Workshop – Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes

One day Workshop

On

Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes:

Social Creativity, Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations

IBA Center for C School, Indus Business Academy (IBA), Bengaluru

&

Vishwaneedam Center for Asian Blossoming, Puducherry

Venue:  IBA, Bengaluru, Nov.  26, 2014, 10.30 am-5pm

Roots and routes are integral realities and perennial challenges of self, culture and society. Simon Weil (1952: 99) writes in her Need for Roots:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.  It is one of the hardest to define.  A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular measures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.  This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surrounding. Every human being needs to have multiple roots.”

But our need for roots many a time leads to ethnocentric and exclusionary patriotism.  Weil calls this self-idolatry. Today both ethnic and national patriotism in their dominant formation reproduces a logic of self-idolatry.

But overcoming this self-idolatry challenges us to realize that there are routes in all our roots. It calls for cross-fertilization of roots and routes. The workshop explored these issues. We shared with interested participants the introductory essay by Prof. Ananta Kumar Giri, “Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes: Ethnicity, Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations” as well as essays by Professors Fred Dallmayr, Piet Strydom, Marcus Bussey and Ivan Marquez. We request the participants to read these essays. We also referred to the work of Dr. Subhash Sharma, New Mantras in Corporate Corridors (2007), whose subtitle also mentions, ancient roots and global routes, in the context of Management and Leadership. The workshop explored and submitted some of these issues for dialogical reflections for many fellow seekers and scholars. This workshop formed another part of our ongoing dialogue nurtured at IBA and is now co-nurtured by Dr. Ananta Kumar Giri and Dr. Subhash Sharma.