 Namaste, welcome to the course on Yoga and Positive Psychology for Managing Career and Life. In this session, I am going to introduce this course, introduce in terms of what is the meaning of yoga and positive psychology, what is the need of both of these, how both of these can be combined, what will be the course objective, why this course has to be offered and why this can be useful to all of you and I will also share about the genesis of this course. It started about 8 or 9 years ago in the School of Management in IIT Bombay and since then this course has evolved and it has reached to this stage where it is being offered on NPTEL and on the Swamperbha platform. So I am going to share all of these things in this session. This course could be termed as Engineering Career and Life. This could also be termed as Art of Managing Career and Life and it could be termed as Science of Managing Life and Career. So it could have termed in different ways depending on who is the faculty member, who is the teacher and what is the background of that teacher who offers this course. Many of you might have noticed that I am in the School of Management so I am calling it Managing Career and Life and had this course and I believe that my colleague and I teach in the technology university, lot of engineers and scientists in the natural sciences and the technological fields they work here and many of them could have offered this course and they could have very well termed this as Engineering of Life or Engineering of Career. They could have termed as Art of Managing Career and Life etc. So essentially Managing, the word Managing comes from my background but the pillars of this course which are Yog and Positive Psychology they are going to remain the same. Positive Psychology we are going to refer because that is a emerging field, emerging in the sense that the major thrust to this area came about 20 years ago. Not that positivity and positiveness in psychology was not there but systematic studies, more empirical studies, conscious effort in theory building all that started about 20 years ago so we are keeping this but we are also looking at the broad perspective of Indian psychology. I am going to explain the Indian psychology and different concepts arising from there in the due course but for time being we can understand that Indian tradition, Indian culture has also reflected like most of the cultures in the world have systematically reflected upon how to lead a good life, how to attain happiness, how to attain success in life, what can be called success in life, how a good life looks like, all these fundamental questions were systematically, thoroughly analyzed and thought through. So, lot of concepts arise from this kind of thinking and this and the text and the scholarly material being produced in the process. Now, I am going to start our discussion with few stories. First story for the session is of the co-founder of WeWork the very famous company. Many of you might have seen WeWork workplaces in your cities, they are shared workplaces and some prime properties are being acquired by this company in many cities across the world. The founder of this company Adam Newman, he almost acquired like a cult status. The company was valued at 50 billion dollar pre-IPO but as we know that in the IPO, in the process of bringing IPO, systematic auditing is done since the prospectus is produced systematically and in that process more thorough and rigorous analysis about the value of the company, potential of the business model, success of the business model, all that is analyzed. And in the while drafting the prospect, the value as evaluated by the prospect writers, the auditors was turned out to be 9 billion dollar. That was a major shock because that was a revelation in a sense that the value of this company was highly inflated. If we look at this kind of inflated evaluation being done about this company, one pointer is straight away goes to the co-founder Adam Newman. So, if we look at the reasons of this kind of inflated valuation earlier, one pointer suddenly straight away goes to the co-founder of this company and it is discussed in the media very widely and some of the very well informed reporters also stated their analysis in terms of the whims and fancies of the Adam Newman as the major cause of this inflated value and the devaluation and crashing down of the value. One of the example is certainly shocking for any person who has some understanding about business and how the business organizations are to be run. He charged 185 million dollars as consulting amount from his own company. Current status is that company is still making losses to the range of 2 billion per fiscal year and as it happens thanks to the media, thanks to the social media, success and failure both get magnified in the current times. So, Wall Street Journal reports that Newman had the inspiration to live forever to become world's first trillinear, expand VWO to planet mass, become Israel's prime minister, become president of the world. Basically most of his endeavors were directed towards building his own brand, he becoming more and more powerful and lot of these things are reflections of narcissistic attitude, deep and probably perverted self-love and not looking at the other variables at all which have to be considered while running a business organization. I come to the second story of the session. The second story or case study is of Sachin Bansal. Sachin Bansal is the co-founder of Flipkart with the Binney Bansal we all know, we all are but the proud of this duo who has started our Desi Amazon in 2007 by started selling books online in India. In 2009 their company was declared by the business today as one of the most promising startup company in 2010. They were given the entrepreneur of the year award by Ansten Young Consulting Organization, they are very successful duo. Flipkart is a very successful company at this moment when we are recording this session the valuation of this company is more than 35 billion dollars. In 2006 till 2006 Sachin Bansal was the CEO of the company. In 2016-17 that talks about this company the stake being sold to the Walmart that happened this transfer of the ownership happened very successfully Sachin Bansal sold his shares he left his CEO position even before that and kind of retired from this company. He took time off, he thought about new company but at the same time he also worked on his own personal well-being in this duration he lost about 25 kgs of his weight and he looks to be much more healthier and fitter in comparison to what he used to look like few years ago. He set up a company called Navi which is aspiring to be a universal digital bank of the India it is still it is operating on many financial products it is only three years of its existence the Navi is in the fourth year and within this time frame only this company became profitable and Sachin Bansal says that daily meditation and yoga has been his chief de-stressing activities. So these two stories tell about how someone can deal with the business success these two stories tell about how a person can approach life and career in all together different way and what is the basis on which these stories are or these stories can be compared the basis is that both of these events both of the lives were managed or both the careers were managed by the individual himself they were not any regulatory pressure political pressure or economic pressure behind what they did for themselves and for their company that was their choice. So these stories tell that we can manage our life and we can manage our career and we can actually mismanage our career and life as well. Major thrust to the field of positive psychology came with the special issue of American psychologist in 2001 and in the introductory article of the American psychologist issue where 12 articles on the positive psychology were published authors Martin Seligman and Chick and Mihai this year also two incidences or stories we can say one story is shared by Seligman about his daughter and the story goes that daughter was very young apparently 5-6 years old and there was a conversation between his daughter and himself daughter said that till the time I was 3 I was more of a whining child on the birthday of on the third birthday I decided to be to whine less to complain about things much lesser and when I am 5-year-old today I am no longer a whiner and then she directs the conversation to his father professes Seligman that if I can stop whining you can also stop to be a grouch and Martin Seligman says that that was a very eye-opening conversation because no one said Nikki the daughter to reflect and to set the direction of her life towards more positive attribute but she did that and not only she did that she was able to inspire her father another story shared by Chick and Mihai Chick and Mihai I can share few seconds about him Mihail Chick and Mihai is a great psychologist of our time we lost him about few months ago I am recording this session in February 2022 two months ago he passed away his most popular work is in the field of flow flow is the feeling of being immersed and experiencing a kind of timelessness while engaged or rather intensely engaged in activity so Seligman is most known for his concept of flow great psychologist so these two were the co-authors of this introductory paper and here the Chick and Mihai shares the story about rather it is an observation about the war veterans of the world war two it was during the world war when he moved before the world war the other he moved to USA from Europe because he was interested in psychology and psychology was not taught as a major subject that time in in the European University or the place where he was and in America it was probably more well developed stream so he moved to USA and his observation is that post war after losing the social support many of the war veterans turned out to be desperate hopeless and they lost the sense and direction and meaning and purpose in life but there were few who were in the similar situation but they retain their or they regain their purpose they remain fully spirited and they build their life altogether different way even without having that kind of social support which they were having or financial support which they were having at the war time so these four stories or caselets tell us that self management is inherently our choice self management can be done consciously most of the courses taught in our schools and colleges are about managing material managing numbers managing technology managing money or managing external things very rarely we create opportunities for a student to have a course about managing self but if we look at who manages money material men and all the science and technology all finance and production it is human being and what is that human being the human being is special because of his mind because of his emotions so when we have all the courses of the world about managing exteriority there are hardly courses on managing interiority but the fact is that it is the interiority it is the intrinsic state or inherent characteristics of human being which decide the quality of management they do of the money material people land other resources etc etc so there is a need to have a systematic study on managing self and like we make it compulsory for kids to study maths or science we need to think about making a course like managing self also a compulsory a very important critical aspect rather in any educational setting