Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar, known to followers as Gurudev or Sri Sri, is an Indian spiritual teacher who founded the Art of Living Foundation in 1981 and co-founded the International Association for Human Values. Alongside its meditation and breathing courses, the foundation runs a large volunteer-based social programme, and Shankar has taken on a personal role in conflict mediation.

The foundation's service work is organised around free schooling, rural development, prisons, disaster relief, water and farming. Its education programme reports over 1,350 free schools; the Prison SMART programme, begun in 1992, teaches breathing and meditation to inmates and has run in dozens of countries; and its disaster response is structured in three stages of immediate relief, trauma counselling and long-term rehabilitation, deployed in more than 150 operations. River and water-body rejuvenation, training for farmers in natural farming methods, vocational training for women and skill development for young people across several hundred districts make up the rest.

Shankar has repeatedly acted as an intermediary in armed conflicts. He visited Iraq in 2007 and 2008 at the invitation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and returned in 2014 to relief camps at Erbil, convening a meeting on the position of Yazidis and other minorities. In June 2015 he met delegations from the Colombian government and the FARC during the Havana talks and pressed the guerrilla leadership to pursue its aims by non-violent means, for which Colombia's House of Representatives gave him the Order of Democracy Simon Bolivar. He was involved in dialogue in Venezuela in 2019, and his organisation has worked for many years in India's north-east, where the chief minister of Manipur credited him with helping bring about the surrender of 68 militants from eleven groups in August 2017. He launched the South Asian Forum for Peace at a conference in Jammu in 2016.

The foundation has held consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since 1996, and Shankar has addressed United Nations events in Geneva and New York, including the first observance of World Meditation Day in December 2024. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour, in 2016.

His public statements have at times drawn criticism, notably a 2012 remark that government schools were breeding grounds for Naxalism, which he later clarified, and a 2018 comment about the Ayodhya dispute.[3][4]