"Engineering Dharma: Building Your Path with Purpose, Strategy & Skill"

Had the privilege to speak with the 2025 engineering batch at SMVITM, Udupi — a region known not just for academic promise but for its deep cultural and spiritual roots. In curating this talk, I chose the title “Engineering Dharma: Building Your Path with Purpose, Strategy & Skill” to bridge timeless wisdom with modern career challenges.

The term Dharma isn’t just a spiritual ideal — it’s about right action, inner alignment, and responsibility, which are as relevant in today’s boardrooms and workstations as they were on the battlefields of our epics. Through the lens of mythology, I introduced students to metaphors from the Mahabharata and Ramayana — from Arjuna’s internal confusion and Hanuman’s forgotten potential to Ravana’s ego and the strategic contrasts between Rama and Krishna.

Engineering students today face intense pressure — placements, skill upgrades, career choices — but little time is given to introspection or inner alignment. That’s where mythology, when treated as metaphor, becomes powerful. It helps students look within, embrace ambiguity, and develop a career compass guided not just by industry trends but by clarity, curiosity, humility, and purpose.

This session wasn’t about religion or ritual. It was about relevance — helping young technologists become not just better engineers, but better individuals.

Individuals who don’t just build machines — but who also build themselves.

#EngineeringDharma #MythologyAndMetaphor #CareerDesign #PurposeDrivenTech #HirifyAI #FutureReady Hirify.ai Chethan Raj (Cr) WanderMonk