Friday 27 March 2015

Vyavastha : an organised state of existence

|| योग: कर्मसु कौशलम् ||

The same thought very lucidly has been described by Mananeeya P Parameswaran ji in the book Basic & Dynamics of Organisation. He says :

Organisation – a Gift from the West?
When we talk about organisation, many times we are reminded of what Swamiji said when he went to the West, how he had fallen in love with organisation. That sometimes creates a notion that organisation is a speciality of the West and we have nothing of the kind here. We are new to it. We are a disorganised people. There is no sense of organisation. All are individualistic. India had never been organised. The charge is very often levelled that India has never been a country, never been a nation, it has always been scattered into pieces. So the sense of organisation is something modern and that has come only from the West.It is alien to us. This sort of a feeling sometimes is created.

Organised Life in India
Swamiji himself has in many places tried to place before us how this country has been evolved from immemorial ages, how we have our own kind of organisation, how the social life was organised, how the cultural continuity was the result of organised social life - all these aspects we are aware of.

Mananeeya Eknathji also pointed out that even though today we appear disorganised, this was not our condition. Probably we were the most well organised nation in the whole world. But for that sort of an organisation, this country could not have existed, survived all the onslaughts for so many millennia. We were one of the most well organised nations of the world!

Mananeeya Eknathji gives the example of the Varnashrama Vyavastha. 'Vyavastha' means an organised state of existence, a system. In India we have had it right from Vedic times. It is that Vyavastha, the Varnashrama Vyavastha, that has been holding us together through thick and thin, through good periods and bad periods, through degenerations also. Even though the system degenerated, the country continued  to exist because of this organised social setup that we had. It is not only in Sanatana Dharma. In every sphere, we had our own type of organisation.

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