PVPF 2024

Interview With Rasikraman Das, author of "Be The Smarter You"

My training at IIT Bombay in Operations Research honed me for finding solutions to logistical problems in areas such as vehicle routing, supply chain management, inventory planning etc. It was there that I discovered the problem-solver in me.
on Apr 05, 2023

Rasikraman Das is a monk, author, life-coach and an inspirational speaker. He is a disciple of HH Radhanath Swami and serves in his Ashram at ISKCON Chowpatty, Mumbai. Rasikraman Das did his post-graduation in engineering from IIT Bombay and after a short stint in the corporate world decided to become a lifestyle engineer at ISKCON. He has a keen interest in the field of training and education and has been instrumental in developing the GBC College for Leadership Development and the Bhaktivedanta Vidyapitha Research Center (affiliated to the Mumbai University). He also conducts leadership and life skills seminars for youth and working professionals.

Frontlist: What inspired you to write a book about upgrading oneself into a smarter and happier version?

Rasikraman: The two most important goals around which most of our individual and collective efforts are centered are success and happiness. While we intuitively know that we need to get them, but we never take much efforts to know where and how to get them in a sustainable way. In our education system today, we have so many courses for teaching skills for making a living i.e. livelihood skills but education on skills for living life fully i.e. life skills seem to be lacking.

Mahatma Gandhi says, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” If we really want to bring about a change in the world, we would need to start with ourselves. There is this story of a person who wanted to change the world, but after some time realized that it is a tall order and then thought let me change my nation which also was an uphill task. Then he thought let me change my city which also turned out to be too implausible. Then he turned his attention towards bringing about change in his family members, which also was met with a lot of resistance. The frustration that ensued made him introspect deeply and then came the eureka moment. He thought to himself, “None one in the world is truly under my jurisdiction except my own self. Let me begin with myself. Charity begins at home.” And as he started working on himself, everything began to fall in place. His family seemed to have become more amenable and the city also appeared to be more pleasant and the nation was also not so much out of order and finally the world was not such a bad place to be. As the saying goes, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

This is the long and short of my inspiration behind writing the book- to transform myself and share tools with others by which they can do the same in their lives. This book shall can serve as our one-stop app-store where you will find life-apps to excel in all spheres of life. The book contains 14 life skills or as I fondly call them life-apps such as life compass for decision making, self discovery for finding purpose, habits reprogramming for updating your personality, stress diffuser for a healthy and happy life, friendships forever for developing deep meaningful relationships etc.

The smart life-apps in my book are zipped in with relevant concepts, models, wisdom tales and worksheets to enable faster assimilation and application. The life apps presented in this book are based on universal principles hand-picked from ancient wisdom texts like Bhagavad Gita and are validated by methods of scientific inquiry and tacit experience.

Frontlist: How does your book blend new-age scientific temper and age-old spiritual wisdom?

Rasikraman: The world has seen apartheid amongst various communities- the blacks and whites, the upper and lower castes, the capitalists and communists etc. Similarly, there exists an apartheid between science and spirituality. As a result, science and spirituality sound like an oxymoron to many. We’ve been made to think that science and spirituality exist on extreme opposites of the human thought spectrum.

The fact remains that, either of the two extremes has caused much damage to human existence- while scientific development has revolutionized life, but in the absence of spiritual purpose and conscience, science has also been an instrument to threaten all human existence on the planet through weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, radicalization of spirituality without scientific temper has often led to blind following which ultimately results in exploitation.

I truly believe that the best thing for the world to happen would be the synergy of science and spirituality. A sustainable solution to all the problems of mankind may lie in the sacred marriage of science and spirituality. While science deals with logical thinking, spirituality deals with emotive thinking. Science works with models and algorithms whereas spirituality deals with refined emotions and consciousness. ‘Be the Smarter You’ brings these two approaches together to create a resonance of scientific rigor with spiritual wisdom. In every chapter of the book I’ve presented algorithms and models to help apply deeply spiritual concepts in a practical way viz. 4 quadrants of success and satisfaction, 3 layers of self-discovery, 8 friends of good friendships, etc. The marriage of science and spirituality has the potential to usher in new life and growth to human existence.

Frontlist: You have played a pivotal role in developing the Bhaktivedanta Research Center, a center for studies in philosophy. How has this experience influenced your approach toward personal development?

Rasikraman: Bhaktivedanta Research Center (BRC) is an educational and academic initiative of ISKCON aimed at facilitating study, research and application of Vedic theology, arts and sciences for the development of a holistic and harmonious society. One of the initiatives of BRC is discovery and preservation of ancient manuscripts, which hold secrets of the research and realizations of the sages of yore on topics such as psychology, sociology, theology, epistemology etc. India is home to the world’s oldest civilization and in the year 2008, the UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of Vedic chanting as a masterpiece of Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Yoga is another discipline which has received widespread acceptance and following all over the world as a means for physical and mental wellness. Even in terms of financial terms, Yoga is now a 100 billion$ industry globally. While working on the BRC, I realized that we can find cutting edge solutions to modern problems in ancient scriptures. While modern science has been very successful in unveiling the mysteries of the outer universe, the sages of ancient India were doing extensive work on unlocking the mysteries of the inner universe. My tryst with BRC helped me get exposure to some of these secrets, which I have laid out in my book.

Frontlist: What is the most significant challenge people face when upgrading themselves, and how can they overcome it?

Rasikraman: The most significant challenge people face when upgrading themselves is to be convinced of the need to change themselves. We are often happy being mediocre and this I believe is a very big impediment in upgrading oneself. It is said that good is the worst enemy of great. We need to have longing for unleashing our true potential in service of something bigger than ourselves. This motivation can be the fuel which shall break the shackles of lethargy and procrastination.

Another key ingredient for self-upgradation is self-discovery. You cannot upgrade yourself without learning to be yourself in the first place. If you are always trying to be someone else, you can never get to work on yourself. You will at best be the shadow of the ones you are trying to imitate and a shadow doesn’t have freedom of its own. It can’t move or grow on its own. It will just be lurking behind in the dark. In today’s social media age, haven’t we become very susceptible to impose someone else’s definition of life upon ourselves?

There is an entire chapter in the book on the topic of self-discovery. We need to embrace the originality which God has thrust in each one of us. It is said that an original is always worth more than a copy. True self-help can only begin when we understand the true self. For this, I believe it is very important to tune in to our inner voice through spiritual practices such as meditation.

Frontlist: In the book, you talk about emotional intelligence and forgiveness as essential aspects of personal growth. Can you elaborate on why these are crucial for mental health and well-being?

Rasikraman: A Harvard Business Review article states that emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar. With Chat GPT unleashing its gargantuan capabilities, it is quite clear that AI is going to replace a lot of humans for doing even tasks based on logical thinking. However, the USP of humans shall always be their emotional and spiritual sides. Those with high emotional and spiritual quotients will continue to be in demand, irrespective of what disruptive technologies do. Therefore, even if you want to sustain and grow professionally, emotional intelligence is indispensable.

One of the longest running studies on human well being is the Harvard Study of Adult Development which followed the lives of 724 men since they were teenagers in 1938. Based on decades of study, Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the study concludes, ‘People who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community are happier, they’re physically healthier and they live longer than people who are less well connected… Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too.” This shows that if we want to be healthy and happy, relationships are vital and for that emotional intelligence and forgiveness are crucial. Awareness of emotions in yourself can help you regulate and deal with your emotions better, while recognizing emotions in others can lead to empathy and success in your relationships, both personal and professional.

Frontlist: Your background as an Operations Research Engineer brings a unique perspective to personal growth. How has this background influenced your approach towards personal development, and how does it set your book apart from others?

Rasikraman: My training at IIT Bombay in Operations Research honed me for finding solutions to logistical problems in areas such as vehicle routing, supply chain management, inventory planning etc. It was there that I discovered the problem-solver in me. Almost at the same time, I found that my heart had another calling, something that couldn’t be silenced for long- a calling to solve life’s existential questions- questions about meaning and purpose. Humanity’s real problems are deeper and much beyond logistical issues- issues like greed, envy, the inability to deal with failures, reversals and stress, etc. In due course of time, although the problems I wanted to solve changed, but the problem solver in me stayed on. My training at IIT really helped me to formulate models and algorithms for self-help, so that self-help doesn’t remain something very abstract but it becomes very practical and measurable. My training in digital technology also helped me in framing the book in digital terminology which we all are able to connect to so well. While smart phones are loaded with smart apps, smart people have to be installed with smart life apps into their personality. I needed to speak in a language my audience- the millennials and Gen-Z can relate to. So, I presented this book in digital terminology for the digital age.

Frontlist: How did your experiences as a monk and life coach influence the content of this book?

Rasikraman: Just as a scuba diver goes deep inside the ocean to find gems hidden deep inside the ocean- a monk’s role is to deep dive into meditation and ancient wisdom literature and share those deep hidden gems and jewels of our inner universe with the world. After a decade of experience as a monk which included a 2 year rigorous bootcamp training in a farm community in the bosom of Mother Nature, I felt like sharing the wisdom gained in all those years. I collected all the jewels and gems from my notes and introspection and gathered them together to string it as the necklace of this book and offer it to the world as a token of my gratitude.

Frontlist: What role do you think personal growth and self-improvement play in mental health and well-being, and how does your book contribute to this?

Rasikraman: Often, we are confronted with a wide gap between who we want to be and who we actually end up being- our ideal self and our real self. We all wish to be more disciplined, more restrained in speech or more prudent in decision making but somehow don’t seem to have the tools to make that change in our lives. We set an alarm to begin our day early but then with the same hands that had set the alarm, we snooze it, thus accepting defeat right at the outset of the day. At the beginning of the day we have a lot of plans and aspirations but as the day progresses we fail ourselves with distraction, procrastination and laziness. Consequently we live with a lot of unfulfilled expectations from ourselves, leading to a poor self-image. This no doubt leaves us with poor mental health. We basically enter a vicious cycle of negative attitude leading to negative behavior and producing negative consequences which further feed into the bad attitude.

The gap between our ideal self and real self is not so much of talent and knowledge or experience but of critical life skills or life apps. My book aims at equipping the reader with these life skills which will empower to make the change you wish in ourselves today.

Frontlist: How do you hope your book will help people improve their mental health and overall well-being?

Rasikraman: Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman shares the idea of ‘psychological present’ which is a window of about 3 seconds – everything else is either past or future. Given that each psychological present represents a thought we could say that an average human can have roughly 30000 thoughts a day. Each of these 30000 thoughts chisel and shape us into the person that we are. While conventional education tells us what to think, focus of my book is to discuss how to think and transform the way we think. My book offers newer paradigms and thought experiments to challenge the old patterns of thinking and acting and create new wiring, so that you can unleash the You 2.0- the smarter and happier version of ourselves.

Every chapter in this book presents a distinct life-app or skill meant for improving one’s mental health and overall well-being. At various junctures in each chapter, exercises and worksheets have been provided for you to apply these skills in your own unique situations and gain first-hand experience on the go. You can choose to read the book sequentially or pick any particular skill you would like to learn first.