The Challenge of World Crises & our Response

Arndt Soret is a German and Swiss lawyer, living and working in Geneva, Switzerland. He does business law, however as the Co-Founder of Humanium Association, a child rights NGO (2008), is as active in the humanitarian world.

Humanium is entirely run by volunteers and it works with grassroot NGO`s who care about the poorest children across the world, mainly in India and in Africa. At Humanium, as its Managing Director, Arndt handles child rights violations across the globe in all of the current 197 countries, working with volunteer lawyers wherever needed. In the field he is active with the poorest in India and Rwanda, the 2 countries Humanium has specialized in for mental health and eradicating child labor.

Arndt says: “Without the beautiful connection to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother only little of this would have happened.”

Arndt has studied European and International Public Law at University of Cologne (Germany), Human & Children’s Right Studies, and Economic, Social & Cultural Rights at University of Geneva (Switzerland), and Leadership Program at Coaches Training Institute (San Francisco, USA). He is proficient in English, French and German, with a working knowledge of Italian and Spanish.

Devdip Ganguli completed his studies at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE, Pondicherry) in 2004, and joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as a resident immediately thereafter.

Devdip has been teaching undergraduate-level students at SAICE for almost two decades. His academic interests are wide-ranging. He offers courses on the social and political philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, as well as courses on Indian history and culture. In addition, he has a keen interest in spiritual and cultural connections between ancient India and China. He is frequently invited to speak in Universities in India and abroad on these topics, and has contributed articles to various publications. Devdip also offers courses for the Gnostic Centre, and is guest faculty at the Rashtram School of Public Leadership. 

In addition, Devdip works in one of the administrative departments of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling, surfing, learning new languages, and playing the piano.

Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation (ORF). His areas of research are economics, politics, foreign policy and the Mahabharata. Earlier, he has held leadership positions in some of India’s top newspapers and magazines, including Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and The Financial Express. He was a Vice President at Reliance Industries Ltd, and has served as a Director on the Boards of CARE India, and Financial Planning Standards Board India.

A Jefferson Fellow (Fall 2001), Gautam is a student of Sri Aurobindo and Dhrupad music. An author, his new book is ‘India 2030: The Rise of a Rajasic Nation’ (Penguin, 2021); his other books being: ‘70 Policies that Shaped India’ (ORF, 2018), ‘Tunnel of Varanavat: Mahabharat Reimagined’ (Rupa, 2016), ‘The Disrupter: Arvind Kejriwal and the Audacious Rise of the Aam Aadmi’ (Rupa, 2014), and ‘Five Decades of Decay’ (Rupa, 1997).

Kent Davis-Packard, PhD, is President & Executive Director of Women Forward International, which she launched as an initiative at the Aspen Institute in 2019.  Most recently, she initiated and developed the SAIS Women Lead curricular program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), launching a practicum program that partners students with public and private organizations on research that advances women.

Dr. Davis-Packard taught Johns Hopkins SAIS’s first courses on global women’s issues: “Transcending Culture: Women as Agents of Change in the International Order” and “Women, Peace, and Security: Moving Beyond the Myth” as well as U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East. She is Features Editor for the Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism journal based at the London School of Economics and a member of the Advisory Board of Kallion, an organization that elevates leadership through the humanities.

Dr. Davis-Packard received her Ph.D. in international relations and Middle East studies and master’s degree in conflict management and economics from Johns Hopkins SAIS. She has reported on such topics as family law reform, sectarianism and extremism, the women’s movement, labor, and language politics for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. She is fluent in French and able in Arabic and Spanish. She has studied or worked in Bangladesh, Bosnia, Croatia, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Qatar, Senegal, Syria, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Her book on contemporary Islamic thought is forthcoming.

Pravir Malik, PhD, is the founder of Deep Order Technologies (USA), and has held a number of leadership positions over the years (at Zappos, BSR, AT Kearney). Organisational Sciences Consulting that includes promoting greater resilience at every level, generating sustainable wealth, is a part of his work. Over the last three decades he has been developing a unified theory and mathematics of organization, emphasizing a whole systems approach integrating individual, organizational, economic, social, environmental and evolutionary dimensions. In recent years he has been intimately involved with computer modeling of complex organizational, economic, and world systems to help different stakeholders practically navigate and understand possible futures. 

Pravir is also a regular contributor to Forbes and recently completed a ten-part series on the creation of sustainable wealth through interpreting environments as complex adaptive systems. In 2020 he also designed and delivered a multi-part Organizational Sciences Certification program with Forbes that was attended by executives from 250 companies. This program included a path-breaking approach to bringing about organizational change by leveraging light and was derived from Pravir’s 10-book series on Cosmology of Light. He has deep interest in core technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, genetics, and transhumanism. He sees that given their current trajectory of development they can easily compromise sustainable global development, and therefore has written extensively about alternative technological possibilities in each of these areas. He is a global citizen who has lived, worked, and been educated in many parts of the world.