Counselling is an ever-expanding universe. Since we live in a world characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA World), pressures are building on our multi-faceted roles. The need for counselling is experienced for parents, teachers, administrators, and service-providers. A prominent sector of counselling service is the organizational context. With an increasing influx of women into our work force, the employees’ population presents a formidable challenge. The multi-dimensionality of problems and multi-cultural context of working population the scenarios become further complicated. Fortunately, the growth of knowledge and multiplication of techniques has offered immense possibilities. The advance of neuroscience has added insights to our remediation process. Counselling principles customized to employees’ needs constitute a valuable tool box in our immediate surroundings. With the hope of helping management students, I have attempted the introductory text. However, general readers would also have the benefit of understanding their roles as informal counsellors.

Western Odisha, marked by a rich and diverse assemblage of music, dance, oral narratives, and ritual practices, constitutes one of India’s most significant reservoirs of folk traditions. Sustained through voice, rhythm, movement, and collective memory, these traditions form the core of the region’s cultural identity. They function not merely as aesthetic expressions but as carriers of shared history, spiritual belief systems, and social consciousness. Despite their cultural depth and continuing vitality, the folk traditions of Western Odisha have largely remained on the periphery of academic inquiry, often under-documented and insufficiently theorized within mainstream cultural studies. This volume seeks to address this gap by bringing the living folk traditions of Western Odisha into sharper scholarly focus. It establishes a critical platform for the documentation, interpretation, and re-evaluation of these living traditions within contemporary academic discourse. It explores the multifaceted landscape of the region’s folk culture through an interdisciplinary framework that draws on literature, history, anthropology, musicology, and performance studies. The essays collected here examine folk traditions as dynamic and evolving practices that respond to social change, operating as forms of creative expression, social critique, and cultural resilience in an era shaped by globalization and expanding media ecologies.