 Through the mystic eye, eminent personalities, from various walks of life, in conversation with Sadguru. This week features Tarun Tahilyani, one of India's most prominent fashion designers. Mr. Tahilyani is known for his ability to blend Indian culture motifs with modern design. In 1990, he founded the Tarun Tahilyani Design Studio, drawing on India's rich heritage to create clothing styles of international appeal. Watch as Tarun explores India's vibrant cultural tapestry with Sadguru, who elaborates on the fundamental spiritual ethos underlying India's culture and its profound significance in today's global village. When we talk about being this great society and granted we were colonized and all, what is this great society or culture when we are so willing and with such alacrity, we embrace the West, we embrace what our colonizers left behind. We judge our own if they don't match up to this, where they don't feel comfortable enough. I mean, when I speak to people and I say, why don't you speak in Hindi? If we don't speak in English, we have no meaning. I have this constant argument in the factory. I have it when I'm trying to interview people. I say, speak in Hindi. If they speak in Hindi, they want to sit on the floor. Only if they speak in English do they think they're good enough to sit. Our whole notion of equality has become a language based here. Perhaps it's less so in the South. So perhaps you can help me resolve this constant confusion I have in terms of we as a culture, why have we done this to ourselves? We need to understand the difference between conquest and colonization. Conquest is to beat somebody down and sit on top of their heads. Colonization is to convert people into your way so that they'll serve you without thinking they're serving you. So some of the things which were the strings of the nation were clearly, clearly mocked out by the British. You must see the letters that Macaulay wrote to the parliament. So he said there are three things which makes India to be a place which is impossible to be conquered. One thing is his education system. Another thing is its spiritual process. Another thing is its family and cultural strength. If we don't weaken these three things, we will never conquer. Wherever they went, they had absolute success, hundred percent success. You go to Australia, it is another England, okay? The native cultures of those lands are only archival, only the museums they live. In many parts of Africa, South America, North America, everywhere they have absolute success. The only place where they did not succeed, though you and me are speaking English language today, they did not succeed entirely here because one thing is the spiritual process was so strong, the ethos of spirituality. The only way you could take away the Hindu way of life, which was not a religion per se, it was a certain a million fold, a million doorway palace of spiritual process. Not one kind of process, not one kind of belief. The only way you could kill this was to kill every human being that lived in this country because there was no one pepacy, one focused place where all the knowledge is centered. It's just happening, decentralized, completely decentralized. So it's because of this you still have some India left. That's the only reason. Otherwise in 300, 250 to 300 years time is a long enough time to subjugate people and change everything about them. It's a matter of eight to nine, eight to ten generations of people. Everything can be wiped out in ten generations. The only and only place where they have not succeeded is India, though you became a little bit of a sahib. Too much so, regretfully. You're falling back. I'm falling back. We have to bring others round. Although I do think now and I complain to the magazines and all which are again owned by companies in the UK that now there's a cultural imperialism coming. I said you all stretch women on computers. You make beautiful Indian women feel inadequate. And because your advertisers are these brands, you're like, what are you people doing? You're still stuck with that imperialism from the West. I know it's maybe, I'm talking about, I also wonder how, because if the elite did not, people who were privileged did not withhold the values. It stands to reason then that other people want to follow. So do I totally agree with you in what you said? What the sword and the gun could not do, MTV is doing it. Well, there you go. Culture is always an evolving and exchanging process. You cannot isolate a culture and say, this is my culture and try to preserve it. Any culture that needs to be preserved means it's already become archival. A culture is an evolving, pulsing, growing thing. So we don't have to be afraid of other influences. If only people consciously pick up what they want, right now they're compulsively picking up things. Whatever is thrown at them because they think it's superior, that has to go. I think that will only go when there is a large-scale economic well-being in this country. Economic well-being means first thing is they give up all Indian weave and Indian texture and everybody goes to America's workmen's clothes. That is the sign of prosperity. If everybody wears worn-out clothes in America, everybody wears worn-out clothes here, somebody tears their pants there, everybody tears their pants here. This is because of the economic superiority. Till we become economically capable and competent where we feel fine with the way we are, till then we will tend to imitate somebody else. So if we want to save the culture, which most people think would not think like this, but I'm telling you, if you want to save this culture, if you want to have Indian culture growing and throbbing, we must achieve a quick economic well-being for maximum number of people in this country. When that happens, you will see the need to imitate will go away. Then we will choose something from the west, something from the east, something from the south, something from the north, it's okay. I also always wondered about this divide with this English-speaking culture in this country and the vernacular. The vernacular kept its culture more, which as you say now is also subject to the same influences as the west. Unfortunately, what's happening in India, because the elite were more English-speaking, everybody else wanted to follow their path. I think when you see people who come from the villages as we all have seen, they come in a certain way. But today when you see their children who have grown up, say in Bombay and Delhi, even if they're in the slums, when you see people, kids coming out of the slums, you can't tell because they're all dressing in western culture. They wear their torn jeans, they wear this, they wear something. So there's also a homogeneity coming into our society. How would you see this change? I mean, where is our society heading? There are many layers of India, not one or two. There are multiple layers of India. So you cannot say where the society is heading because every society, some are heading to Phuket, some are thinking of coming to Delhi, some are thinking of coming to Mumbai. Sometimes I just want to get out of the slum. There are many societies out here. The question is about where are we taking the nation? Because always we have been a diverse culture and this diversity we have managed very well, mainly because of the fundamental spiritually thoughts, where we always saw that whoever and whatever you may be is your making. It's your karma means it's your making. Do you subscribe to that? What? I mean, this is the prevalent thought so far that it's your karma. I mean, I don't think that that's my karma. I haven't brought up that way. Do you subscribe to that? No, no. When I say karma, I want you to understand. It's my making. Whatever I am in my life is my making. It's the most dynamic way to exist. Slowly this most dynamic way to exist has been kind of corrupted to become a fatalistic existence. Yeah, exactly. But if I told you this is God's will that you are doing well, then you have no choice. If I tell somebody who is not doing well, this is God's will, he has simply no choice, isn't it? That's the way he has to be. When I say it's your making, that means he can make it something else if he wishes. It is just that it has been wrongly put as if it's the end of the world. When we said it's your karma, we are saying it is one hundred percent your making, everything that you are and that means you have to create your own life. So because of this, it is not that it's fully misunderstood. It's partially conveniently misunderstood to a point. But still, this has kept people free of resentment and anger and hatred. That's why India is incapable of a revolution, you know? So far at least, yes, I would agree. Once you lose the spiritual ethos, if all this, even the terminology disappears from day to day culture, which is happening, I don't think today's generation is even using the word karma anymore. So once this disappears, then resentment will grow in people. Resentment and anger can lead to a revolution. A revolution can sometimes lead to well-being, but it usually… it only replaces one tyrant with another set of tyrants. Usually that's what it's done in the past. When many people today in the political sphere are talking in terms of anger being the only propelling force for change, we have never seen it that way in this nation. For thousands of years we've been here, we always saw anger is not the way to propel change. You can do it out of sheer human longing to be better. Every human being is constantly longing to be little better than what he is right now. Just that longing is enough to transform a society and individual in the whole situation. If only you create the situation where everybody has the opportunity to find expression to that longing, it is not necessary you have to… if any major change has to happen, it has to happen with anger, brutality and blood. You know, people have gone to the extent of saying only blood moves the wheels of history. No, it need not be. It can be just human love, human compassion, human ingenuity, human intelligence can truly move the wheels of history and that is a modern times. Now the information technology and other things is a clear manifestation that human ingenuity can change the world. It need not necessarily happen with blood and gold. Our lives have changed so dramatically in our own lifespan. How we were experiencing life twenty-five years ago and how we are experiencing life today, it's… it's an unbelievable change. To go back to what I was asking you about what is hel… or what defines the spiritual space that made this Hindustan that people recognize and that has held us, if you could elaborate on that. This is a godless country. Tell me who is the god in this country. It's… there are millions of different people, used to thirty-six million or something. Yeah. So, those millions of gods happened when our population was that much. Since… Each one had their own. Yeah, because… So it's up to 1.3 billion gods now, so… We… no, we lost our imagination somewhere on the way. We became shy of creating gods because other people laughed at us, oh, you have so many gods. This is again inferiority complex. This idea that there's one god sitting up there, one big human being, of course a man, not the… not a woman, sitting up there and controlling the whole universe and whatever, and this is all come because they think the existence is human-centric. We have never seen it that way. We know we are just a small speck in the universe and tomorrow morning if you disappear, everything will be fine, nothing is going to go wrong. Absolutely. So, this is something that we have always understood. The only reason why we are talking about a god is because we have no explanation for the creation. There's such a phenomenal creation and we don't know how. So, simple childish explanation is there is one man sitting up there and doing all this stuff. The idea of god has entered our mind only because we are unwilling to admit that we do not know how all this happened because it's too phenomenal. Too magical the creation the way it is, who did it means there must be somebody up there. If there was no creation you would have definitely not thought of a creator, isn't it? Because the nature of your mind is logical for everything if there is a A there has to be a B, this is how the logical mind thinks. So there is a creation, so there must be a creator. This is rudimentary logic, this is childish logic which has led to all this. So we created gods and whatever else. In India we never believed in a god. Here in this country we are referring to the gods or the deities or yantras. Yantra means a machine, a machine that we created for our well-being. We clearly know we created it. Everywhere else god created man. In this country man created god and we are very conscious about it. Everywhere else also it's the same truth, they've lost the awareness about it. Now in competition with ignorance we are also losing it. This is not a land which was created by morality, we are a completely immoral country, please see this. And it is a most beautiful way to live because morality means persecution, morality means right and wrong. Once we come to right and wrong, tell me who is right, who is wrong. Always it's me who is right and you who is wrong. Once right and wrong comes, you will create a very prejudiced world. So we never looked at it as right and wrong. We always saw it in terms of every life has to find full expression. So for that it needs nurture. How well you nurture it, that's how well it becomes. Like every plant, like every animal, a human being also needs nurture and he needs external nurture and also self-nurture, both are needed. So every life on this planet, how great it becomes or how puny it becomes is not dependent upon whether it's good or bad, it is dependent upon how much nurture it finds from outside and from within. So because we recognize this, no good and bad was fixed, no right and wrong was fixed, no high and low was fixed, everything was left open. People, you know like travelers like 1200, 1400 years ago writing or some people who came in the BC time over 2000 years ago, they're writing, there is no, nobody to rob anything from you, no murderers, no killers, no thieves, we can't say much about that today but still our level of crime is way below anything else on the planet. People don't understand this, people think there's too much crime happening in this country, no. For example, twelve kilometers away from the ashram there is a police station which has eleven policemen allotted to it. One in that one is a sub inspector, ten policemen, out of that three will always be on leave. So seven, out of those seven, two will be a night duty, only five left. There is no vehicle, they only have a bicycle, some of them have their own private TV or small pad for which the government doesn't give gas. So if you call him and say there has been a murder, he will say, should I really come anywhere the man is dead. Call the ambulance, what will I do? I'm saying that is the level of law or there is literally no law, okay? But still there is no great amount of crime. People are in such desperate conditions economically, some people are living up here, some people living here, nobody slits anybody's throat. This is spirituality. Yeah, I've always wondered and I agree with you. So I'm saying it is not controlled by law, it is controlled by people's way of being. Ugly incidents, aberrations happen, yes we have to enforce law in those places that is a necessity. But we need to appreciate without any law how we are with the levels of disparity that is there in the society, how we still are. This wouldn't be possible anywhere else. If you take away law in New York City for three days, you had it, it's true. They came as totally unskilled labor. Their passion and their longing to learn and they're being inspired by what's been happening here in Ateesha, they themselves may not be able to understand all aspects of it. Just their love and passion to do their bit. They're not exposed to any international art or craft or anything. Just with the little bit of train in Prama Ramacharis, I feel what they're producing is truly incredible. Ateesha Craft is an endeavour of Ateesha Foundation, which focuses on providing expression to the creative instincts of rural India. Working to restore traditional means of livelihood, Ateesha Craft creates aesthetic, eco-friendly products that stand out in their sublime beauty and distinctive design. Hands of Grace is a unique craft exposition held every Navratri at the Ateesha Yoga Centre, featuring handicrafts from across the length and breadth of India. Hands of Grace seeks to rejuvenate ancient craft traditions that were once an integral part of daily life. It is an endeavour to preserve the country's diverse and multi-dimensional art forms for future generations.