GOD AND SOCIAL GOOD LURE IITians BY THE DOZENS.....

A significant recruiter at the IIT campuses across the country, completely unheralded at that, is GOD. Scores of IITians are finding a career in spiritualism to be a more uplifting option than i-banking or technology.

Four students from IIT Guwahati and IIT Chennai recently joined Iskcon Bangalore. Many others from IIT are working with Art of Living(AOL), Ramakrishna and Sringeri Mutts, Chinmaya mission, Mata Amritanandmayi ashram, and Shirdi Sai Baba ashram. Iskcon, Bangalore, at 18, has perhaps the largest number of IITians working in one city.

Spiritual Inc is besting India Inc because it offers to these high achievers a combination of personal upliftment and social service. Dinesh Ghodke, who runs the world youth programme at AOL packs a B.Tech Metallurgy from IIT Mumbai. Ghodke gave up a plush Rs 2 lakh per month job at Deloitte Touche to work full time for AOL. "In my second year, I had taken an AOL course. The first day of that course was the turning point in my life. The knowledge imparted was profound. I immediately felt my friends, sister, brother should all try it. The course, I felt was a fantastic platform for individual and social growth. I then organised courses myself. Along the way came the realisation that spirituality was a powerful tool that was replicable, sustainable and meaningful. And once I saw the organisational work that AOL was doing, I immediately felt spirituality was my calling."

For Iskon's Satya Gaura Chandra Dasa --an M.Tech from IIT Chennai, who had worked with American MNC, Novell Software -- a lecture by a muslim, Russian professor, on the Bhagavad Gita, "was the turning point in my life. I took a step to understand life in the spiritual sense."

"And then he gave me a book - Perfect Questions, Perfect Answers. In the book, a foreigner asked Prabhupada - `We speak of perfect answers, but a perfect question, what's that?' Swamiji explains a method of life that completely changed my perception of religion. I was looking for spiritual intellect. I got it there. Service to people and society with God at the centre of it was what moved me. I knew this had to be my quality too."

Spiritualism and social service prove to be hard-to-resist combination to bright young minds fed up with the routine life and wondering `Is this it?'

Bhakta Vikas, M.Tech in Electronics from IIT Guwahati, who was working with Tejas Networks as an hardware engineer, and Bhakta Venkateshwaralu, M.Tech in digital signal processing from IIT Guwahati, who was working with Sony as a software engineer, said routinism of life caught up with them. "Going to work, coming back home, eating, sleeping, back to work again, maintaining some relationships, fighting now and then was all that we were doing. We felt we were wasting our lives. We were experiencing loss of meaning. We wanted wholesomeness. That was when we came in touch with Prabhupada's writings. It changed us completely - the absolute intellectual rigour with which swamiji has articulated happiness and God."

The Aakshay Patra programme was a major hook. "Feeding 13 lakh children with 170 people working for it. We realised Iskcon had the training and knowledge to blend spiritual and social service. After visiting and seeing first-hand the service-oriented nature of the temple, we decided to take the plunge and did so on the same day," they say.

Quote: "Nothing was giving me a sense of completion. Things changed when I took my first meditation course. All aspects of my life became easier and relaxed. Then came the most inspiring moment - when I listened to Sri Sri at the ashram. I felt here was a man living his ideals. I felt I too needed to live my ideals. I finally chose my passion - where I would not feel I had compromised - it had to be spirituality. It was not a hasty decision. Perhaps my IIT background gave me the courage to choose my passion."