Its not about cleverness but content when it comes to writing

I read a well structured article on net about a particluar concept which many will love to comment about.The author has done a good job in explaing what he feels is correct. I also tried to do the same in reply.

This is the link for that article:
http://www.deeshaa.org/is-sri-sri-ravi-shankar-a-con-man/

And this was my response

This is again an opinion and not considered to be a verdict or even anything near it.
Note: I am NOT a follower of sri sri ravi shankar

As I was reading your blog, one thing was clear to me, that you have good clarity in some areas in life. (I said ‘some’ in comparison with the large no. of areas of knowledge present in the world). Because the coherence in the content (in almost 60% of the section) being conveyed and the effective way in which it has been portrayed, is not possible by someone who only knows good English and who has access to lot of knowledge repositories which is not his own.

Rather, it can only happen in an attempt to express ones inbuilt and time-tested ideologies using a comprehensible language with a particular motive in mind.

This can only happen in an attempt to express ones inbuilt and time-tested ideologies using a user understandable language, towards a particular motive.

The most sensible (doesn’t mean others are not…) from your writing.
“The reason I am cautioning you about this is often a consumer may start attributing superior motives to a provider where none exists. And once you misjudge a person’s motives, you can make mistakes like putting them on pedestals, giving them all your money, accepting all that is said uncritically, etc.”
This again was good.
“What works for you is what matters, not what I think of the technique or some person. In fact, that is the crux of the matter. The mind is the ultimate and what happens to you is what your mind makes possible. If you believe that something is good for you (and indeed it is not bad to begin with), then it WILL be good for you.”

Main points from “the compilation of your opinions” (as far as my understanding goes).

 It’s a clever compilation of what already existed for long.
 Good technique of marketing and commercialization employed.

First, my opinion about the clever compilation.
At this juncture anything expressed by a person is something borrowed knowingly or unknowingly from the system over the period of time he has existed. Infinite number of people have done this process infinite number of times before us. At some point of time somebody tries to compile their understanding in some form, which if effectively is appreciated by many as everyone does not have the potential to look at, what things have taught them, in a connected manner over a period of time. This in turn, slowly with passage of time becomes a source of information which is a subset or an inherited class under the whole system itself.


The same process is done again and again by mankind and here they use the subsets also as a source of information. The fact is that, we have solutions to most of our problems within us in terms of lessons learnt from our own experiences as well as others’. And for those we don’t have answers within us, we can get it from someone else who has a solution developed as a result of his own experiences or the set of others’ experience which he has come across.

But the problem is either to find the answers within you or to find the person who has an answer for you. Even if you manage to find someone who might have the answer, he might as well be facing the same problem as you have.

Now the need of the hour is a clever compilation, which is a very difficult task to accomplish. If you are able to manage the data collected over a wide area and develop a mechanism to retrieve the relevant ones at the required hour and process it to an easily understandable format And on top of it, if you can make the whole thing easily implementable to majority of the users, then no doubt, you will be the biggest hit in any industry. Even there are many attempts being made in material areas and to some extent people have succeeded., as the no. of parameters to be taken into account is limited. But to do it with life is very difficult as the parameters to be studied are very vast.

Having said all this, if he has done a clever enough compilation that is helping a dynamically growing huge group to solve majority of problems of their life and has made it reachable to so many people around the world keeping his capital as people themselves, I feel his act, deserves if not appreciation at least recognition but definitely not a statement calling it to be “simple and a usual act”

I am not saying that he is a person to be worshiped.

My stand point is: His preaching is his own version of the open source code of the system and is very profound.

Second about the commercialization
The content and its commercialization, this is a relation often being amplified. If you take things which are being commercialized these days, the actual content will be many times less than what is being actually conveyed to the consumer of the product. This has become the style of the day; it is being taken in its own way by the consumers.

But comparing the gap between the content and the conveyed impression in all the areas, whatever marketing or commercialization you claim is being done with “art of living” is, insignificant.


Just because of the magnitude of the gap being insignificant one can’t justify the act of commercialization. When you are trying to do something, that is beyond a particular size in terms of the parameters involved, your control over it reduces. At the same time anything big cannot be done alone and you cannot find exact replicas of yourself to help you.
Even if you manage to, you will be still be losing out on the positives of others which you might not possess. At the same time they might possess some negatives which need not exactly coincide with your set of negatives. (with a basic and valid assumption that every one has positives and negatives)

So any big initiative being taken is a result of an aggregation of positives and negatives ( with uncertainties of time) of everyone involved in taking the whole thing forward. Here the weightage will be more to the ideologies of the person who is heading it and will reduce as you go towards the lower rung of people. This is what generally happens in any organization with trivial exceptions. Here, more the strength, focus and sense in the ideology of the leader, the more it will penetrate into the organization.

Once you have understood the above said, you will know that as you leverage the positives of the other members you should also be ready to bare with the negatives if it is considerably and comparatively less.

So I would like to conclude that if any one sees “The art of living” as a whole unit with an unbiased, neutral and a logical approach, they would (possibly) find that, there are few things of not great value which can be easily filtered but lots of great knowledge and practices compiled in a easily understandable way.

A one point contact for an enormous set of needs of life, with pure logic as the ingredient.

Other inherent but trivial aspects:

Stories of superhuman feats – Those are mere interpretations of people, who are expected to distort communication even if it’s a three level communication. Here the network is huge so it is expected to happen. After reading your blog, I went through the website (not very comprehensively, rather don’t have the patience to do it) and I was not able to find any references to super human feats. Please do let me know the exact area. I too don’t appreciate such things.


I am very sure that I have exceeded the word limit of a response to that article of yours. So I am stopping here. Will get back if I feel so.

I would like re-emphasise that am not a follower of sri sri ravi shankar but I like the content of art of living course.

I saw that you have included few responses to your article in your blog……but then its orientation is single sided, If you really appreciate healthy arguments then go ahead in putting this too….we will see where this takes us to.