Life can take some strange turns. On the 9th of June, I went along to a meditation event in the City that a friend had suggested, having, then as now, minimal experience and knowledge of meditation practices and related spiritual traditions. A week later, I was doing a face-to-face interview with the man known as Gurudev or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, one of the more high-profile of India’s living gurus and spiritual leaders.
How did that happen, you ask. Well, that meditation event I went to was put on by The Art of Living, which, I learnt that day, is one of Shankar’s two global organisations dedicated to education and humanitarian interventions, and, as I learnt in pretty much the same moment, Shankar happened to be due to visit Luxembourg a week later to receive a Luxembourg Peace Prize. He would also give a public talk and guided meditation. And they wanted him to be interviewed for local media beforehand.
I had my hesitations. You don’t have to dig much online to find criticisms of Shankar (concerning everything from comments he made about Malala winning the Nobel to his relationship with Modi and the BJP), but I didn’t immediately feel able to judge how fair or even fact-based those criticisms are, and people at this Art of Living event – kind, intelligent people, by all indications – told me that this man and his movement had radically changed their lives for the better. I determined to try and keep an open mind.
Still, the title of the talk Shankar was to give bothered me: ‘All that you want to know about life’. Dr Katrien Hertog, director of the Belgian branch of the International Association for Human Values, Shankar’s other big organisation, told me it was not necessarily his choice of title. Then there was the cost of attending – even the reduced student fee was €25, and the highest of the tiered prices (‘Diamond’) was €190. Hertog said ticket sales need to cover the cost of putting on the event.
A further source of doubt for me was a 160-page document Hertog sent me entitled 45 Years of Impact, highlighting the achievements of Shankar and his organisations in a wide range of humanitarian fields. The claims the document makes are impressive, no question of that – 800 million people reached in 182 countries, 1 million volunteers across 10 000 centres, etc. – but I couldn’t particularly trust what I was reading. The stats are rarely backed by independent sources. The writing is vague and glib, AI-style. Worse, there’s this constant, resoundingly praiseful focus on Shankar himself. At its most extreme, the document seems to insinuate that he was pretty much solely responsible for major geopolitical developments – like the end of the Colombian Civil War. Hertog told me he did not write the document; it’s just a perhaps overly condensed summary of the very diverse work carried out under his leadership.
On the 18th, I arrived in good time at the Hôtel Le Place d’Armes, where Shankar was staying and the interview was to be held. The building seemed full of people of South Asian appearance, and, judging by bits of conversations I overheard, at least many of them were in some way connected to Shankar. ‘You do know who you’re about to meet?’ the Art of Living coordinator for Luxembourg, Spaniard Borja Carsi, asked me solemnly before leading me into the rather glamorous ‘Suite Cristal’. ‘I know a bit,’ I answered. ‘Is there something in particular you’d like me to know?’ ‘It’s all out there,’ he replied.
Shankar soon came through from his bedroom. He’s a small man, 70 years old, with long, greying hair and beard. He was wearing, as usual, white and saffron robes. He seemed pleasant.
Prash Chandrasekhar of The Luxembourg Mind podcast interviewed him before me, asking first about Shankar’s experiences meeting world leaders. Shankar was dismissive of the difference between such people and others he meets, saying everyone has a lot to offer. Chandrasekhar notably didn’t push back on the guru’s answers, but perhaps he was just trying to fit in as many questions as possible. We didn’t have long. I had 15 minutes.
I first asked Shankar what he’d say to those in Luxembourg’s typical golden cage scenario, i.e. doing high-paying, high-status jobs, with all the material comforts they could want, but unhappy or unfulfilled. ‘That’s exactly what I’m here for,’ he answered. ‘Not just material comfort can bring happiness. We need to be free from stress, we need wisdom, we need meditation, we need an opening of consciousness’. He went on to say that, when we have these things, people here can be ‘a shining light to the world’ and ‘great scientists, great artists’. I asked whether he thought then that doing these golden cage jobs isn’t compatible with living well. He countered that it absolutely is. ‘Your job you don’t do 24 hours. You do it 6-8 hours – the rest of your time is still with you, and in that time you can always find yourself. Once you find yourself, it doesn’t matter what job you do – you still find yourself to be in a very happy place.’
I pushed on to another question: ‘Luxembourg is an unusually wealthy country. It’s also a country that got wealthy in large part by being a corporate tax haven. How should those of us living here feel about that? What should we do about it?’ After a moment of silence, Shankar answered, ‘well, I am not an expert on taxation and all that. But every country has some speciality’ – he speculated that this may be Luxembourg’s, and then declared, ‘with any system there are some pros and some cons – I leave that to the wisdom of people, to weigh the pros and cons.’
I said to him that I’m also a British citizen. The UK got rich in large part through hundreds of years of colonial extraction. How should I feel about that? What should I do about that? ‘First and foremost,’ he said, ‘you should identify that you are a beautiful human being.’ He then cautioned me against letting colonial guilt weigh down my spirit. He told me every country has some drawbacks, and I don’t have to ‘put on the clothes of somebody else’s wrongdoing’. He told me I’m a world citizen, we are a world family, and, if one of our family members has not been so kind, that is because their education was not proper. He concluded that we all should ‘consider the whole scenario as a lesson and move forward’. I pressed him, ‘you don’t think that, as I live now with the benefits of my ancestors’ cruel behaviour, I should try to atone or compensate?’ Shankar again took a moment to think and then said, ‘Irrespective of what they did or didn’t do, it is each individual’s responsibility to care and share. It is the responsibility of all those who have to share what they have with other people, whether it is knowledge or wisdom or material resources. Because sharing gives you immense happiness.’
I thought there was a lot of good stuff in this answer, but I also detected in both of his answers a kind of quietism. While reading through that 45 Years of Impact document, I’d had the recurring thought that a lot of his organisations’ initiatives seem to be dealing with symptoms – especially stress of various kinds – rather than with the deeper, systemic problems that generate those symptoms. I put this point to him now. He said that all systems boil down to who’s running them; can bad people make good systems? Can even a good system really work if it’s got bad people running it? Impossible, he said. ‘This is why The Art of Living is there, to help people have clarity in mind, purity in heart, sincerity in action’. I wanted to ask what kinds of systems he expected to result from such healthiness, and whether he didn’t think systems can corrupt and trap people, and how he remains hopeful that his efforts are working overall, given that he’s been at this for 45 years now and things seem, especially recently, to have been getting darker – but we’d gone past the 15-minute mark and he’d ended these last comments with a conclusive ‘thank you’.
In parting, Shankar put a golden, Art of Living-branded shawl over my shoulders, gave me a small book, 25 Ways to Improve Your Life, with his name and face on the cover, and then said to me, ‘you want a photo with me, don’t you’.
The public talk and guided meditation, about an hour and a half later, were in the enormous Europe Room at the Parc Hotel in Dommeldange. There were some 680 attendees, most of them South Asian. Along one side of the room, there were products for sale – not just Shankar’s books, but SriSri Tattva supplements, body oil, cough syrup, eye drops, toothpaste, chocolate, etc. SriSri Tattva is Shankar’s consumer goods and wellness coaching brand. Before Shankar went on stage, a short video was shown, kind of in the style of a Hollywood movie trailer, all about how superhumanly amazing Shankar is (recited the whole Bhagavad Gita at age four, now busy saving the world).
When he arrived and left, not only did he get standing ovations but the audience turned as one to watch him make his way to and from the stage. After he first ascended the stage, a band sang his name for about six minutes. He then gave bouquets of flowers to each of the two Luxembourgish politicians in the front row, Paul Galles and Erna Hennicot-Schoepges (both CSV). There were huge screens either side of the stage, and they showed mostly Shankar, even when he was just sitting passively during musical interludes. As for the talk that he seemingly ad-libbed, it was essentially about how we need to listen more, be more childlike, smile more, and how meditation is the means to such ends.
The guided meditation I failed miserably at. The evening sun was hitting me full-on through a window to my left, I couldn’t coordinate my breathing, my hand movements and the opening and closing of my eyes in the way he was instructing us to, I quickly gave up.