1 March 2014 - QA 11

Gurudev, India is rapidly emerging as one of the youngest nations of the world. How do we channelize all this energy of the youth towards the progress of the country? What should the youth of this country bear in mind as they move ahead in their lives?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: This is why we have created Volunteer for a Better India (VBI). All of you should become active members of VBI.
I want us all to bring about a wave of happiness in every corner of the country. You all should work for this. The population of our country is 120 crores. If just 10%of the poplution gets actively engaged in VBI, then there will such a huge transformation in our society, and in our country.
So everyone of you should have this as a target for yourselves.
Each one of you should bring 10,000 new volunteers into VBI. It is not difficult at all. Get people to fill in the Happiness Survey. Form groups of three and reach out to people and get the Happiness survey forms filled by everyone.
When you cross 5000 or 7000 surveys, just send me an email informing me of this. Even the ladies can get together and do this.

If we can provide India with a strong base of 10 Crore dedicated volunteers, who can dedicate at least one hour every day for the society and the country, then the entire face of this country will change.
We have such great knowledge with us, yet we are miserable and dejected. What then is the use of such great knowledge. We are sitting on top of a great treasure (of knowledge), yet we weep and cry for small petty things.

Just think over our country’s situation today. There is an abundance of oil in the middle-east countries, and in countries like Malaysia, yet we are exporting oil and petroleum to these countries. We are sitting over a great wealth of oil and natural gas in our country, yet we are behaving like beggars, asking for oil imports. This is the work of the corrupt people in the government administration.

I was just reading about something yesterday. In a span of just six months, there have been ten major sea accidents by the Indian Navy. Have you ever heard of something like this happening in any other country? Such accidents do not simply happen by chance (implying the work of conspiracy by some corrupt officials). When such accidents happens, everyone in the country takes the naval officials to task and questions them as to why such an accident took place (on grounds of alleged negligence). Despite ten such accidents having taken place, our ministers do nothing about it, except sit there and watch the scene unfold. This is very unfortunate.
Had this happened in some other country in the world, people would have been shocked and angry about it. But in our country, our officials and our people are simply sleeping over it. No one is concerned about how many lives were lost in such mishaps at sea. All they are interested in is about filling their own pockets with money.

We have a huge wealth of coal and mineral resources, yet we are importing coal from other countries. Our country is so rich in Bauxite ores (an ore from which Aluminium is made), yet we are importing that as well. We have such great wealth of iron ore, yet we export our rich ore deposits to other countries (at lower prices), and import finished steel products (at higher prices) from them. This is most unfortunate.

There is no dearth of talented scientists and researchers in our country. There are talented people everywhere in our country. So the youth of this country are very capable of bringing about a huge transformation. I would ask the youth to just come together and bring more people to VBI. We should all think of doing something big in the coming 3-4 years. Do you all agree with me? Will you all join? Just do it.