The Feeling of Being Useless

It’s been quite a while since I have blogged in my Social Entrepreneur’s blog. I have been more busy with my NEEV Forum for Integral Living blog. But then I never planned to orphan this one for long.

Well, actually God does not want me to orphan it. While the NEEV Forum for Integral Living is the path of knowledge, Social Entrepreneurship is the path of action. It is taking some time for me to integrate both these paths in my self and in NEEV but then that’s his (God’s) wish, so things happen with an uncanny sense of timing.

As more and more intelligent and committed youth have started joining the movement of Social Entrepreneurship, I have been slowly thinking in terms of forming a NEEV Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. It’s an exciting idea for me personally and I am sure it would be for friends of NEEV who have seen NEEV move from an infant to an adolescent.

I had never wanted to scale NEEV as an organization. I wanted NEEV to be a role model, a seed crystal around which other movements, ideas and actions would crystallize. I have a great belief in swarm theory and I hope to blog on it some day. It is not systems but individuals acting in the system that are the real agents of change. I believe in the power of the individual.

As ordained by God, NEEV has slowly been attracting a steady current of intelligent and interested youth who want to do their bit in contributing to society. I have had a growing feeling in the past couple of months that now it is time for NEEV to transform from being a container of Social Entrepreneurship idea to a generator of Social Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship Movement. I have not done a great deal of thinking in this issue because, as a believer in swarm theory I believe in the swarm intelligence. A raw form of the idea has to be placed in front of the swarm and the swarm will respond with it’s intelligence. So I am placing this nascent idea in front of all of you with a request to share your intelligence with me and give this idea a life, a form and a swarm intelligence.

BW is a bright young girl recently having graduated from FMS (Faculty of Management Studies). After her MBA she joined a top rated corporate in India and was dispatched to a village for getting a peep into Rural India. BW came to know NEEV through Saurav, an alumni of REC Kurukshetra and a great friend of mine and NEEV. You all may recognize BW as the writer of one of the blogs I had posted in NEEV Forum for Integral Living. I spotted a talent in her for writing and urged her to blog on social issues. This is her second blog which I am introducing to NEEV with a sense of great pride. She, of course vindicates my faith in her talent and also brings home a point with her characteristic sense of self deprecating honesty. This is a hard to find honesty.

She has voiced my own thoughts in her blog. This is what I have been trying to tell people since a decade. Social Entrepreneurship is not about Power Point Presentations, Pie-Charts and slick graphics. Borrowing a word from my tradition, Vedanta, it is a long “sadhana” (discipline). The word Social Entrepreneurship has become trendy and I am happy it has but the story has just begun. In one of the lectures I was giving on Social Entrepreneurship at a school, I was asked by a girl, “Sir, what degree do we need to pursue to become a Social Entrepreneur?” I was a bit flummoxed by the question because in my whole life I had never thought of doing a degree to become a Social Entrepreneur. It all flowed from within and got built through the realities I experienced. That’s the beauty of Social Entrepreneurship – it requires passion, perseverance and honesty. These are skills that cannot be taught in courses. These do not flow from the cold analytics of the mind but from the heart. I am not discounting the mind. In fact, if anything, Social Entrepreneurship will stretch every resource of your mind and even more. It is mind plus.

As BW has so nicely documented, the realities you have to deal with in Social Entrepreneurship are multi layered and complex. In a sense they mimic the dazzling complexity and variety of Life. Again borrowing a term from Vedanta, you have to grapple with Maya, and she is an exceedingly bewitching opponent. The moment you think you have figured her out, she transfigures. I love Social Entrepreneurship because I get to play the toughest contender – Maya. Social Entrepreneurship was the Karma Yoga for me, in the field of action.

Ultimately the Kurukshetra (battle-field) is within. The feeling of being useless, which BW mentions is beginning of a journey. The world’s greatest wisdom of Bhagvad Gita was not given to Arjuna when we was all strong and confident. He was a warrior, par excellence. But despite his excellence, he was assailed by the feeling of uselessness of war. It was this moment of honesty and humility in Arjuna that Krishna seized to give the eternal wisdom of life. Please read BW’s blog at

http://bovinewings.blogspot.in/2013/02/the-feeling-of-being-useless.html