Leadership Skills from Ramayana: Morals before Maths and Character before Coding

It is said that great knowledge and wisdom is passed on from one generation to another, that can be applied to your life no matter how much times change. Our epics and historical texts are rife with such valuable and important lessons that can help us achieve a great deal in life. Indian religious texts like Ramayana & Mahabharata are not only religious texts but great treatise on human and organizational behavior.

The example of transformational leadership exhibited by Rama in the Ramayana epic can be used as a model for leaders at the different levels of an organization, society or a country.

Keeping this in mind, a new EdTech has taken shape, teaching life-skills through Ramayana and other Indian epics in the form of The Ramayana School which marks a new paradigm in online education. Founder of The Ramayana School (TRS), Shantanu Gupta, believes a way to fill this gap is by learning our India’s ancient text and scriptures.

Mr. Shantanu Gupta, is the founder of The Ramayana School, an Indian Author, TEDx Speaker and Political Analyst.He has an engineering degree from GB Pant University (India), Management education from XLRI, Jamshedpur (India) and did his masters in policy and politics from Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex (United Kingdom). Shantanu has worked for a decade as a process and management consultant in many cities in India, Switzerland, Cyprus, Hungry and Israel. He has represented India in many international conferences on economy and policy, in Germany, Malaysia & Srilanka.

Shantanu, a home-schooling father, started decoding Ramayana for his son and later started offering it to the other kids. During the Covid pandemic it got further traction and by now thousands of children from more than 15 countries have done the two flag-ship courses of The Ramayana School. The Ramayana School team is working with more than 25 partners worldwide to reach out to families across the globe.

As per Gupta, Valmiki Ramayana is a vast treatise in itself, comprising of 6 Kandas (Parts), 645 Sargas (Chapters), and 24,000 shlokas. Each shloka has great learnings and the complete understanding of The Ramayana can enrich humanity, with timeless values. Hence, we invited Mr. Shantanu Gupta to conduct an online session for our students to give them an exposure to numerous life lessons of the Ramayana that can be applied in all realms of life.

Ramayana is a book of ideal behaviour. Ramayana as an epic is an eternal source of guidance to mankind about how to live life in a manner such that it benefits society and commits no acts that one lives to regret later.
Every character and every development in the story told in Ramayana is a valuable lesson for us all. Lord Rama’s life was one of ethics and ideals, he preferred hardships of the jungle to the luxuries of the palace just because there were promises to keep
Ultimately good won over evil, but gave us lessons in ethics, integrity and righteous behaviour.

With the big data revolution, companies have been increasingly using the data around them to gain meaningful and useful insights into their organization. On average, about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day, which is unheard of for the ordinary people around who are mostly responsible for it. To get benefits from this data, the company hires data professionals who are given reigns to it to read and produce insights beneficial to the organizations.

These data scientists handle a plethora of sensitive data from not only the common people but also large organizations. The way data scientists build models can have real implications for justice, health, and opportunity in people’s lives, so it becomes imperative for data scientists to follow a code of ethics in their day-to-day workflows.

Data Scientists and professionals are on the front lines of almost every aspect of the modern world. Data professionals are the first, and last, lines of defense against the misuse of technology. Nobody else understands the systems as well, and nobody else is in a position to protect specific data elements or ensure the connections between one component and another are appropriate, safe and reliable. Data professionals have helped usher in the new and richly vibrant rhythms of modern life but as data becomes increasingly interwoven into the fabric of life, those in the profession must personally recommit to serving society through ethical conduct.

There are several factors that one needs to remember while setting up and leading a business. Successful entrepreneurs have certain traits in common such as clarity of thought, perseverance, strategic thinking, good communication skills, and valuing efficiency, amongst others. All of these lessons can be learnt from the Indian Epic – Ramayana. We firmly believe that the epic has left humankind a path to follow on, in order to succeed in any sphere of life with entrepreneurship being one of them.