The Tenets of Yoga as Leadership Practices, with Chetan Roy
In this episode of the podcast, Andrew talks with Chetan Roy, who has held various positions in IT leadership in the banking sector in India, after working for many years outside India. Chetan shares some of his personal stories, including the experience of landing on a challenging first day in the US when he went abroad for the first time to attend university in New York. Chetan has deep knowledge of Hinduism, yoga, and other traditions and practices, and he shares some of his wisdom and experience about the connection between yoga practices and business leadership practices. He has a way of gently and practically distilling wisdom which comes through clearly as he shares his experience. This is a conversation across continents, cultures, and religions—and reinforces the universality of connection and personal values in leadership.
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The Tenets of Yoga as Leadership Practices, with Chetan Roy
Chetan’s Journey
Welcome back to the show. In this episode, I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Chetan Roy. Chetan is in Mumbai India, although he has lived all over the world. This is a really wonderful conversation certainly about his story, but not just about his story, about what he has learned in terms of cultural differences related to leadership, spirituality, and religion and how he shares in a very easy and seamless way about what he has learned.
He talks about yoga from his own experience and scholarly learning about yoga in India, what it is, and what it isn't. He certainly talks about his own journey growing up in India and going to college in the US with a double major that framed some of his approaches to life, one more personal-focused, and one more business-focused.
He talks about growing up in his household and the role of his parents in creating an atmosphere of inquiry into the real reason why religion is the way it is and how they were really scholars, which is quite a remarkable story. I feel very appreciative of him taking me back to his family dinner table if you will. He talks about his coming to the US and the first taxi ride in New York City which led to some conversation about faith and how faith is an important part of his spiritual practice. He talks a bit about that.
We talked a bit about how operations don't promote spiritual awareness, and there may be a reason for that, but how corporations have focused more on wellness, understandably, including spirituality as part of wellness and emotional awareness. He says that kindness, compassion, empathy, and integrity are the outcomes of any spiritual practice and they all have a very important place in leadership. As he has put it, leadership has lots of spirituality embedded in it, whether we call it so or not.
He also talked a bit about the impact of culture on how leadership differs from place to place. For example, he shared how taking people along is different depending upon what culture one is operating in, the archetypes, and the stories. The process of sharing, engaging and bringing people along is different, for example, in the US than it is in India.
He then circles back to the tenets of yoga and the five principles of yoga, and how these are all spiritual practices, including non-violent thoughts, self-management, and integrity, and how these connect with leadership. It's a very practical conversation. I appreciate the ease with which Chetan talks about these important concepts. He is a fount of knowledge. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to include him in these conversations. I hope you enjoy it.
With me is my friend, Chetan Roy, from Mumbai. Are you in Mumbai?
I'm in Mumbai.
I met Chetan a few years ago when we were together in a cohort of her coaching certification based in India. It was a wonderful experience for me and hopefully for you two. We could talk about that. I'm grateful to have Chetan on the show because his background regarding spirituality is very different from mine and for many of the people I know. His work in business is also different. First, welcome, Chetan, to the show.
Thank you very much for having me here. I really appreciate it.
You have spent your career at the intersection of banking and technology, a very late 20th century or early 21st century intersection of banking and technology, as well as cultures. My understanding is that you've spent more of your career out of India than in India, working in New York, London, and some other places as well. Could you talk a little bit about your professional journey? I'd then love to circle back to what has been the spiritual thread.
I did my undergrad or my college in the US. I did my schooling in India. I went to a boarding school in India. After that, straight after school, I went to college in the US and I started both engineering and history together. One of the good things about the US education system is that you can do these double majors and things.
I started to work on Wall Street pretty much after my college straight after. Except for a small detour in between where I worked for companies like AT&T and UPS technology, I pretty much worked almost all of my career in Wall Street both in New York and then even when I went to London. I was also working with the Wall Street firms but sitting in London.
Most of my journey has been around the technology space, being a programmer, a developer, and a software coder maybe for a while. I was running teams, managing teams, managing global teams, doing design and architecture, and running large programs. All of that is through the journey of the evolution of financial services in the US and globally as well. Also, along with that is the evolution of technology hand in hand with that.
A strong spiritual practice and education, was that a big part of your life growing up?
In my case, it was. For a lot of people in India, it is, but spirituality can mean different things to different people. Religion is a very big part of most Indians. Regardless of which religion they are in, it is still a big part of their life. For me as well, both my parents were very spiritual people. My father belongs to a reformist sect called the Brahmo Samaj, which was a reformist sect that came out of Hinduism.
Leadership: Spirituality can mean different things to different people.
It still followed Hindu scriptures like the Upanishads and various other scriptures but at that time rebelled against some of the outdated customs in society. Sometimes, you have certain societal customs that come out and then get linked to religion even though they're not really religious. It gets linked to the religion of that community. Over time, these traditions become outdated, things like the treatment of widows.
There was a custom in those days called Sathi where the woman would jump into the funeral pyre of her husband. This came out of a tradition where the Islamic rulers who came to India many years ago. They were like any other invader. They would pillage, loot, and also molest the women. A lot of the women would jump into the pyre with their husbands at that time rather than be captured. That somehow became a tradition and somehow got linked to Hinduism. The founder of the Brahmo Samaj said, “We need to change that. Women shouldn't jump into the pyre because they happen to become widows.” It was things like that.
My mother came from a much more orthodox Hindu background. She was somebody who had read the scriptures in depth, so she understood why you prayed the way you did, what were the customs, and what was the rationale behind it. She had a daily practice. She would sit for an hour or an hour and a half every day in prayer and meditation without fail. Faith was a very strong part of her life, both her personal life as well as her career.
They would have a lot of spiritual discussion in the house around philosophies. My father would learn a lot more in-depth about Hindu practices and things like that from my mother. My mother would also get to hear things from my father. Brahmo Samaj, for example, was much more around the formless aspect of the spirit. For example, Debendranath Tagore was a Brahmo Samaj, one of our greatest poets. A lot of his poetry and a lot of his songs embodied the Brahmo spirit. Some of them are beautiful prayers and beautiful songs that have been written. She would learn from him on that.
I would be sitting in the house as an only child, getting the benefit of a lot of these conversations. From a very early time, I had that exposure. Occasionally, I would even sit with my mother. She would maybe sit with her in her prayers and chant with her. I knew some of the chants and some of the prayers that were being done. Our epics, for example, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Pranic stories are all stories that have very deep philosophy and spiritual wisdom in them. Some of this also I learned from my mother as well as from various other family members.
I'm struck by two things. One, there's so much that I don't know about Hinduism. Two, when you talk about this with your parents, there's a real sense of love. I feel privileged to be hearing about your parents in this way, so thank you for sharing that. You grew up in a household that is spiritually alive and that is spiritually relevant. We're talking about this. We're not marching through traditions that, in my experience, can happen so often when it comes to religion. We do it. We don't think about it. We don't talk about it in any critical way. We do it. For you, it sounded like I don't want to say intellectual because that's a very Western, obnoxious term, but more like a willingness to open it up and look at it. Is that a fair description?
Yeah. It was intellectual, not just for the sake of intellectual discourse but truly an inquiry to understand. What does this mean? Why was this said? What was the actual wisdom behind that story or that specific instance? You talk about not knowing Hindus. I'll tell you a very interesting piece about it. The word Hindu doesn't exist in any of our scriptures, the Vedic scripture, the Upanishads, nowhere. It's a word that came from the Greeks.
When they came to this area with Alexander, there was a river called Sindhu. They couldn't pronounce it so they were calling it Indus. They would call it a Sindhu civilization that became Hindu over time. That word doesn't exist. Hinduism is something known as Sanatana Dharma, which is the eternal dharma. Dharma is fundamentally that which upholds. It upholds your own life, society, or whatever it upholds. That could be values, traditions, codes, or conduct. Sanatana Dharma is that eternal flaw by which we all live.
That's really interesting. Is it a term that you don't like to use or do you prefer not to use because it's something that was imposed?
Not at all.
It reminds me a little bit about what has happened here in the United States, where many of the Native American tribes’ names are not their names. They're French names. The Sioux Indians, Sioux is a French word. There are many of those here. It's the story of history everywhere we go. First, you come to the US. I'm curious to know what your experience was like. The first time you were here was when you got off a plane as a college student?
Yeah. I was in a very different New York at that time. David Dinkins was the mayor. It was a different New York than the New York we know now. In fact, I'll tell you a little story. When I landed at the airport, the college was supposed to come to pick me up and didn't show up. I had no idea how to do anything in the US because I had never gone abroad outside of India until that time except Bhutan. Bhutan is a neighboring country.
Someone had to show me how to use a payphone and how to call the college. The college guy said, “It's okay. Take a cab and come over. Sorry. We got the days wrong. We got it mixed up.” I said, “How much would it cost?” He said, “It will cost $40.” I said, “Okay.” This cab guy, I could sense he was a hustler, and he was. He turned out to be one. He brought me into a black limo. I said, “How much?” He said, “$150.” I said, “I only have $40.” He dropped me off somewhere in Queens. I figured out my way from there, figuring out how to use subway trains and all kinds of things and getting back to my college. Even there, I feel my spiritual practices and even my education helped me to get through that day, which was an insane first day in the US.
That was a bit of an initiation. Welcome to New York. How did your spiritual practice and your education help you on that day?
It built resilience. One of the things that's very strong in my spiritual practice is faith. Faith is a term that can be banded up into many different kinds, faith in God, faith in an external being, or faith in whatever. At that time, at the age of eighteen, with more faith in a god or some divine being that's taking care of you. That was very strong in me because I'd already, by that time, gone through many struggles in life with my parents who had some misfortunes. I've seen how they had hard times, but they had always come out of it in some form or the other. There was always this faith. My mother was deep into faith. My father, too, to some extent, was also a man who was of strong faith.
That faith that I would survive that day and that I would be taken care of was one aspect of it. I went to a boarding school where you can get thrown into the deep end. You're living in a macrocosmic society from the age of 12 to 13. You learn how to navigate situations. You learn how to navigate unpredictable times and people. That combined with some of these elements helped me through.
Thank you for sharing that. I have a friend who's got a strong sense of faith. He says to me, “The way I see it from a spiritual point of view, everything works out well in the end. If it's not working out well, we're not at the end.” I could see how people might disagree, but it's hard to argue with that. Welcome to New York.
Cultural Perspectives
There's so much I want to speak with you about and we only have a certain amount of time. I'd love to hear that you've lived in different places and have come from a strong sense of your faith. What have you seen and observed about how that sense of faith is either encouraged, welcomed, shut down, or, “Please stuff that in a sack. We don't want to hear about that.” I'm curious to know. You've lived for many years in many places. You’ve been back in India for the last couple of years. 'm curious to know how the world out there has responded to your belief system, whether you express it directly or not.
It's a very vast question because there are some differences and there are some commonalities. What I mean by that is India, the cliche around it being a very spiritual country, it is. Almost every family and every person in their home probably practices in some form or the other and perhaps more than many other worldwide nations. It's very intrinsically built into our daily routines in some form or the other.
In the US, for example, if some people did what Indians do regularly, they might be called evangelical or extremely orthodox. In India, that's not the case because, despite all the practices, there's an openness, which is why Hindus have been able to assimilate so many other religions over time, whether that’s Buddhism or Jainism. They've all been able to coexist because there's a certain level of openness within the Hindu thought structure and the way it has been designed. There's no one book to follow. At the same time, when I was growing up in India, there was a certain set of people in India in front of whom you don't discuss religion or spirituality. They scoff and say, “No time for that. That's impractical.”
That's across the board. I found the same thing in the US. I found the same thing in the UK. I did feel that in the US, there is a much stronger leaning towards exploring different spiritual practices and different spiritual traditions. There's an interest or curiosity to know. There's a willingness to accept and try that out or to let somebody else try it out peacefully.
When I lived in New York, for example, there were yoga institutes and South American practices that I came across. Spiritual practice is an island, as it happens. I came across Southeast Asian practices. Whereas when I lived in London, I didn't see so much of that. I saw much less of it. Occasionally, I'd meet people, but the frequency where I met people in the US was much higher. People were a little bit more open to talking about religion or spirituality.
For example, the entire onset of yoga in the US has been that openness to say, “What is this?” Although the practice of yoga in the US is very small in the sense that the subject of yoga is much larger than what is practiced in the US. The US practice is fundamentally Hatha yoga. Yoga is much larger than Hatha yoga. Hatha yoga is a small part of it. That practice has mushroomed and blossomed in the US because of that openness to try out different things.
This was in New York City.
The US but definitely in New York City because that's where I lived for the most part. It’s the Tristate area, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. I met people visiting from California, Colorado, or wherever else. They're trying out different traditions. They're trying out different practices. There is this little group in New York called the Kundalini Yoga Center, which is not Kundalini yoga in the traditional way. It's a yogi gentleman who came from the Amalias. Since he was Sikh, a lot of the people in that tradition who follow him like Sikhs and practice Sikhism to whatever extent.
There are all of these different variations there in the US. In the UK, I lived mostly in London, but I didn't meet as many people in the short time that I was there. I didn’t stumble across so many different things. We have all the different sectors in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington DC. I didn't come across too many of those in London.
You probably came across more Indians in London though than in New York, I would imagine, at least back in the day. Maybe that has changed somewhat. I love the way you talk about these places in New York that are called this but they're really not that. They describe this as the vast body of knowledge, but in fact, it's one page in volumes of history, work, and culture. It's fascinating what we do here. We take a little snippet and say, “This is what it is.” We take a hamburger and say, “This is cooking.”
You can take yoga. The word yoga comes from the word yuj, which means to yoke or to unite. That fundamentally means that you're doing a certain technique or certain practice that harmonizes your mind, body, and spirit, which is much more than poses than breathing. Most yoga in the US is fundamentally around postures.
Yoga fundamentally means a practice that harmonizes your mind, body, and spirit, much more than just poses and breathing.
It's these activities to follow the script.
All the different kinds of yoga that you come across are fundamentally different kinds of ways to do posture or asana. Asana is a small part there. There's Hatha yoga and then there's Raja yoga, which has 7 or 8 steps. In the Raja yoga based on a book called The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, he mentions asana maybe in 2 or 3 sutras pretty much. Asana means to sit. It doesn't even mean posture. It means to be able to sit in a cross-legged pose so that you can do other practices of meditation, concentration, detachment, and so on. It's a much larger subject. What's interesting here is that the word religion comes from religion, which means to rejoin. It is similar to yoga, which is also to rejoin or yoke together.
Leadership And Spirituality
There's so much to talk about. In the course of your career, moving different places and moving up, certainly, the last few positions you've had were very senior leadership roles. What is the role of spirituality in leadership? That could be for you. What does it mean for you when you go into a stressful meeting, have a tough conversation, or need to make an ethical decision? It could be anything. It could even be with the people you've seen around you, and those could be people in India. You have worked primarily for New York banks or London financial institutions. How have you seen spirituality poke its head out with other leaders as well?
The corporate world, at least for a long time, didn't really give a window for spirituality to play out in a more conventional form of spirituality. Spirituality in itself, what does it mean? It means such different things. If you think of ourselves as spiritual beings or as beings of spirit, then we are all spiritual in some form. Living alone is spiritual.
Spirituality means that awareness of knowing, “I am not just this body, this mind, or this intellect of opinions and ideas. I'm something more, an energy force.” My body, my mind, my intellect, and all the elements together and my energy are vibrating in some unique signature in this time-space continuum. It is also knowing that you and everybody else around me is from that same energy. All of us have these different signatures of these elements together with the energy that makes each of us unique. It’s the ego giving us that identity. Living with that awareness, to me, is more what I would think of as spirituality.
If I look at it from that perspective, corporations don't really promote that sort of awareness, and they don't want to because you might drift off somewhere. Having said that, in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of focus and wellness across all corporations. That wellness is physical wellness and emotional wellness. Somewhere underneath emotional wellness is spirituality because emotional wellness will require a certain amount of self-awareness. It will require a certain amount of emotional intelligence in managing your emotions, kindness, compassion, and empathy.
Fundamentally, spirituality is these outcomes. Things like kindness, compassion, empathy, integrity, ethics, and ethical behavior, no matter what you practice, are the outcomes that you would like to see coming out of a spiritual practice. You can see more corporations coming into that with the values that they talk about, the company values, and then the wellness program that they run. I'm seeing more of that.
If you talk about leadership, what are the traits of a leader? It is things like vision, walking the talk, and leading by example. If you're walking the talk, then that is practicing truthfulness. Truthfulness is a core element of a spiritual practice. A leader who has no integrity has no credibility. That's truthfulness, the ability to take people along with you. How do you take people along with you? You speak from a place of conviction. You have complete faith in yourself. We come back to faith. There's faith in the external entity. The fundamental faith is the faith in your own self. Do you have faith in yourself? Once you have that, you speak with conviction about your beliefs or whatever it is that you want other people to come along with you.
Leadership also requires a certain level of diplomacy, knowing how to speak to whom and when, and not being hurtful to anybody. That is a practice of non-violence, to not hurt anybody else by himself. That’s a spiritual practice. Leadership requires a lot of emotional intelligence. That’s EQ, as we call it, or Emotional Quotient, which is self-awareness. Don't be impulsive. Manage your emotions. Understand where somebody else is coming from. Understand the backstory. Leadership has a lot of spirituality embedded in it. Sometimes, leaders practice that without even realizing that it's spiritual because it's part and parcel of being a leader.
Thank you for that. One of my earlier guests talked about how spirituality is the latest conversation in the workplace that's becoming more okay to talk about. There was a time when we couldn't talk about race. There was a time when we couldn't talk about gender. There was a time when we couldn't talk about a lot of things. This is the latest conversation it's becoming okay to talk about.
These dimensions of leadership that organizations are talking about, and they better be talking about them in terms of engagement, retaining leaders, ethics, and some of the things you've talked about, it’s a conversation that needs to happen because these qualities need to happen. These dimensions of leadership need to be practiced and demonstrated. That's part of my thesis for doing this show. For you, given your background, particularly working with banks based in the US, London, etc., do you think that your approach to these dimensions of leadership in the way you manifest them and the way you might talk about them is different from others with whom you work?
To some extent, they are, because I'm conditioned by my Western upbringing, at least in the professional space. I grew up reading a lot of wisdom from all different cultures and religions. That was part of my own spiritual journey. As you grow older and take on leadership roles, you start to assimilate things you might have read several years ago. They start to make some sense. You start to map what you read to what you're doing and to the challenges that you face.
Similarly, when I came back to India, I was reading a lot more about our own Indian wisdom. There's a lot of leadership even in ancient Indian wisdom because there were great leaders way back when, whether they were kings, spiritual leaders, or what we call the sages. The sages ran entire communities. Their approach is a bit different in some ways than what we traditionally have as leadership, which is a very strong Western corporation-based. That's where leadership is talked about a lot, whether it is in the political space, the corporate space, more often than not, or to some extent, even in the public sector space.
A lot of the things that I spoke about, whether it was a vision or taking people along, all that is relevant no matter which culture you are from. The whats remain the same but the how differs. If you were here, the way you would take somebody along, the conversations you would have with them, and the stories that you would evoke would be very different. The archetypes that you might refer to would be different.
In leadership, no matter which culture you’re from, the ‘what’ remains the same, but the ‘how’ differs.
One of the things that India is very lucky to have is that in the mythology or the epics of India are great leaders and heroes who embody core strong spiritual values. Whether it's integrity, ethics, truthfulness, compassion, love of nature, and all of these things. That's there in the way that we were brought up and we were taught.
When you talk about that here, sometimes, you can evoke certain stories from there that will resonate very deeply with people. These stories are very deeply embedded into us because we hear these stories from our childhood, the time we're 2, 3, or 4 years old. The how changes from time to time or from place to place. Abraham Lincoln, for example, in the US has a leader archetype.
Leadership Opportunities
In the few minutes we have left here and less until we continue this conversation, which I would love to do, I'm curious to know your thoughts about what are the opportunities with regard to leadership that may draw upon some spiritual principles from whatever the source. I'm particularly interested in your source and your heritage. What are the leadership opportunities that may be spiritually based? What's needed? What's next? What needs to come forward?
I'll talk about yoga because that's a very much more globally understood phenomenon. The practice of yoga asks you at the very start to try and practice five things from a lifestyle perspective. They're known as yamas. They are called yamas. There are things like truthfulness, non-violence, not coveting somebody else's property, practicing self-restraint but not being overindulgent, so having a balance, and not stealing. If you take these five basic tenets and you could practice any one of them to the extreme, you would probably become enlightened. If you could be truthful 100% of the time, you'd probably hit the enlightenment. As a leader, if you practice all five of them and you bring them into your practice, all of them are relevant in some form or the other as you lead people.
In the way you speak, your words are very important. With non-violent thoughts, when somebody makes a mistake, you don't start judging them. You first try to understand the full story before you go there as a leader. It is truthfulness from an integrity perspective and non-indulgence. For example, understanding how to spend your budget. Where can you indulge and where can you not? It is having that balance. It is also having the desire to grow but also be content. You are not necessarily comparing your people to somebody else but to compare yourself or your team to your own selves. You’re like, “Am I better today than I was tomorrow? What can I do to be better tomorrow than I am today?” not necessarily better than that person or that team.
There are a lot of these concepts of leadership that we can glean from various places and from a spiritual perspective. All these are spiritual practices. There are techniques. For example, to bring a place of calmness. To handle any difficult situation is the sense of calmness, which is non-violence. It is when you're calm. Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's reframing. Maybe it's a big-picture perception.
There are these specific spiritual tenets that I've read in various different books and scriptures that we can bring into it. I see more of it, but also, I still see cases where there are challenges. Especially when you're a leader, whether it's politics or a company, sometimes, you have to say something that you may not fully agree with. That's the company line or that's the party line in a political party. How do you balance that,
Personal Leadership Journey
Working within a system, a leadership team, or something like that. There's so much behind what you're saying. I want to go in so many directions. I would love to ask you this question. Forgive me if I'm challenging you a little bit, but something tells me this could be a juicy question to ask you. What are you working on in your own leadership at this point in time?
A few things. Many years ago, in my spiritual journey, I decided that I would practice these five things in my own life. It required a lot of building self-awareness over time. Every time you're not truthful, you catch yourself and you say, “I wasn't truthful there.” You don't punish yourself. You don't become guilty. Say, “Next time, I'll make more of an effort.”
I am bringing these practices now also into my work life. How am I practicing truthfulness? How am I practicing compassion? How am I practicing kindness? How am I practicing non-violence? This is part of my own leadership journey through spiritual practice. The one big piece is what we call dharma. It is a term both in Hinduism as well as Buddhism. Dharma is fundamentally that which upholds your life, your community, your society, or whatever it might be.
For example, a company's values might be the dharma of that company. How are you aligned? How is your dharma aligned with the company? How are you practicing your personal dharma in your workplace? You may have your own set of values or your own set of code codes that you live by. How are you practicing them in the workplace? How are you making sure that you are not being untrue to yourself as you lead people? The moment you're untrue to yourself, you will get seen through at some point or the other. It will be evident. These are all very strong leadership pieces that I work with all the time.
The moment you aren't true to yourself, you will get seen through.
That’s beautiful. I hear that as an expression and manifestation inside-out of, “Who am I? Who do I want to be in the world? It is also then aligning and calibrating with the leadership team, organization, or system within which I'm operating because that's important. I'm expressing myself spiritually in isolation. I'm in this system and I need to see where I am and how I fit in the system.
If you're going to play soccer and you go to the soccer field, you can't just say, “I want to play cricket,” or, “I want to play hockey.” You got to kick the ball. Those are the rules. You have to work within the rules.
That's why you're there. You used hockey as a reference coming from Mumbai. I haven't heard that before. Thank you. Thank you so much for this conversation. I must ask. If someone wants to learn more about you or perhaps contact you or hear more, what's the best way for them to reach out to you if you're open to that?
I'm open to that. They can email me anytime. My email is Chetan.Roy@Gmail.com. They can always email me. They can even reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm available there as well.
I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much. I look forward to continuing the conversation. I've made a few notes here on things I want to come back to in speaking with you. Thanks for taking the time at the end of your day, given the time change. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation. You asked some thought-provoking questions, which made me coincide. Hopefully, I answered them authentically. Thank you for that.
Thank you.