At the Youth Leadership Conclave, a Dialogue with Lord Krish Raval on Leadership and the Self

Acharya Prashant addressed the UK India Youth Leadership Conclave 2026 on 1 June, an event convened by NISAU, the body representing Indian students and alumni across the United Kingdom, and was met with a warm reception from an audience largely of young people drawn from universities and early careers.

The core of the programme was an extended exchange between Acharya Prashant and Lord Krish Raval, Member of the House of Lords, ranging across leadership, education, technology and self-awareness. Against a conception of leadership built on influence and control, Acharya Prashant argued that the deepest problems confronting humanity begin within the individual rather than in external conditions, and that genuine leadership therefore begins with self-understanding before any attempt to change others.

He pressed a distinction that ran through the session, between pain and suffering. Circumstances, he said, can inflict pain, but suffering appears only when the ego takes that pain as its own and builds an identity around it. Drawing on the figure of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he called on young people to choose courage over comfort and to hold truth and love above self-preservation. What the present moment asks of humanity, he added, is not further technological acceleration alone but self-education and right understanding at scale.

The conclave follows the opening stretch of Acharya Prashant’s tour of Britain. He began at the University of Cambridge, and on 31 May he held his first London public session, on the Avadhuta Gita, which the Foundation reported reached a substantial online audience.