“EDUCATION IS ABOUT DEVELOPING A WAY OF VIEWING THE WORLD”

   Professor Ramnath Narayanswamy has been with IIM, Bangalore for the last 17 years. He teaches in the area of Economics and Social Sciences. He talks about nuances of right education, how both the arts and sciences are essential and on the progress of his book on Mahatma Gandhi co-authored with Thierry Pauchant of HEC Mopntreal

You secured a first rank in Political Science during your masters. What attracted you to the subject?

Social change and transformation has I guess, always retained a special fascination for me. Just as engineers are engaged in understanding how machines can be made to work to produce newer and better outcomes, I was particularly interested in understanding the nuts and bolts that enable societies to function the way they do. And since a lot of economic transformation is brought about by political means, I opted to study the political process.

Can you comment on the stereotype of Science being better than Arts?

In my humble view, there is no such thing as this is better than that. Every domain of knowledge holds its own special charm, interest and relevance. There is something distinctive about every branch of knowledge. Persons who are strongly intellect-driven tend to be attracted by the sciences, while people who are driven by feelings tend to be attracted to arts. Both have their place, both are important and both domains present their own unique challenges. Efforts to box them are best avoided.

At IIMB you have been instrumen tal in pioneering various courses. Can you list them and how they came to be part of the curricula?

I tend to be critical of what I do as it spurs my creativity. Too much of our education is concerned with semantics. Too much of it is devoted to filling young minds with megabytes of mindless information that is unfortunately mistaken for knowledge or wisdom. Mere information is actually neither. Semantics must be balanced with semiotics: the power to vision, envision, imagine and visualize. Education is about developing a way of viewing the world. It is as Swami Vivekananda so beautifully expressed it, “the manifestation of the perfection already present in us.” Learning by rote is emphatically destructive.

   This is especially true of management education both in India and abroad. It is heavily weighted in favor of analytical intelligence at the expense of neglecting emotional and spiritual intelligence. I believe it is impossible to nurture effective managers without simultaneously nurturing good human beings. These considerations prompted me to devote my professional life to bring themes and subjects connected with emotional and spiritual intelligence into the mainstream.

   Mata Amritanandamayi, the Divine Mother expresses the matter pithily when she distinguishes between “education for a living” (professional courses that help young people earn their livelihoods) and “education for life” (providing them a spiritual foundation that will help them develop life skills). The point is that we need a balance of both. The former is like helping a man catch more fish. The latter is like teaching him how to fish.

Management colleges tend to kill creativity and mass produce candidates who speak the same management jargons. Why does this happen and what is your solution for the same?

This is part of the process of growing up is it not? Which one of us grew without reference to the dominant belief structures of our respective contexts? We should not be unduly harsh on our young adults. They will tend to be influenced by what is taught to them until they are old enough to develop a point of view that they can call their own. In contrast to North America where people tend to gravitate towards an MBA programme in their late twenties or early thirties, the MBA programme in India attracts young people

   who graduate from engineering colleges or  from those who have completed a first degree in other disciplines. This difference in context perhaps explains the phenomenon.

Your areas of interest include Business and Society, Spirituality and Self Development, Entrepreneurship in the Creative Sector and Creativity and Innovation. Can you tell us a little about these programmes and if these are part of the IIM curriculum or outside of it?

I handle (by that I mean I teach and train) courses in creativity, spirituality and leadership. All three courses are part of our curriculum and I also engage with these issues with companies and institutions interested in these domains. So they are both within and without.

   You are fluent in various languages. Can you tell the advantages you have experienced owing to this.
   Learning a new language is to internalise an altogether new worldview, idiom and to some extent, a new cosmology (the German word Weltanschauung captures the idea well). It opened my mind by broadening my horizons, helped me become comfortable in different cultures and climes and taught me to respect diversity in every sense of the terms. It is highly recommended.
You are co-authoring a book on Mahatma Gandhi. Can you tell us a little more about it? At what stage are you in now? What new are you saying that hasn’t been said already?

In the world that I come from (the world of management), we continue to struggle with competing models of leadership despite the tremendous and often useful work that has been done in this domain over several decades. The Chair of Ethical management headed by my colleague and friend, Professor Thierry Pauchant, of HEC Montreal, spearheaded a new effort by choosing a hundred well-known leaders with a view to first mapping their stories. I have completed the first draft. The second stage of the project will involve isolating those elements that are common to all the stories and the third stage will attempt to theorize the outcome. The book will have much that is new by way of interpretation and less by way of biographical detail.