How exactly will your November 23-26 conference about success in Coimbatore help small businesses?'Insight: The DNA of Success' is being organised to spread awareness of the methods by which small businesses may graduate to the level of big business. Most small businesses grow to the level of Rs200-250 crore and then find it difficult to grow beyond that. Owing to the fundamental mindsets behind them, there's an inability to hand them over to somebody else to run and to grow. This conference is aimed to bring just such a capability within such businesses – to upscale, to reinvent themselves. The format of the conference is unique in that it features super successful people like Ram Charan (author and management expert), Harsh Mariwala (CMD of Marico), KV Kamath (chairman of ICICI), Dr Prathap C Reddy (chairman of Apollo Hospitals), Rama Bijapurkar (marketing expert), Roopa Kudva (CEO of ratings agency Crisil), Dilip Cherian (public relations consultant), Prasoon Joshi (ad man and lyricist) and others, devising lesson plans that are derived from the business lessons that they have personally learnt in their long experience.

Considering that you, a spiritual figure, are the force behind the conference, the question is: aren't business, which is geared towards profit-making, and spirituality, poles apart?I don't know how this idea came about... spirituality is being seen as a disability. Contrarily, the spiritual process is about inner exploration, the fundamental empowerment of the human being. It is about being in the most comfortable space within oneself. It's especially vital for those who attain to positions of business leadership because these people have an impact on millions of lives. Therefore, it is important for them to work on themselves, first and foremost. It's all about shaping oneself in the right mould; and for that, the most important thing is to settle the interiority.

Recently, tribals in Orissa opposed a mining project. Can spirituality bring about environmentally sustainable progress?Let me give you an illustration. We have instituted Project GreenHands, the largest ecological movement in Asia which has planted 70 million trees and increased Tamil Nadu's green cover by over 7%. We each have to sustain our soil we walk on, the atmosphere we live in.. and businesses, especially when they are large, have to seek the nation's welfare. In the next 100 years, business leadership will be the most important aspect of society; and in the next 25 years, company CEOs will rule the world! In this context, business leaders will have to have the vision to move from merely personal ambition to thinking about issues of their countries, in fact the entire world!

'Greed is good' – so goes a line of a movie character that seems to represent all that the modern free-market economy allegedly stands for. Driven by greed, man has plundered nature, destroyed environment... all in the name of industrialisation and economic development. Modern man has travelled so far away from spirituality, it seems, that retracing all those missteps appears impossible. Do you agree?Greed is good: I say it as well. I say why not have it all...you want the world, then you must have that – but my greed is even greater, I want not only the world but the Creator as well! Greed is a problem only when people are kanjoos (mingy or narrow-minded) about greed – they want prosperity only for themselves and their families. My greed wants the entire world to live in prosperity and abundance, that's how big it is. It's an unabashed greed. In that sense, spirituality is still about the 'me' – but the context of 'me' is enlarged. What I, as a spiritualist, consider as 'mine', is the whole universe.

Given that modern society is busy accumulating wealth, do you think it has the time for, or the inclination towards, spirituality?Spirituality just enables one to do better what one is doing in a given amount of time...

Even when most of that time is saturated with advertising messages of sex and consumerism? To become spiritual, one has to first escape this ambience, isn't it?You don't have to escape...it's a question of whether one makes compulsive or conscious choices, really. We can make conscious choices through the spiritual process. That's where my course in inner engineering at Coimbatore helps.

Financial scams are being unearthed frequently in our country. They seem to be fairly rewarding for the people who indulge in them. How do you, a spiritualist, view that?Scams are not rewarding. The people who indulge in them go to prison. Scandals can be considered rewarding only when there is no enforcement of law. So we need to enforce laws – it's about ethics. If there is no strict enforcement of law, then people will believe that they can get away. If the laws are tighter, people will not break them.

But then, not a day passes without one business group or another being accused of illegal activities, unethical practices, corporate misgovernance, so on. Where do we stand as a nation?As a nation, we are in a state of evolution. We cannot disregard this fact. The question is how quickly we evolve to a more structured state of evolution and of how rigorously we enforce laws. We should structure things as quickly as possible. Every human being should find a way to rise to their highest level. We are trying to be a democratic society but we are essentially feudal in mindset. Also, there is loyalty among us to our families and communities but no loyalty to the nation.

And then, popular lists of top billionaires seem to reflect the ever-widening economic inequity between the haves and the have-nots. Can spirituality ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth?There are two solutions to this – we could essentially make everyone into have-nots, which is not difficult, or we could make everyone into haves. For the desirable latter option to be achieved, a lot more needs to be done. The government needs to take more bold and adventurous policy decisions. As of now, this country is largely being held up by enterprise, though, unfortunately, entrepreneurs have been largely nailed down by government policies.

How will your Coimbatore conference address this issue?We already have leaders in this country. The focus is to help them to scale up because any effort that's not reaching each person in the 1.2 billion population of India is not big enough. This 'big enough' effort is what the conference hopes to achieve.

'Insight: The DNA of Success' will be held at the Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore between November 23 and 26.