The Bhagvad Gita CD-ROM
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He's been known as a prolific researcher and writer who's authored books on subjects ranged right the way through from capital markets to Indian scripture. And after taking an MBA from New York University and an MS from Columbia along the way, and then spending years as a senior executive with various multinational corporations, the very Charming Ram K Piparaiya is an e-Publisher today!

It's all about Indusvista Publications, the new division of Aridhi Hi-Tech Limited, Ram's fifteen-year old company headquartered in Mumbai (India). And that in turn is all about the return of Ram's son Rishi to the company as Director (multimedia and e-commerce) after picking up an MBA from Cornell University, a BA from the University of Rochester, and broad executive exposure across North America, Europe and Asia.

While looking to get much deeper into production and marketing of multimedia publications, this is Aridhi's first CD-title. Not surprisingly therefore, the company's looking for collaborations with publishers, distributors, artists and content developers from around the world to work on more subjects related to India's cultural and spiritual heritage.

So then what's this CD all about?

There's a complete original text in Sanskrit with 500 pages of English translation and explanation, more than a hundred images and over 5 hours of chants, narration and originally scored instrumental music.

Basic content is structured around an amalgamation of insights from commentaries by eight famous thinkers - Sri Aurobindo, Swami Chinmayananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Sivananda, Swami Tapasyananda, Sadhu T.L.Vaswani and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Basic messages: Work selflessly and worship God in any form; happiness comes from Wisdom about the divine Self within. The focus is upon "being relevant to modern times, appealing to persons of all faiths, all nationalities and all age-groups",.. but especially "NRIs and Foreigners".

The CD works smooth as silk on PCs and Macs, doesn't require any installation, and has stand-alone AV sections for quick reference and run through. There's detailed text for in-depth study (with text-search), and there's also some pure audio for "inspirational listening".

The rationale behind it all is that "Indian culture, heritage and spirituality are very topical subjects all over the world". And the business perspective seems to be that there's "global demand for CD-titles on such subjects not only among people of Indian origin but from persons of all religions and ethnicity."

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below: some screen-grabs from the CD

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