Financial Express
March 19, 2006

DBANASREE PURKAYASTHA

It’s self-actualisation at its very best. From a business conglomerate to a writer and philosopher, Vijay Eswaran has done it all. It is his own home-grown philosophy interwined with management methodologies and inherent wisdom that helped him pen In the Sphere of Silence. “It began with short discussions with like-minded people, collected speeches, etc., which finally took the shape of a book,” says Eswaran.

A successful businessman, heading the $ 700-million QI Group, he has been practising the Sphere of Silence for the last 18 years. The tool prescribed in his book is as relevant for a corporate CEO, who manages a company as it is for a homemaker, who manages the home, he says.

According to him, our mind, being the single most powerful invention ever, has a lot stored inside it, which needs to be harnessed. And this can be done by understanding the value of silence.

Coming from a family which had always drawn strength from its core Hindu concepts, Eswaran learnt the value of mouna (silence) at a young age from his grandfather, for whom it was a way of life. “A lot of people of that generation practised mouna in various forms. My grandfather observed mouna vra-tham, and I learnt elements of it without really understanding its depth then,” he says.

So does that make him a new-age thinker? "I lay no claims to any originality," cautions Eswaran, referring to the fact that the elements of this practice are part of a cultural inheritance. “I am only an instrument of its modality.”

Eswaran has two more books in the pipeline. The first one titled The Thinking Mind, is a sequel to In the Sphere of Silence, and the second one, Sleep Only Gets In The Way, is a book targeted at corporate professionals.

To be released in June this year, Sleep Only talks about that 1% of humanity who show the way to the rest of mankind. “It’s an attempt to find out what makes our leaders different from ordinary persons,” he says.

Does not all this philoso-phising get in the way of running a business and making money? “No, ultimately, there’s no contradiction bet-ween attaining a level of spirituality and making money. Both require the same type of perserverance, determination and courage,” he says.

Eswaran is currently in India to explore business opportunities. His group plans to develop a five-star hotel and a theme park in Mahabalipuram for which it has purchased 47 acres of land. “We are talking to a couple of international chains for setting up a hotel,” he says. He is also planning to set up holiday homes and resorts in Bangalore, Coimbatore, Trichy and Chennai.

A third-generation Indian born in Malaysia, in 1998, Eswaran co-founded Gold-Quest, the flagship brand of the QI group that retailed fine art gold products through e-commerce. Seven years hence, it has interests in resorts, telecom products, a gold mint in Germany, TV stations in Australia, UK and Malaysia. Now exploring opportunities in his homeland, this global citizen says, “This is India’s millennium and there is no better time to be in India than now.”

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