Ex-banker turned Hindu monk urges Wall Street to meditate
Rasanath Das, a former New York investment banker who gave it all up to become a Hindu monk, was recently spending his Sunday afternoons leading Occupy Wall Street protesters in meditation until police cleared their camp at Zuccotti Park this week.
The 32-year-old monk isn’t sure now where his next session will be. He’ll keep following the protesters to offer meditation sessions, though, convinced they will only roll back the inequality they see around them if they find equanimity deep inside.
“Anger won’t solve anything,” he told Reuters. “We have to work from the heart… there is so much distrust now.”
Das has been a discreet presence at the protests, leading sessions of only 5 to 7 minutes before making way for other religious leaders to preach at a weekly interfaith service. What he doesn’t tell is an unlikely life story that explains how he ended up in Lower Manhattan.
A native of Mumbai, Das studied at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) there and moved to the United States in 2000 to work as a consultant with the accounting firm Deloitte. After earning a masters of business administration (MBA) at Cornell, he started at Bank of America in 2006.
His specialty was the technology, media and telecoms sector and he dealt in so-called structured products, including mortgage-backed securities — “the things that blew up, the toxic products” as he put it in a telephone interview.
Das had studied this market but remained baffled by it even after he began trading. “I saw people I considered much smarter than I was, and they really believed in them, so I didn’t open my mouth,” he said.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Why doesn’t the article mention anything about his practices, such as worship of the God known as Krishna, vegetarian diet, reading of the ancient Vedas? Readers should know the specifics of what Rasanath Das is doing with his life that he finds better then a $200,000/year job on Wall Street. Incidentally, there are many Hindu worshipers who don’t become full time Monks but work at productive jobs throughout the country while maintaining their spiritual practice and families. Both are to be praised and spotlighted in an expanded Reuters article.