scientific investigations demonstrating the so called “The Maharishi (Mahesh Yogi) Effect.”
On November 3, 2023, the Union of Global Scientists for Peace published a full-page open letter in the Wall Street Journal addressed to the President of the United States and other World Leaders, urging them to adopt the Maharishi technology to make the world more peaceful.
Experience is the best guide and the letter in the Wall Street Journal presents powerful evidence of a more peaceful society pursuant to the practice of meditation. However, not everyone will experience such benefits following a certain days of meditation practices. Having a measurement device to estimate the emotional state before and after meditation increases the confidence in the mind of the aspirant that the practices are working and serves as an impetus to continue with the practices regularly. Measurement devices for emotions are now available, and so the benefits of meditation can be audited.
Further Reading
1. Deshpande, Pradeep B., Six Sigma for Karma Capitalism, Amazon 2015.
2. Deshpande, Pradeep B. and Kowall, James P., The Nature of Ultimate Reality and How It Can Transform Our World: Evidence from Modern Physics; Wisdom of YODA, amazon 2015.
3. Deshpande, P. B., Tantalean, R. Z., Unifying Framework for Six Sigma and Process Control, Hydrocarbon Processing, June 2009.
4. Arati Menon Carroll Interviews Pradeep B. Deshpande, Six Sigma Could Change the World, The Economic Times, 18 September 2009.
5. Consultant Editor of the Telegraph, Dr. Ashok V. Desai Interviews Pradeep B. Deshpande, Six Sigma Enlightenment, Business World, October 4, 2004.
6. Deshpande, P. B., Makker, S. L., and Goldstein, M., Boost Competitiveness via Six Sigma, Chemical Engineering Progress, 95, 9, September 1999. pp. 65–70.
7. Deshpande, Pradeep B., Scientific Framework for World Transformation, Dialog & Alliance, Universal Peace Federation, summer 2019.
8. Deshpande, Pradeep B., Transforming Higher Education, Higher Education Digest September 7, 2023.
9. Deshpande, Pradeep B., Transforming India and Indian Businesses, Business Mandate, Madras Management Association, October 2020. pp. 55–57.
About the Author
Pradeep B. Deshpande is Professor Emeritus in and former Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Louisville. He is also president of Six Sigma and Advanced Controls based in Louisville, Kentucky. He is an author of eight books and over one hundred fifty articles in reputed journals that include Proc. Royal Society–UK, Chemical Eng. Progress, Ind. Eng. Chem. Proc. Des Dev, Chem. Eng. Science, among several others, and is a recipient of several international awards. He is a Fellow of ISA. pradeep@sixsigmaquality.com.
