18 Quotes by Gurcharan Das

By deceiving Drona, Yudhishthira corrupts his teacher's relationship with the world. So do we every time we lie - we corrupt the 'other' in the same way.

Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.

Commerce they say, encourages the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work,self -reliance,and self discipline.

Yudhishthira answers Yaksha's question - what is man? by saying, 'The repute of a good deed touches heaven and earth; one is called a man as long as his repute lasts.

One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself. This, in brief, is the law of dharma. – Mahabharata XVIII.113.8.

Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.

When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations.

So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one might interpret ‘fruit’ to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one’s inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character.

Customs inspectors could not stop the export of software through telephone lines; labour inspectors could not stop software engineers from talking to customers in America at night; excise inspectors could not harass the IT firms because the government did not levy tax on services. Much like Gurgaon, India’s knowledge economy literally grew at night when the government slept.