(Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran, Associate Professor of Marketing, IFMR Graduate School of Business, Krea University)
Historically, there has been a lot of research done around the concept of hope. For someone in distress, providing support to cope with the situation with strong words of hope is an important part of human activity in relationships, and the interventions range from a basic pep-talk to counselling and psychotherapy. Self-help books were trying to address this through tools like storytelling. In the western world, there are several self-help books like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Tough Times Never Last but Tough People Do and so on, that are aimed at people who need stories of hope during their times of distress. These best-selling books cover positive stories related to a range of topics like love, parenting, death and so on. This paper delves into some of the traditional Indic practices of providing hope during a state of distress. This will have managerial implications in Human Resource Management (Organizational Behaviour) and Marketing (Consumer Behaviour).
A version of this paper was presented in the IIM Kozhikode International conference on Globalizing Indian thought
Keywords: Hope, Indic Texts, Management, Positive Psychology, Storytelling