In the year 2003, during the memorial lectures, we promised the networking of a 'Dialogue Group' for creating and maintaining a public Discourse Web space for informed discussions and debates on economic issues.

We hoped to invite at least three thousand young entrepreneurs, managers, other professionals and government officials to this dialoguing enterprise. This was meant mainly for deliberating on the urgent need for a new development model for Kerala.

In Kerala the public discourse is always hijacked by either politicians or eco-romantics on the one side and communists or communalists on the other. Hence the burning economic issues are forgotten and people are blissfully unaware of the abysmal pit that Kerala is slowly descending. The Kerala economy is sustained through the oxygen of money order income, the source of which is so fragile, that we are already on the death bed. Kerala is dreadfully living on borrowed time. All the state enterprises are running in the red; new investments are scarce to come; four million young educated men and women are unemployed and possibly unemployable; labour is in a suicidal pact with irresponsible unions wasting their time in hartals and bandhs; politicians are blind-sighted and the official machinery is corrupt and inefficient to the core. Kerala is in a comatose state, convulsing with the last spasms of ebbing life energy.

Yet all is not lost. Our people are intelligent, educated, sensitive and ours is a land of peace and plenitude. The saying goes: " There is no plant that does not have some medicinal value, there is no word that does not have some mantra power, there is no human who does not have some functional capability. Alas! But team building, inspiring leaders are rare to find."

Kerala lacks intelligent, informed, courageous and visionary leadership. In the modern world of all pervasive skepticism and operational complexity and information explosion it is difficult for one all encompassing 'avatar' to emerge who will solve all problems by wave of a magic wand. We need leaders, hundreds of them, at all levels of human activity. Those leaders have to be people of high integrity, vision, ability and determination to share their vision with others and doggedly pursue that shared vision to a successful completion.

I think that this Dialogue Group will create such a bunch of thoughtful leaders for Kerala with in the next seven to ten years. I invite all of you to join this Dialogue Group and share your vision for Kerala.

Swami Bodhananda
12th March 2004, New Delhi

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