Travels in the Riel World

Here’s an interesting confluence of religion and business - the Dow Jones Dharma for faith-based investing. Business Week has the story.

Back in India, a new generation of gurus is promoting the latest thing to hit the Indian stock market: values investing. Not to be confused with Warren Buffett-style value investing, values-based investing draws on the principles of Indian religions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Last month Dow Jones launched the faith-based Dow Jones Dharma indices, which measure the performance of 254 companies that have characteristics like good governance and environmental friendliness in common.

Letters are pouring in to support the new group of five indices. They are not your typical congratulatory notes, but blessings and endorsements from assorted Indian spiritual leaders and scholars. “May the maximum number of investors utilize it, and thus globally advance core Hindu values,” writes Shastri Narayanswarupdas, a religious leader from Ahmedabad in western India. Writes another: “Trust is the breath of business, ethics its limbs, to uplift the spirit its goal.” …

The dharma-compliant stocks, according to Gor, are those that adhere to the precepts relevant to good conduct. They include opposition to animal slaughter, support of the environment, and adherence to good corporate governance. Assorted temples, scholars, and academicians support the idea…

There’s no shortage of companies that adhere to these Dharma principals. Already, in India, Dow Jones has compiled a list of 254 companies that are dharma-compliant.

There was a five-part series on NPR recently in which a reporter delved into Indian life by traveling the length of the Ganges River. The waterway, which is considered holy by Hindus, extends more than 1,500 miles from the Himalaya Mountains to the edge of Bangladesh and cuts across a long swath of northern India.

The river passes through India’s most populous state, its most lawless state, its holiest city and its cultural capital, Calcutta.

Our journey provides the opportunity to learn how Indians feel about the changes taking place in their country as it moves toward world power status: how they feel about its rapid economic growth, the co-mingling of ancient and modern, materialism and spirituality and the widening gap between rich and poor.

One of the more interesting stops on NPR’s tour was in the city of Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in this spiritual country.

Nowhere in India do you feel more surrounded by — and immersed in — Hinduism than Varanasi. India’s holiest city, Varanasi is one of the oldest in the world, said to be as ancient as Babylon and Thebes…

Here the river is the centerpiece. She is wide and brown. Despite general grubbiness caused by slogging across north India’s heavily populated plains, she is also surprisingly majestic. This is Mother Ganga at her most sacred: Every day in Varanasi, about 60,000 Hindus bathe in her waters in search of spiritual regeneration.

As a secular agnostic, and an outsider to boot, I’ve never really expected to fully comprehend Hinduism, or its fascinating multitude of gods and complex mythology. Yet there are times you can lift the veil and glimpse just a little of what lies within.

There is no better place to try than on the stone steps, or ghats, that lead down to the Ganges at Varanasi. We arrived at dawn to watch the faithful gather for their morning rituals. It was a clear morning; the river’s muddy surface radiated with a wide shaft of golden light cast by the rising sun.

The scene was inspiring and transfixing, and yet also curiously casual. Men in the lotus position sat motionless, deep in meditation. Half-naked sadhus, or Hindu ascetics, prayed and sang earnestly as they dunked themselves in the holy waters. But only a few feet away, people were scrubbing pots, washing clothes and brushing their teeth. Some of them were just having fun, cavorting in the water and splashing one another joyfully.

Varanasi is certainly an interesting destination, one that is equal parts fascinating and frustrating, as Lisa and I discovered during our own visit there in 2005.