On September 8, Shakti delivered a lecture in the Ramsay Gardens Seminar Series, organized by the International Futures Forum (IFF). The topic was View from India: Rebalancing Economic and Social Policy as if Aesthetics Mattered. Here, he spoke as a powerful advocate for applying the aesthetic qualities of balance, harmony, proportion, rhythm and context to his former domain of economic and social policy making. In India he diagnosed a state of ‘aesthetic emergency’, where rapid economic growth has reinforced a seemingly exclusive focus on economic indicators and GDP growth to the detriment of other aspects of a vibrant society. The talk offered lessons for the UK, equally obsessed by growth, or rather the lack of it.

A summary of the talk is available on the blog written by IFF’s director, Graham Leicester: http://www.internationalfuturesforum.com

Hyderabad, November 2010

Shakti was invited as speaker and workshop leader at an international residential conference, Cortona-India (http://www.cortona-india.org), which had as its theme ‘Science and the Spiritual Heritage of India’. He spoke on Beauty: A Fundamental Organizing System in the Relational World. The main premise was that beauty has become trivialized and de-legitimized in the last couple of hundred years. The word has lost much of its meaning having become a general and amorphous adjective. If beauty was understood as a cluster of organizing values for all relational systems, whether in nature or manmade, we would not have many of the systemic problems we face today, such as the environmental crisis, economic systems that lead to increased disparities of income, wasteful consumption, and the depletion of resources. Beauty may well be a vital master key in the new thinking about nature, environment, technology, health, sciences and economics. It offers us a much needed relational ‘value’ or ‘quality’ framework.

On April 21, 2009, Shakti spoke in London on Beauty: A Master Key for Sustainable Relationships, at a special event organized under the aegis of the Scientific and Medical Network and Resurgence magazine (www.resurgence.org). Satish Kumar, eminent Gandhian philosopher and editor of Resurgence, inaugurated the evening and introduced Shakti and his idea of beauty as a key sustaining principle of life to the audience. Shakti’s article on beauty, ‘A Master Key’, appeared in the March/April 2009 issue of Resurgence. Read it here.

Shakti speaks to the audience in an informal, aesthetic environment

Claudia Nielsen of the Scientific and Medical Network, host of the event, introduces Satish Kumar (right) and SHakti Maira in London