K V Kamath: I want to
maybe stay on Davos for one more round
before you move on.
You have seen Davos from 2006
till after the crash of 2008,
and just before we came here we were having a short chat,
you said you addressed depression (Sadhguru Laughs) in the post-2008 period
and of course you have seen the euphoria of the preceding years.
Euphoria to depression,
how do… how do… how do these mood swings happen
and how does one balance out one’s views as it were?
Sadhguru: I… I think one reason is,
lot of people have not strived for their success,
they are successful by chance,
that’s why they are euphoric and depressed.
If they had crafted their success you would know the mechanics of success,
it doesn’t matter what’s happening today,
you know where you’re going anyway.
Nobody can take that away from you,
so people who do not know the mechanics of what they are doing,
the fundamentals of what they are doing,
by chance because of situational help somebody becomes successful,
he is euphoric.
He thinks he’s hit
They are hitting a lottery, they are not successful. (Laughs)
Hitting a lottery is not success, it’s just chance.
So because of that you see too much of these swings
and (Laughs) anyway as I was telling you,
they asked me to handle this session called ‘Recession and Depression.’ (Laughs)
It was 2008, just then recession had moved into the European and American market,
all these billionaires were carrying long faces.
So I am supposed to spread it a little bit. (Laughter)
K V Kamath: Spread a smile like this.
Sadhguru: So I said, ‘Recession is bad enough,
do you need depression on top of it?’
You always dreamed you want to walk the beach,
you want to swim,
you want to play golf.
Okay, this is the time, less work.
This is not the end of the world and above all
the way we have structured our economic process in the planet is such
that if we fail we will be depressed,
if we succeed we will be damned.
I said I prefer that you are depressed. (Laughter)
We… Because our economy is all about ‘more’, not about ‘all’.
I think the business leaders,
people who have reached a certain level of success
should shift their attention from ‘more’ to ‘all’.
‘All’ would naturally be … inclusiveness.
‘More’ is taking,
‘all’ is an embrace.
K V Kamath: Moving on to something that we see across India today,
the mood of negativity.
In a way it is a continuum of this depression that we are looking at.
But this collective mood of negativity,
how would you look at it
and how would you actually explain this?
Sadhguru: I think you meet only the people in the boardrooms. (Laughter)
Right now, a lot of people, too many people,
including the business leaders and the media, everybody is
constantly talking about India will become a superpower
which makes me very apprehensive.
You don’t have legs and you want to climb Mount Everest,
it sounds really apprehensive to me
because we are going to flounder with this kind of attitude.
Everybody is talking about India becoming superpower.
You need to understand this,
in this country right now,
for 1.2 billion people
you neither have the roads nor the airports nor the infrastructure
nor the homes nor even enough trees,
or not enough rivers,
not even a piece of sky for 1.2 billion people.
The only thing that we have is we have a population,
we’ve done well on that. (Laughter)
We have a huge population.
If you transform this population into a very competent,
focused, inspired population,
yes, we could be a super power in a different way.
Then you understand ‘superpower’ in normal sense.
Superpower means people have always thought military might and something else,
but we will be a super power because just about anywhere you go,
already we see that,
but in a much bigger way, every company on the planet could be led by an Indian.
That is superpower (Applause); we are all over the place.
So somebody was telling,
‘See, this is Bharat; Mahabharat is elsewhere else.’ (Laughter)
You know, it’s in a different place.
So I know there’s one segment of people who are constantly morose
about markets going down, markets going up and stuff.
There is another level of people who are too
too loose in their thought that they think we are going to become a superpower.
We don’t have the fundamentals.
I don’t have to tell this to you, you know better.
We don’t have the fundamentals to become any kind of superpower;
it’s just too much of nonsense.
Our problem is we are too dramatic in our minds,
we exaggerate our success, we exaggerate our failures,
but it doesn’t matter the crowd sees it that way, it’s all right.
But people in positions of responsibility and leadership
should be able to see what is the reality,
not imagining things about being superpower,
not imagining things about going into dumps -
both are not true.
We are at a threshold;
we are sitting with a possibility,
a huge possibility in front of us,
but between possibility and reality there is a distance.
Do we have the necessary commitment,
strength and focus to walk the distance,
that’s a big question.
Is every one of us working towards creating an India
which will have the necessary focus and commitment to walk the distance
from possibility to reality
this is still a question mark;
which way we will go, we don’t know. (Laughs)