immediate workplace. The disconnect, as I see it, is that Indian authors in the field of management rarely cite Indian experiences, Indian examples, Indian case studies or their own experiences. They present instead summaries from one or more books. Interviews with successful managers and entrepreneurs, are published in newspapers. In those interviews statements are recorded eulogising the person concerned. Conclusions about their success are drawn which are in conformity with the theories propounded in Western, mainly, American books. Perhaps to add Indian flavour quotations are interspersed from Mahabharat, Gita, Ramayan and Arthashastra of Chanakya. Quotations from books are given as guiding Principles followed by these interviewees. A reader does not get any feel of distinctly Indian management practices followed by them in practice in their management career.
There is another set of articles which picks up the ideas from the latest management Journals and tries to prove that they were extant in the old Indian literature. Some words or phrases from the old classics are quoted as proof of that. I do not find it the right approach. Unless you build your practice on strong basic philosophical postulates, you tend to parrot words and phrases while the meaning eludes you.
When National Panasonic, a Japanese electronics company, made their first collaboration agreement with Philips from Holland, they said, “we will pay fully for the scientific technology and import it from you but we do not need your management technology”. A renowned management thinker Ohme has stated that what is called Japanese management is really picked up by them from American books but they have poured it into crucible of Japanese thoughts and traditions and transformed it into Japanese management theory. There is an important lesson for us in this approach.
In 1952 a listener asked Acharya Vinoba Bhave a question after his daily discourse. “What was the great wisdom that Jawaharlal showed when he gave one vote to himself and also one vote to his chaparasi?” Vinoba replied that though Jawaharlal Nehru was educated and brought up in British education system, he is at heart (31-1) (non-dualist). Since all living beings have the same aicHq (Soul), he gave equal voting right to all Indians, I have yet to come across a more elegant, simple and easily understood explanation of equal voting rights for the Indians. I have my doubts whether Nehru had this idea or thought in his mind at all when universal adult franchise was enacted into the Constitution of India. Its foundation was the Government of India Act 1935 and other Laws passed by British Parliament, and Constitutions of France, the United States of America and the United Kingdom laws were before the framers of the constitution. The idea of Universal Adult Franchise has come to India from
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