Tirades against corruption and gender abuse have brought people together on streets, made them think and arrive at conclusions for the cause of their worries. Solutions have poured in from different people associated with different walks of life. But Santosh Sharma, author of Next What’s In has other ideas.
A mentor at International Growth and Leadership Foundation, Sharma has come up with a module which, according to him, “deals with the root of every problem – the individual.” “The limited understanding of self by an individual gives rise to abominable characteristics of fear, ego, attachment and domination of mind which affects his interaction with the outside world,” he explains. “And because individual is interacting with different social institutions (family, school), as well as the system, these five elements are giving rise to different problems like corruption, which is passing from individuals to organizations to systems,” he adds.
Terming desires as the driving force behind crimes in the modern world, Sharma links them to the corruption of human personality. “Desires or unfulfilled dreams leave a sense of craving inside an individual which push him to the wrong side of the law in order to fulfil them,” he says.
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“We surveyed 563 people and the results clearly show that the gap is pretty large between their desires and achievements resulting in huge frustration levels in a modern individual,” he comments.
Decreasing this difference is not a suitable remedy for Sharma. “The westerners have tried doing that and it has resulted in their lives becoming directionless, empty and not very meaningful,” he says.
Sharma provides help as well. “We have to bring down cravings to the natural level which a human can manage instead of suppressing, ignoring or fighting them,” he explains. “Out of the box thinking is only diverting the problem and not solving it. Dissolving the box completely is what is required as it will help us to completely detach ourselves from prejudices of our ‘mental boxes’ and make our thought more ‘free and fertile’.” After that the mind will work on ‘intent’ rather than ‘cravings’.
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According to Sharma, the first step in this scientific process is to accept the situation as it is. “Neurosciences also testify that accepting a situation drastically affects the reaction of an individual to it,” he adds.
Describing his participative module as universal, Sharma says that it can be applied to sports, culture, lifestyle in addition to politics and society. “The government is creating an intervention only at the systemic level which will work in the short term. But for the mid and long term success, both top down and bottom up approach are required,” he believes.
Having talked to many Parliamentarians, Santosh Sharma wants to reach out to the policy makers and the UN. About his next book Dissolve the Box , which exhaustively deals with this concept, Sharma mentions, “It takes the journey forward from my first book.”
We can only hope this module somewhat satisfies the never ending urge for explanation in India.