What the latest neuroscience reveals about what our children are losing, and how five quiet days of Bharatiya cultural education might begin to give it back.

The Number That Should Stop Every Parent In Their Tracks!

The average human attention span has collapsed from twelve seconds at the turn of the millennium to roughly eight seconds today. The goldfish, that traditional symbol of our easy condescension, sits at nine. We are no longer the senior species in the sustained-attention department.

This is not opinion. It is now one of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology. A 2026 study led by Johns Hopkins University and the Child Mind Institute, covering 18,500 children across eleven countries, found that children who spend more than four hours a day on screens experience a 34 percent steeper drop in sustained attention during cognitive testing than their lower-screen peers. Carnegie Mellon researchers have shown that the modern brain now needs nearly twenty-seven minutes to fully refocus after a single digital interruption. A landmark study published in Scientific Reports demonstrated that simply reading on a smartphone, compared to paper, suppresses the body’s natural deep breathing reflex, overstimulates the prefrontal cortex, and measurably lowers reading comprehension. The act of reading on a phone is not the same act as reading on a page. The brain knows.

Closer to home, the Indian Academy of Pediatrics warns that 39 to 44 percent of Indian adolescents already meet the clinical threshold for smartphone addiction. The figure is intimately correlated with depression, sleep disorders, and academic decline. In 2024, a survey of 1,543 Indian families across Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bengaluru found that 76 percent of children, three out of four, wished their parents would put down their phones during family time. Over 90 percent wished some social media apps had never been invented at all. Our children are not asking for more access. They are quietly asking for less.

Feedback from Happy Parents

What Attention Is, and Why Its Loss Is Not Only Cognitive

Swami Vivekananda said: “To me the very essence of education is concentration of mind, not the collecting of facts. If I had to do my education over again, and had any voice in the matter, I would not study facts at all. I would develop the power of concentration and detachment, and then with a perfect instrument I could collect facts at will.”¹ 

Attention, in this view, is not merely a tool we use to read a book or finish a homework assignment. It is the very substrate on which a human being becomes capable of self-knowledge, of relationship, of meaning. A child who cannot attend cannot listen. A child who cannot listen cannot understand. A child who cannot understand cannot connect. A child who cannot connect grows into an adult who is lonely in a way no amount of social media will heal.

What we are watching, in the data, is not a learning problem. It is a foundational human problem. The capacity to be present is being eroded before our children have the chance to know what it feels like.

The Quiet Inheritance We Are Forfeiting

Bhārata’s pedagogical traditions assumed something the modern educational system has almost entirely forgotten. How a child learns shapes who they become. The Upaniṣads describe learning as a threefold practice. śravaṇa, listening with full attention. manana, turning the teaching over in reflection. nididhyāsana, sustained contemplation until the truth is known directly, not merely held intellectually. Each stage requires longer, deeper, slower attention than the last. The whole architecture of becoming a wise human being was built on the assumption that a child could sit still, listen all the way through, and then sit with what they had heard.

We are now, for the first time in the long human story, raising a generation that cannot sit through śravaṇa. Not because they are lazy. Because their nervous systems have been reshaped, hour by hour, by an industry whose business model is the manufacture of compulsive distraction.

This is the part that does not show up in screen-time statistics. The loss is not only of minutes. It is of the inheritance.

What Five Days Cannot Do, and What They Can

Let me say this plainly. Five days at a summer camp will not undo a decade of dopamine. Anyone who promises that is selling you something.

But five days can do something else. A single, vivid, embodied experience of an alternative way of being can plant a saṃskāra, a latent impression, that the child returns to for the rest of their life. The first time a child experiences ten unbroken minutes of maunam, real silence, and notices that the silence is not empty but full, something happens that no app can subsequently take from them. They remember the taste. They look for it again. The seed is planted.

This is the modest, honest claim of the work we do at Sanskritishaala.

A Day at Sanskritishaala

Sanskritishaala is, at its heart, an experiment in what Bharatiya cultural education looks like when it is given five uninterrupted days to do its work. The camp runs from May 4 through May 8, 2026, at our space in Gubbalala, Bengaluru. Children aged six to fifteen come for the day, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon. They do not touch a screen for those six hours. What they do instead is the whole point.

A morning at Sanskritishaala does not look like a classroom. The day begins with the children sitting on the floor in a quiet circle, breathing together, before a single word is spoken. They learn that the day has a form, that the form begins in stillness, that stillness is itself a teacher. By mid-morning they may be in the library, three children huddled around a single table, working on a question together, surrounded by walls of actual books. They are reading whole pages instead of feeds, and they feel the difference in their own minds.

At lunch, the children sit at long tables and share food from thali plates, laughing across the table at things no algorithm chose for them. The communal meal is not a break from the teaching. It is the teaching. Anna, food, has its own dharmic weight in the tradition. Children who eat together remember each other. They build friendships that have nothing to do with profile pictures, the kind that a child carries forward into the world the way an earlier generation carried childhood neighbours.

The afternoon brings the embodied work. Yoga Nidrā in a quiet hall. The language of dance teaches them the fundamentals of communication as well as expressing their emotions in a productive way. Small dialogue circles where the children practice listening to one another finish their sentences, then disagree, then recover the thread. There is cooking, illustration, debate. There is also, quite deliberately, time to do nothing for a while, which is where original thought is born and where a child first meets their own mind without help.

Across the five days, twenty-one quiet arts are practiced. The art of conversation. The art of imagination. The art of thinking clearly. The art of communication. Understanding one’s own nature. The Questionarium, the art of asking the right question. The art of debate and dialogue. The art of conscious breathing. The art of illustrating ideas. The art of endless creativity. Dream and build. Yoga Nidrā. The art of lucid dreaming. The language of dance. The art of visualization. The art of cooking. The art of relaxation. The art of giving and receiving feedback. The art of silence. The art of concentration. And the art of doing nothing, for a while.

Each of these is, in its own way, a direct reversal of something the screen has trained out. Conscious breathing reverses the suppressed-sigh pattern researchers found in smartphone readers. Sustained listening reverses the four-second cycle of feed scrolling. Real conversation, with its pauses and disagreements and recovered threads, reverses the algorithmic curation of opinion. Yoga Nidrā restores the parasympathetic balance constant stimulation has eroded. None of this is presented as therapy. It is presented as joy. We call them fun activities with hidden education and wisdom. The fun is on the surface. The education and the wisdom work underneath, in the tissue of what the day actually feels like.

This is how children should be taught. Not only by lecture. By living the form. By eating together, sitting together, breathing together, dreaming together. Satyam, the truth of what is being lost. Śivam, the divine good that the tradition knows how to cultivate. Sundaram, the beauty of children, laughing in a circle, learning who they are.

The Question Every Parent Eventually Has to Answer

If you are reading this, you already know the situation. You see your child’s eyes when the screen comes out and when the screen goes away. You have watched the dinner conversation thin to nothing. You have wondered, quietly, whether the child you are raising will be capable of the full human inheritance, the capacity to love deeply, to think clearly, to sit with another person and really be there, or whether something essential is being silently exchanged for the convenience of a quiet evening.

You are not alone in wondering. Three out of four Indian children are wondering the same thing about their parents.

The question is not whether to fight technology. That fight cannot be won, and it is the wrong fight. The question is whether, alongside the inevitable digital fluency our children need to function in the world, we are also giving them the inner technology, the trained attention, the cultivated breath, the practiced silence, that will let them remain whole inside that digital world.

Schools will not give them this. Tutors will not. Parents alone, no matter how loving, often cannot, because the household itself is now soaked in the same waters. What the tradition called the gurukula, a small, intensive, embodied environment in which a child learns by doing alongside others learning by doing, is the form that works for this kind of teaching. It always has been.

Sanskritishaala is, in its modest way, an attempt to keep that form alive.

A Personal Note

The Sanskritishaala summer camp begins on Monday, May 4, 2026, and runs through Friday, May 8. It is open to children aged six to fifteen. If you cannot make Monday for some unavoidable reason, you are welcome to join us on Tuesday, May 5. The children adjust. The doors stay open. To register, please WhatsApp us at 89512 84041. The location is #14, Sri Ranga, Brindavan Street, 80 Ft Road, Kanakapura Road, Gubbalala, Bengaluru 560062.

If you cannot come this year, that is also alright. The practice of maunam in your own home, ten minutes a day, with your child sitting beside you, costs nothing and may change everything. The traditions are not jealous. The seed is the same seed.

But if you can come, come. Five days is not very long. And the seed your child carries home from this week may be the one they reach for, twenty years from now, when their own child is sitting in front of a screen and they need to remember that another way of being a human is possible.

That memory has to start somewhere.

Let it start here.

Sources: Johns Hopkins University & Child Mind Institute (2026)  ·  Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute (2026)  ·  Honma et al., Scientific Reports / Nature (2022)  ·  Indian Academy of Pediatrics  ·  Vivo India & CyberMedia Research (2024)

The post The Eight-Second Mind first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

Walk through any modern shopping district and observe what is actually happening. A new beverage arrives, and the lifestyle is built around it. A new gadget launches, and the lifestyle bends to accommodate it. A new fabric, a new device, a new convenience — and slowly, almost without anyone noticing, the rhythms of an entire generation reshape themselves to fit whatever was just engineered in a factory and pushed through a marketing funnel.

We have not stopped to notice what has happened. The product is now driving the lifestyle. Industry decides what to make, and millions of people quietly reorganise their lives — their food, their clothing, their homes, their leisure, even their inner sense of who they are — around objects that were never designed with their actual life in mind.

This is the inversion at the heart of our crisis. It is also the precise reason why decades of work on “sustainable products” has failed to make the world sustainable.

The Inversion We Must Reverse

The honest sequence is the opposite of what we practice. Lifestyle must come first. Lifestyle must be sustainable. And then — and only then — industry’s job is to design products that support and maintain that sustainable lifestyle.

A “sustainable product” sold inside an unsustainable lifestyle is a contradiction. An electric car parked outside a six-thousand-square-foot home heated to twenty-two degrees in the middle of winter, owned by someone who flies twelve times a year, is not sustainability. It is the appearance of sustainability layered onto a way of living that prakṛti cannot underwrite. The product is innocent. The lifestyle is the problem. Not that anyone of us is free of this contradiction. But unless we begin to see the illusion, we will not do anything to solve the problem.

When we keep designing greener versions of the wrong things, we do not solve anything. We simply extend the life of an arrangement that was never built to last.

What Civilisations Knew About Place

Long before sustainability became a corporate vocabulary, our civilisations knew something subtler. The way human beings live cannot be separated from the land on which they live.

Consider the deserts of Rajasthan. Walk through any old village in Marwar or Jaisalmer and you will find an entire civilisation built around the scarcity of water. Stepwells. Johads. Khadins. Lime-plastered homes that breathe. Jharokhā windows positioned for cross-ventilation. Garments woven loose and light to reflect the sun. A cuisine built around millet because millet asks little of the soil. Festivals that mark the monsoon as something sacred. None of this was an accident. It was lifestyle as a careful, multi-generational answer to what the land could give.

Now travel north. In Himachal, in Uttarakhand, in the high villages of Kinnaur, homes are built of deodar and slate, oriented to the sun, with low ceilings to hold warmth. The diet is dense, fermented, slow-cooked. Terraced fields follow the contours of the slope rather than fighting them. Forests are woven into ritual life — a particular grove belongs to a particular devatā and cannot be cut. Streams are protected because the village’s drinking water depends on them.

These are not “lifestyles” in the magazine sense. These are intelligent, embodied responses to ecology, refined over centuries. The clothes, the food, the architecture, the rituals, the calendar, the festivals — every element exists in conversation with the kṣetra, the field of land it belongs to.

What did industry do in such a society? It served. The potter, the weaver, the metalsmith, the carpenter, the dyer — each took from prakṛti only what their craft required, returned the byproducts to the soil, and produced objects that fit a lifestyle already in equilibrium with the land. Industry was the hand. Lifestyle was the body. Land was the breath.

We have severed all three.

The Five Conditions of a Dharmic Enterprise

Before any company can produce a single sustainable product, it must first become a particular kind of organisation. Not a “responsible” company in the ESG-checklist sense, but something deeper. At least Five conditions must be present (this is by no means exhaustive).

One: A holistic, systems-level understanding of society. A dharmic enterprise must see the society it serves as a living organism — not a market, not a demographic, not a target segment. It must understand the structure and make-up of that society, the purpose of its customs, the meaning of its rituals, the function of its festivals. A company that does not understand why a Rajasthani woman keeps a particular vrata or why a Coorgi family worships a particular ancestor cannot truly serve either of them. It can only sell to them.

Two: The intention to do good and to do no harm. This is the dharmic version of the Hippocratic oath, applied to industry. Behind every product decision, there must be a sincere intention — not a marketing claim — to benefit the society and to sustain it across generations. Intention is not soft. It is upstream of every operational choice that follows from it.

Three: A self-conception as an integral part of the society and of nature. Most companies see themselves as actors upon a society and upon nature — extracting, producing, selling, externalising. A dharmic enterprise sees itself as a part of both. It is one organ in a larger body. The health of the body and the health of the organ are not separable propositions.

Four: An understanding that the relationship is symbiotic. Symbiosis is not partnership. Partnership is a contract; symbiosis is biology. The company breathes what the society and nature exhale. The society and nature breathe what the company exhales. If the company exhales only carbon, microplastic, and addiction, the body will eventually expel the organ.

Five: A radically expanded definition of stakeholders. Stakeholders are not only shareholders, employees, customers, and regulators. The stakeholders of a dharmic enterprise include the society it operates within, the culture it draws from, the civilization it inherits, the rivers that pass through its supply chain, the mountains it mines or spares, the forests that surround its factories, and every living being that depends on those rivers, mountains and forests. The river is at the table. The forest votes. The generation yet unborn has a seat.

These five conditions are not idealism. They are the prerequisite intelligence of an enterprise that intends to last.

The Five Tests Every Product Must Pass

Once such a company exists, every product it puts into the world must pass through five filters. These are simple. They are also unforgiving.

One: Does it do no harm? Not “less harm than the alternative.” Not “harm offset by carbon credits.” No harm — to soil, water, air, body, mind, family, or community. If a product cannot pass this first test, no amount of clever positioning will save it downstream.

Two: Does it support a regional lifestyle as it actually is? What can help someone in the Rajasthani desert live better — better, not differently — without breaking the cultural fabric that has kept them well for centuries? What can help a family in Kinnaur, in Coorg, on the Konkan coast, strengthen the wisdom they already carry, rather than replacing it with an imported template? A product that requires the customer to abandon their tradition in order to use it has failed before it ever shipped.

Three: Does it refuse to exploit natural resources? Aparigraha — non-grasping — is not only a personal virtue. It is also an industrial principle. Take what is necessary. Take it slowly. Take it where it can be replaced. Refuse the logic of extraction-as-default.

Four: Does it leave the natural environment intact? No deforestation upstream. No microplastic downstream. No toxic effluent in the river the village drinks from. No noise pollution that drives birds from the orchard. The product’s full life-cycle, from mine to landfill, must leave the land able to do what it was already doing before the product arrived.

Five: Does it give back at least double of what it takes? This is the Yajña principle. In the Vedic worldview, every act of taking from prakṛti must be answered with a greater offering back. A tree felled meant ten planted. A bull worked meant a temple festival in its honour. A river drawn from meant a tank desilted. A truly dharmic product is regenerative by design — it returns to the soil, the water, the community and the culture more than it ever extracted from them.

This last test is the one that separates dharmic innovation from every other kind of green-washed effort. Net-zero is the floor, not the ceiling. The ceiling is regeneration.

Yajña: The Logic of Reciprocity Industry Has Forgotten

The Bhagavad Gītā describes a beautiful cycle.

अन्नाद्भवन्ति भूतानि पर्जन्यादन्नसम्भव: | यज्ञाद्भवति पर्जन्यो यज्ञ: कर्मसमुद्भव: || 14||

annād bhavanti bhūtāni parjanyād anna-sambhavaḥ yajñād bhavati parjanyo yajñaḥ karma-samudbhavaḥ

All living beings subsist on food, and food is produced by rains. Rains come from the performance of sacrifice, and sacrifice is produced by the performance of prescribed duties.

Annāt bhavanti bhūtāni — from food, beings come into existence. Parjanyāt anna sambhavaḥ — from rain, food is born. Yajñāt bhavati parjanyaḥ — from yajña, rain comes. Yajñaḥ karma samudbhavaḥ — yajña arises from action.

Read in industrial terms, this is a complete circular economy described two and a half millennia before the phrase was ever coined. Action that includes offering — yajña — keeps the cycle of nourishment turning. Action that takes without offering — what we today call extraction — breaks the cycle.

The modern industrial mind treats prakṛti as inventory. The dharmic mind treats prakṛti as a relationship. One can be drawn down to zero. The other is renewed precisely by being honoured.

Every product that leaves a dharmic enterprise must carry within it some quiet trace of this logic. A textile that returns to the earth as compost. A piece of architecture that cools without electricity. A food that rebuilds the soil it grew in. A device whose end-of-life is a ritual of return, not a problem of waste.

What Dharmic Innovation Actually Looks Like

This is where our innovation, our brainpower, our research budgets, our engineering talent, our capital and our ambition must now turn.

Not toward making the next clever product whose lifestyle we then have to invent.

Toward studying — patiently, humbly, deeply — the lifestyles that have already been refined by communities living inside their landscapes for centuries. Toward asking: what would help this Rajasthani family carry water more easily without abandoning the well? What would help this Kinnauri household stay warmer in February without burning more deodar? What would help this Coorgi farmer keep her coffee profitable without poisoning the stream her village drinks from? What would help this fisherwoman in coastal Karnataka preserve her catch without plastic refrigeration she cannot afford and the sea cannot absorb? Of course, the questions of feasibility, profitability etc will come and we need to address that. But it is still a design problem. Make it a dharmic design problem. Add the dharmic boundaries, constraints and requirements. And see what you get. Try.

These are the questions that should occupy our R&D laboratories. These are the briefs that should sit in our design studios. These are the problem statements that should guide our venture capital.

This is dharmic innovation: innovation that respects the natural boundaries of prakṛti, understands the limits of what she can provide, and aims to regenerate whenever something is taken. It is innovation in service of life, not in service of growth alone.

It is also, incidentally, the only kind of innovation that has any future.

The Industry We Have Yet to Build

We do not need more sustainable products inside an unsustainable civilisation. We need an industry whose entire purpose is to support sustainable lifestyles inside a regenerating civilisation.

The companies that understand this — and choose to reorganise themselves around it — will build the next great industries of this century. They will build them not by chasing markets, but by serving life. Not by extracting from nature, but by partnering with her. Not by inventing new desires, but by honouring old wisdom and improving it gently, where improvement is genuinely needed. A lot of people immediately respond – but this is too idealistic. Is it really practical? etc. It is like making holes in your boat to access the water from the sea!

The shift is not technological. The shift is in the orientation of the human being who runs the company, who designs the product, who funds the venture. When that orientation turns toward dharma, everything downstream of that turn — the supply chain, the product specification, the marketing language, the after-sales relationship — begins to align of its own accord.

Industry can return to its rightful place. Not as the driver of lifestyle, but as its quiet, skilful, reverent servant. The hand that serves the body that breathes the land.

That is the industry our civilisation knew how to build.

That is the industry our planet is now asking us to remember.

Dharayati Iti Dharmaha. And Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitaha!

The post The Great Inversion first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

Before anything was, there was water.

The oldest hymn of the Ṛgveda, the Nāsadīya Sūkta, describes that moment — or rather, that moment before moments:

tama āsīt tamasā gūḷham agre

praketaṁ salilaṁ sarvam ā idam

Darkness was concealed within darkness; all this was undifferentiated water — salilam — unillumined, unmanifest, yet pregnant with everything that was to come.

Before the sun. Before the word. Before even the gods. Only water.

And when the cosmos finally took form, what does the Vedic imagination offer us as its foundational image? Nārāyaṇa — reclining upon the serpent Śeṣa, afloat on the infinite ocean, Lakṣmī pressing his feet, the lotus rising from his navel, and Brahmā seated on that lotus beginning the work of creation. The universe is not born on solid ground. It is born on, and in, and through water.

The Agni Purāṇa explains the name Nārāyaṇa itself with an etymology that stops the heart. The waters are called nārāḥ because they are born of the Supreme Being, and because his first motion was in them, he is known as Nārāyaṇa — “he whose resting-place is the waters.”

Let me sit with this. Nārāyaṇa. Nārā-ayana. He who moves in the waters. He whose home is the waters. He who is, in some ultimate sense, the waters themselves.

Begin not with an argument but with this image. The Blue Lord asleep on the cosmic ocean, dreaming the universe into being. Not as mythology. Not as metaphor. But as revelation. After many years of sitting with the Veda, the Purāṇas, and the quiet daily rituals of our tradition, I have come to believe the ṛṣis were telling us something our modern minds have almost completely forgotten — that water is not a substance. Water is a mode of chaitanya itself, wearing the veil of liquidity.

A Pradakṣiṇā Around the Word Jala

What follows is not an argument but a pradakṣiṇā. We will walk, circumambulation-style, seven times around this one word — jala — and on each round see a different face of it.

First, water as cosmos — the primordial ocean from which creation emerges and into which it dissolves.

Second, water as civilization — how the geography of a people shapes the temperament of their mind, and why our dharmic tradition is, at its heart, a river-bank tradition.

Third, water as chaitanya — of rivers as living beings, not metaphors of life but life itself — and of the gulf that opens between the English word “consciousness” and the Sanskrit word chaitanya.

Fourth, water as sacrament — arghyam at the three sandhyās, and the full architecture of the Vedic homa, in which every one of the pañca-mahābhūtas is given its own role.

Fifth, the Sapta-Sa — seven Sanskrit words that together form the inner map of jala-tattva. A mnemonic for your pocket.

Sixth, what it actually means to “be like water” — a phrase the modern world has received in fragments and forgotten the depth of.

And finally, a short jala-dhyāna — a water meditation. Because understanding is one thing. Tasting is another.

I. Water as Cosmos: The Primordial Ocean of the Ṛgveda

The Vedic mind was not primitive. It was seeing. And what it saw was that the outer and the inner are one continuous landscape.

When the ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha sang to the āpo devīḥ — the divine waters — he was not composing poetry about the Indus or the Sarasvatī alone. He was singing to something vaster. Listen to the opening of his great hymn in the seventh maṇḍala:

āpo asmān mātaraḥ śundhayantu

“May the waters, our mothers, purify us.”

Not “may the rivers cleanse our bodies.” Not “may the rain nourish our crops.” Mothers. The waters are called our mothers. Read this slowly. The ṛṣi is saying something ontological. He is saying we come out of the waters, we are made of the waters, and we return into the waters.

Sri Aurobindo, in his luminous essay The Seven Rivers, reminds us that the sapta sindhavaḥ of the Veda are not the geographical rivers of the Punjab. They are, he says, the seven streams of one conscious existence — what he calls the floods of the higher consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from the plane of immortality. They are the same waters the ṛṣis knew as madhumān ūrmiḥ — the honeyed wave — and ghṛtasya dhārāḥ — the streams of clarity. They carry within them soma, the nectar of bliss. They are, he tells us plainly, the waters of the vast Truth, ṛtaṁ bṛhat, and they establish for man the supreme good, which is the felicity of the divine existence.

Seven. Always seven. Seven rivers, seven oceans, seven islands, seven lokas, seven chakras, seven sages, seven vāṇīs — the seven creative Words of the goddess Vāk. The Garuḍa Purāṇa describes the earth floating like a boat upon water, ringed by seven continents, each continent girdled by its own ocean, each ocean twice as vast as the land it enfolds. This is not geography. This is cosmology dressed as geography. Seven is the rhythm of completion in the Vedic imagination, and water is the element that keeps repeating itself in that rhythm.

The whole spiritual work, in the Vedic vision, is to open a passage through which these higher waters may flow — to become, as the ṛṣis put it, one in whom the rivers flow downward from the heavens. Indra’s cosmic task, the slaying of Vṛtra, is precisely this: to break the coverer, the hoarder, the one who holds the waters back, so that the seven rivers may come down to water the earth-consciousness of mortals.

Every drop of water you have ever touched is, in its deepest nature, a descending stream of the infinite. The rain that falls on your rooftop in Bengaluru. The tumbler on your bedside table. The Gaṅgā-jala in your family’s pūjā room. The tears that came unbidden at your grandmother’s funeral. All of it — all of it — is the same water upon which Nārāyaṇa sleeps.

When our Purāṇas tell us that Gaṅgā flows from the feet of Viṣṇu, that Śiva catches her in his matted locks to break her terrible velocity, that she washes away sin and carries the souls of the departed across the gulf of death — this is not superstition. This is a staggeringly sophisticated cosmology encoded in the language of story. And these make great infographics!

The Vāyu Purāṇa says that Gaṅgā’s flow covers the firmament for sixty thousand yojanas, that she falls first on the peaks of Mount Meru, that she splits into streams and irrigates all directions. The uncountable stars of the Milky Way — what our tradition calls the ākāśa-gaṅgā — are her shimmering body suspended in the sky. She is tripathagā — she who walks the three paths. Heaven. Earth. Pātāla. One goddess. Three worlds. A single flowing thread of water stitching the cosmos together.

Our tradition gives us two exquisite etymologies for her name. Gamayati bhagavat-padam iti gaṅgā — she is called Gaṅgā because she carries the soul to the feet of God. And: gamyate prāpyate mokṣārthibhir iti gaṅgā — she is the one who is sought by those who desire liberation.

The river is the road. The water is the way.

This is why the dying in our tradition are brought, if at all possible, to her banks. Not because the river is a magical sewer that mechanically washes away sin. But because she is the conscious current by which the soul is lifted from one shore of existence to the next. The Kauṣītakī Upaniṣad even tells us that those who depart this world go first to the moon, and the Purāṇas say the river Gaṅgā is herself the water of the moon descending — which is why Śiva, who bears the crescent moon on his head, is the only one who can receive her torrent and hold it without being swept away.

II. Water as Civilization: Why the Ṛṣis Chose the Riverbank

From the cosmic, let me turn to the civilizational. A question I have been sitting with for many years:

Why did our ṛṣis choose the riverbank?

Think about this. A civilization is shaped, first and most deeply, by its geography. The land teaches the people what to think. The climate shapes the temperament. The available food decides what the body will become. And among all the features of the earth, none is more decisive than the presence — or the absence — of water.

Consider the peoples of the world, and notice the different qualities of mind each geography produces.

The people of the deep forest — the vanavāsīs — live with a particular interiority. The forest is enclosed, shadowed, rich with unseen life. The forest dweller learns patience, silence, attentiveness to the rustle behind the leaf. Much of our āraṇyaka literature — the forest books of the Upaniṣads — came out of this consciousness. The forest teaches inwardness. It teaches that the answer is hidden, and that you must be very still to hear it.

The people of the high mountains — the Himālayan peoples, the Tibetans, the Andeans — live in a different register altogether. The thin air, the verticality, the slow pace of everything at altitude. Mountain consciousness is vertical consciousness. It is the consciousness of ascension, of retreat, of the ekānta-vāsī, the solitary one on the peak. The mountain teaches you that the view is earned by climbing.

The people of the deserts — the Bedouin of Arabia, the peoples of our own Marwar and Jaisalmer, the Saharan nomads — live with the scarcity of water as the organizing fact of their existence. Their poetry is full of longing, of the oasis, of the beloved who is always somewhere else. Desert consciousness is consciousness pared to its essentials. Nothing is wasted. Everything is sacred because everything is rare.

The people of the frozen north — the Scandinavians, the Siberians, the Inuit — develop a consciousness of endurance, of preservation, of the long dark winter spent in the memory of the sun. Their mythologies are full of ice giants and returning heroes. They teach us that survival itself is a spiritual discipline.

The people of islands — the Polynesians, the Japanese, the English — develop a consciousness bounded by horizon, separated from the mainland, turned outward toward the sea either in contemplation or in conquest. Island consciousness is edge consciousness. It tends to produce either great navigators or great isolationists, and sometimes both in the same people.

And then there is the consciousness of the river-bank people.

Our civilization is a river-bank civilization. And we chose the banks deliberately. Sage Kapila settled at Siddhpur on the Sarasvatī. Sage Bhṛgu at the Narmadā. Sage Mārkaṇḍeya at the Tāpī. Agastya moved south along the rivers of the Dakṣiṇa. Every great centre of our tradition — Vārāṇasī on the Gaṅgā, Prayāga at the saṅgama, Haridvāra where she first touches the plains, Nāsik on the Godāvarī, Ujjain on the Kṣipra, Śrīraṅgam on the Kāverī — every single one of them is a river-bank centre. Even our country’s name — Bhārata, Hindustān, India — is traced to the Sindhu, the river that taught the first Vedic peoples who they were. We are, quite literally, the children of a river.

Why did they choose the riverbank? What does the river teach that the forest, the mountain, the desert and the island cannot?

What the River Teaches

(Think of “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse)

The river teaches continuity within change. The water that flows past you now is not the same water that flowed a moment ago — and yet the river is one. Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. The ṛṣis said something more subtle: the river is one precisely because the water is not. Identity is not stasis but pattern. To be alive is to keep arriving and keep departing in the same breath.

The river teaches abundance. Annual floods deposit silt; the land grows rich; the settlement can pause, think, build a temple, argue about metaphysics, compose hymns. You cannot do philosophy on an empty stomach, and you cannot fill a stomach without water. Every sustained philosophical civilization in human history — the Egyptian on the Nile, the Sumerian on the Tigris and Euphrates, the Chinese on the Yellow and Yangtze, and we on the Sindhu, Sarasvatī, Gaṅgā, Yamunā, Kāverī, Godāvarī, Narmadā — was a river-bank civilization. No desert has produced a Mahābhārata. No iceberg has produced an Upaniṣad. Water makes thought possible.

The river teaches tīrtha — the sacred crossing. The Nārada Purāṇa defines tīrtha as the road across the ocean of saṁsāra. Every place where a river can be crossed became, in our tradition, a place where the soul can cross. The physical ford and the spiritual ford are the same word. This is why the Tīrthaṅkaras of the Jain tradition take their name from the crossing — they are ford-makers. To find a place where the river can be forded is to find a place where liberation can begin.

The river teaches dāna — giving. The river does not clutch its water. It gives and gives and gives, and somehow the giving does not impoverish it. It is the great teacher of generosity — not as a moral virtue but as a metaphysical stance. What flows lives. What hoards dies. This is why every Hindu village, traditionally, grew on the bank of a river or a tank, and every village temple had a puṣkariṇī — a sacred pond — at its side. The water taught the people to give.

And the river taught our ancestors the metaphysics of saṁsāra itself. The river that dies into the ocean is not lost. It becomes cloud. It becomes rain. It becomes the spring high in the mountains. It comes back as itself, the same water in a new form. Our doctrine of reincarnation is, at one profound level, the metaphysics of the water cycle, observed for a thousand generations and finally spoken aloud.

Food. Nourishment. Cleansing. Offering. Tīrtha. Every one of these is a water-word. The granaries of a river-bank people are full because the irrigation is reliable. The kitchen is clean because water is near. The body is bathed because the pond is close. The offering is possible because the kalaśa is easily filled. The pilgrim can find a ford. The dead can be immersed. Every dimension of dhārmic life is underwritten, silently, by the river.

Other peoples had to invent workarounds for the absence of water. We simply lived beside it, and listened to it, and let it teach us.

III. Rivers as Chaitanya — and the Trouble with “Consciousness”

Something that may sound strange to the modern ear: in our tradition, rivers are not metaphors for living things. They are living things. They are not personifications. They are persons.

The Mahābhārata tells us that Gaṅgā was the wife of King Śāntanu and the mother of Bhīṣma. When Bhīṣma lay dying on his bed of arrows at Kurukṣetra, Gaṅgā rose from her waters in human form and wept uncontrollably over her son’s body. This is not allegory. This is the tradition affirming — emphatically, in its greatest epic — that the river is conscious, that she grieves, that she loves, that she is a mother in the full-throated sense of the word.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa tells us the cīra-haraṇa episode, in which Kṛṣṇa takes away the garments of the gopīs while they are bathing in the Yamunā, and explains that one should not bathe naked in the river because the devatās residing in the water are disrespected by such an act. The river is a being. She has a presence. She has sensitivities. She can be disrespected.

The Kāliya-mardana story — the young Kṛṣṇa dancing on the hoods of the thousand-headed serpent who had poisoned the Yamunā — is, on one level, an ecological parable. Kāliya represents the pollutants we dump into our rivers. Kṛṣṇa represents the divine will to restore. But at a deeper level, the story is about the river’s suffering. The Yamunā was in pain. Her children were dying from her water. And Kṛṣṇa came to heal her, to drive away what was afflicting her, to return her to herself.

Feel the difference between how a modern environmentalist speaks of a river and how our tradition speaks of a river. The environmentalist says: the Yamunā is polluted; we must clean it for the sake of downstream users. The dhārmika says: Yamunā-mātā is suffering; we must heal her. The first is a management problem. The second is a relationship.

Why Chaitanya Is Not the Same as “Consciousness”

Something that has taken me years to articulate: the English word “consciousness” is not the same as the Sanskrit word chaitanya. They are false friends. And because we have been translating one with the other for two centuries, we have lost almost everything.

“Consciousness” comes from the Latin con-scire — to know with, to know jointly. At its root it is a knowledge-word. It implies a knower and a known and a relation between them. The Cartesian tradition that shaped modern English philosophy treats consciousness as something that arises inside the human head — as a private theatre, a stream of mental events — and the great unsolved problem of modern philosophy has been how to get this inner theatre to connect to the outer world at all. This is the so-called hard problem of consciousness. It is hard because the very framing is wrong. If you begin by locating awareness inside a skull, you can never account for its presence anywhere else.

Chaitanya is a completely different idea. Chaitanya comes from the root cit — which means to shine, to be aware, to glow with awareness. It is not knowledge-with. It is being-as-awareness. It is the light, not the knower. It is what is there before there is any “I” to know anything. The Upaniṣads call this prajñāna-ghana — a dense mass of pure awareness. They call it sat-cit-ānanda — being-awareness-bliss — the three inseparable faces of the Real. They call it cit-śakti — the power of awareness that animates everything.

Here is the decisive turn. In our tradition, chaitanya is not something that appears inside a brain. Chaitanya is the substrate of everything. Every rock, every tree, every river, every star participates in chaitanya — some more manifestly, some more hiddenly — but everything, absolutely everything, is in some measure alive. The difference between a rock and a river is not that one is dead and one is alive. It is that the river’s awareness is more vyakta, more manifest, more fluid in its expression. A rock is chaitanya slowed almost to a standstill. A river is chaitanya in graceful motion. A plant is chaitanya that has learned to grow. An animal is chaitanya that has learned to move. A human being is chaitanya that has turned back on itself and become capable of saying “I.”

Our own language has many shades for this. Cit — pure awareness. Bodha — the act of knowing. Prajñā — wisdom, the perceiving intelligence. Saṁvit — integral knowledge. Citta — the mind-stuff, the field of awareness. Antaḥkaraṇa — the inner instrument. Each word catches a different gleam of the same jewel. English has one flat word — “consciousness” — and uses it to mean all of these.

If water is not dead, then all five mahābhūtas are not dead. The earth holds the memory of what happens upon it — our śāstras say so; ask any tāntrika who has meditated on a cremation ground. The air holds the memory of the words spoken in it — ask any skilled clairvoyant. The fire holds the memory of what is offered into it — this is the whole premise of the homa. And ākāśa, the subtlest of all, holds the memory of everything – like someone said, “All things will be recorded in space.”

Soon, I suspect, even modern physics will arrive where our ṛṣis were standing millennia ago. The universe is not a dead machine. It is a field of intelligence, of which matter is one mode and water is perhaps its most exquisite. Check out the Gaia Hypothesis.

IV. Water in Fire: The Architecture of the Homa

Let me begin with the smallest sacred act of our tradition, and then open it out into its grandest.

The smallest is arghyam.

In the orthodox daily practice of sandhyāvandanam, performed at the three junctures of the day — prātaḥ-sandhyā at dawn, madhyāhnika at noon, sāyam-sandhyā at dusk — there is a simple act. The sādhaka takes a little water in the right palm, chants the Gāyatrī mantra, and offers the water up toward the sun.

It looks like almost nothing. A handful of water, thrown into the air. Repeated three times per session. Four times, in some traditions, with one extra as prāyaścitta for any error in timing.

The daily ritual of the sādhaka — performed in a quiet courtyard in Bengaluru, in a flat in Chennai, on a riverbank in Kāśī — is keeping the sun alive. The individual’s tiny act is participating in the cosmic order. There is no clearer statement of the Vedic vision anywhere than this: the small and the great are one continuous fabric, and the human being is not a bystander to the cosmos but its active collaborator.

The philosophical reading of the same story is even more beautiful. The arghyam, the consecrated water thrown upward, is the daily act by which we participate in the maintenance of our own inner luminosity.

After the offering, the sādhaka declares:

asāv ādityo brahma, brahmaiva aham asmi

That sun is Brahman. I myself am Brahman.

The same water, offered to the outer sun, reveals the inner sun. A single handful of water, in the palm of one human being, becomes the meeting-place of macrocosm and microcosm. Our ancestors found so many ways to keep us connected with prakriti and to keep reminding us that we are a part of it and have a responsibility towards it.

The Homa as a Dance of the Five Elements

With that small act in mind, let me open out into the grand act — the homa.

Picture a homa-kuṇḍa. A sacred fire-pit, dug into the earth or built of bricks. What is it made of?

Pṛthivī. Earth. The body of the ritual. Every homa begins by consecrating the ground itself — establishing that this patch of earth, here, now, is becoming sacred space. The kuṇḍa is pṛthivī-tattva offering itself as the vessel.

Before any fire is lit, what is the first thing the priest does? He sprinkles water. Around the kuṇḍa. Around the participants. Around the offerings. Around his own body. Prokṣaṇa — the sacred sprinkling.

Jala. Water. The purifier. The first act is never fire. The first act is always water.

Why? Because fire without prior purification is dangerous fire. It burns destructively. It does not carry the offering to the devas; it merely consumes. Water prepares the field. Water establishes śuddhi — the subtle cleanliness that allows the sacred to appear. And the water he sprinkles is not ordinary water. It is water over which mantras have been chanted. It is jala that has been made into tīrtha.

Then the priest sets up the kalaśa — the sacred water-pot. This is the heart of the ritual, placed to one side of the kuṇḍa, filled with fresh water. But he does not leave it as mere water. Into it he places specific substances, each with a precise tattvic meaning.

Mango leaves arranged around the rim — the vegetable kingdom invited in, the vitality of plant life.

A coconut on top — the fruit, the whole cosmos in miniature; its three eyes representing the three eyes of Śiva, its fibrous shell the gross body, its water within the subtle body, its kernel the causal body. The coconut is the universe on top of the pot.

A gold coin inside — the mineral kingdom, the ākāra-tattva of the earth, the incorruptible witness.

Rice grains at the base — the grain, the staple, annam, the Upaniṣadic equation: annam brahma, food is Brahman.

Turmeric and kumkum — the feminine powers of auspiciousness, the śakti-tattva.

Sometimes tulasī leaves. Sometimes darbha grass. Always a red cloth tied around the neck of the pot.

Into this composed water, the priest chants the invocation of all the great tīrthas:

gaṅge ca yamune caiva godāvari sarasvati

narmade sindhu kāveri jale’smin sannidhiṁ kuru

“O Gaṅgā, Yamunā, Godāvarī, Sarasvatī, Narmadā, Sindhu, Kāverī — be present in this water.”

In that one moment — in a single ritual moment — the priest has brought the entire dhārmic hydrosphere into one pot. Every sacred river, every ocean, every holy body of water is condensed into that kalaśa. This is why when water from a kalaśa is sprinkled on your head at the end of a pūjā, you are receiving the blessing of every holy water on the planet at once. This is the mystical mathematics of Hindu ritual. The whole is brought into the part, and the part releases the whole back into the world. Now, seeing is believing. I have experienced the energy and power of the water in the Kalasa at the end of the homa. A kumbha snana at the end is something I look forward to it.

Now the fire is lit. Agni.

But the priest does not light it arbitrarily. He lights it with mantra. He invites Agni:

agnim īḷe purohitam yajñasya devam ṛtvijam

“I praise Agni, the priest who goes before, the deva of the yajña, the ṛtvij.”

The Ṛgveda begins with this line. Agni is not merely fire; he is havya-vāhana — the carrier of offerings. He is the Purohita — the one placed in front, the cosmic messenger.

Why does Agni get this role? Because Agni alone among the pañca-mahābhūtas transforms. Earth does not transform; it endures. Water flows but remains water. Air moves but does not digest what it touches. Space holds but does not change what it holds. But Agni — Agni takes a solid thing of this world and turns it into smoke. Agni translates the gross into the subtle. Agni is the alchemist. Agni is the one element whose job is conversion. Without Agni, our offerings would simply rot on the ground. With Agni, they become fragrance, smoke, subtle essence — and ascend.

What does the priest feed Agni first?

Ghṛta. Clarified butter. And this too is not arbitrary. Ghee is the condensed energy of the cow, which is itself the condensed energy of grass, which is itself the condensed energy of sunlight falling on the earth. Ghee is stored solar radiance. When you pour ghee into Agni, you are returning sunlight to its source. Agni receives it as fuel and releases it as light, heat, and subtle essence. The whole homa is, at its physics, a ceremony of re-converting stored sunlight back into free radiation — but done with mantra, with intention, with saṁkalpa, so that the energy released is not merely physical but subtle.

Along with ghee, the priest offers samagri — a carefully prepared mixture of herbs, grains, fragrant woods, each with its own prabhāva, its own subtle signature. Sandalwood for calming. Tulsi for devotion. Specific herbs for specific deities. Each offering accompanied by svāhā — the sealing word, the feminine consort of Agni, the one who receives what he carries.

The priest’s voice is chanting mantra throughout.

Mantra is sound. Sound is vibration. Vibration needs a medium. The medium of sound, in our tradition, is ākāśa — space-ether. When the mantra is chanted, the ākāśa itself is imprinted with the vibration. The ākāśa receives the mantra the way the water in Emoto’s experiment received the word. The very space in which the ritual is happening becomes charged.

The priest’s breath carries the mantra. Breath is prāṇa. Prāṇa rides on vāyu — the air. The air moves through the space, carrying the sound, carrying the breath, carrying the warmth of the priest’s body and the moisture of his mouth. The vāyu is the envelope in which the mantra travels from the priest’s heart to Agni’s mouth.

And my saṁkalpa — is the invisible directing principle of the entire ritual. Without saṁkalpa, the homa is just chemistry. With saṁkalpa, it is alchemy. The saṁkalpa specifies who is offering, at what time, in what place, for what purpose, to what deity. Without this specification, the energy released has no address; it dissipates into the general atmosphere. With the saṁkalpa stated, the energy has a destination.

Look at what is happening in the homa:

Pṛthivī — the earth — is the kuṇḍa, the containing body.

Jala — the water — is the kalaśa, the purifier, the medium of blessing.

Agni — the fire — is the transformer, the messenger, the carrier upward.

Vāyu — the air — is the breath, the carrier of sound and warmth.

Ākāśa — the space — is the field of mantra, the subtle medium in which vibration lives.

And running through all five is my saṁkalpa — intention — and the manas, buddhi and bhāva of the ṛtvij — the mind, intellect, and emotional quality of the one performing. Above these, the devatā’s kṛpā — grace — received through the opened channel.

The pañca-mahābhūtas are not ingredients. They are roles. Each element does a specific kind of work in the sacred economy. And water’s work, though quiet, is foundational. Without water, there is no purification. Without purification, there is no access. Without access, there is no ritual. Water is the silent queen of the yajña.

V. The Sapta-Sa: Seven Sanskrit Streams Within

A mnemonic.

There are many ways to enumerate the dimensions of water.

Think of them as a garland –

Sṛṣṭi.  Śuddhi.  Snāna.  Smṛti.  Srotas.  Saundarya.  Samādhi.

One. Sṛṣṭi — Source. Water is where creation begins. The hiraṇyagarbha, the golden womb, floats upon the cosmic waters. You began your life floating in the amniotic sea inside your mother — an ocean of your own, ringed by her heartbeat. Seventy percent of the earth is water. Seventy percent of your body is water. You are, and always have been, a water creature. Water is the name we give to the womb of being.

Two. Śuddhi — Purification. Āpo asmān mātaraḥ śundhantu. May the waters, our mothers, purify us. Water washes what nothing else can wash. Not merely dust and dirt but, in the dharmic imagination, the subtler residues — karma-mala, the stains of action; vāk-mala, the stains of speech; mana-mala, the stains of thought. This is why the Gaṅgā is called sarva-pāpa-harā — the remover of all sin. Not because of the chemistry of her water but because of the chaitanya that flows in her.

Three. Snāna — Sacrament. The daily bath is not hygiene. It is upāsana. The temple abhiṣeka is not decoration. It is the descent of grace. Snāna transforms the body from object to offering. In the moment we step into water — truly, consciously step in — we step into a current of practice older than memory. The Kumbha Melā, where millions bathe at a single astrological moment, is the largest snāna on earth, and also the clearest statement: that to step into water, together, at the right moment, is to participate in something the individual alone cannot touch.

Four. Smṛti — Memory. Water remembers. It receives impressions and holds them. Every mantra chanted over it becomes structural. This is why Gaṅgā-jala stored in a copper pot does not putrefy. This is why a few drops of tīrtha placed on the tongue carry the benediction of the mūrti across miles and years. Water is the library of the universe. And not only water — all five mahābhūtas hold memory. The earth holds the memory of your footsteps. The air holds the memory of your words. The fire holds the memory of your offerings. The space holds the memory of your silences. Our tradition has always known this. Modern science is slowly catching up.

Five. Srotas — Stream. Water moves. Water flows. Water never argues with the shape of the vessel; it simply becomes the vessel. This is water’s teaching: be fluid, be receptive, meet what is hard and patiently carve a canyon through it. The Himālayan boulder yields to the mountain stream not because the water is strong but because the water is persistent, and because the water knows a secret — that what flows is alive, and what resists is already dying.

Six. Saundarya — Beauty. Water keeps you young. Water makes you fresh. A face just splashed with cool water glows with a radiance no cosmetic approximates. Rivers beautify every landscape they pass through. The lotus opens only where there is water. Saundarya is not ornament. It is the visible sign of life fully flowing. Where water is honoured, beauty emerges on its own.

Seven. Samādhi — Dissolution. And finally, water is where we go. Our ashes are immersed in the Gaṅgā. Our bodies, seventy percent water, return to their source. Water is the mother at the beginning, and water is the mother at the end. Samādhi — the final gathering-in, the return of the drop to the ocean.

VI. What Does It Mean to “Be Like Water”?

One final contemplation before the meditation.

“Be like water.” You have heard this phrase. It is quoted today from Bruce Lee, who learned it from Daoism, and Daoism received it from Laozi. But the teaching, in its essence, is older than Daoism, older even than the Veda’s explicit articulation of it. It is a teaching water has been offering to any civilization willing to listen for as long as there have been rivers.

What does it actually mean to be like water?

It does not mean to be passive. Water is not passive. Water carved the Grand Canyon. Water sinks continents. Water, given time, is the most patient and the most inexorable force on this planet. The phrase does not call us to weakness. It calls us to a specific kind of strength — the strength that works by yielding.

The teaching has seven dimensions — and they correspond to the seven streams just given.

First: to be like water is to be flexible without losing essence. Pour water into a cup, it becomes the cup’s shape. Pour it into a bowl, the bowl’s. Into the ocean, the ocean’s. But water never stops being water. Its adaptation to form is total; its surrender of identity is zero. This is the yogi’s secret: meet every circumstance completely, while remaining unalterably yourself. The householder, the monk, the teacher, the father, the friend — all these are vessels the same self-pours into, and the self never ceases to be itself.

Second: to be like water is to seek the low place. Water always flows downward. It does not strive for heights. It does not cling to the mountain. It surrenders to gravity, and in surrendering, it reaches the ocean. The Bhagavad Gītā says mānāpamānayoḥ tulyaḥ — the wise one is the same in honour and dishonour. The wise one seeks the low seat. Water has been teaching this for four billion years. The Sanskrit tradition calls this vinaya — humility — and regards it as the first qualification for knowledge.

Third: to be like water is to cleanse without resentment. Water receives the dirt of the world — every day, billions of tons of it — and does not stay dirty. Given time and movement, water purifies itself. It does not hold a grudge. It does not remember yesterday’s mud as an insult. It simply flows on, and in flowing, becomes clean again. The saint receives the unkindness of the world and does not let it stain. The saint is not immune to the mud; the saint is moving water.

Fourth: to be like water is to be patient. The drop that carves the stone. The river that carves the canyon. Water never hurries. Water has all the time in the world. And because it has all the time in the world, it accomplishes what the ambitious and the hurried cannot. Every spiritual discipline — japa, dhyāna, svādhyāya — is the work of the water-drop on the stone. It looks like nothing is happening. And then one day, the stone is gone.

Fifth: to be like water is to move without force. Water does not fight the obstacle in its path. It goes around it. If the path is blocked, it waits. If the wait is too long, it rises. If it cannot rise, it evaporates and becomes cloud and falls on the other side of the mountain. There is no situation water cannot eventually meet. This is the deepest teaching of strategy the Arthaśāstra knows — that force defeats only that which is more brittle than itself, and water defeats by never being brittle.

Sixth: to be like water is to give without calculating. The river gives its water to the fields, to the cattle, to the cities, to the ocean. It does not demand gratitude. It does not check the ledger. It is the perfect instrument of niṣkāma-karma — action without desire for reward. The river does not stop flowing because the farmer forgot to say thank you. The river does not reduce its gift because the downstream village is ungrateful. It simply gives. This is karma yoga in its natural form.

Seventh: to be like water is to remember that you are not separate. The drop is never apart from the ocean. Even when it appears to have fallen from a cloud onto a leaf and trembled there alone, it is on its way back. There is one water, wearing a billion momentary forms. There is one chaitanya, wearing a billion momentary bodies. The drop and the ocean are — have always been — the same. This is the final teaching of Advaita, and it is spoken most clearly by rivers.

There is a beautiful image to hold before the meditation. The lotus grows in water. The leaf touches water. When raindrops fall on the leaf, they bead up and roll off. The water does not soak into the leaf. The leaf is in water, of water, surrounded by water — and yet untouched, pristine, unstained.

To be like water — ultimately — is to be both the water and the leaf. Present in the world. Shaping and being shaped by every vessel. And yet, at the deepest level, untouched. The sage is water on a lotus leaf.

In Closing

Water is not a substance but a mode of chaitanya.

We have walked around seven faces of this one truth.

Water as civilization — the reason our ṛṣis chose the riverbank over the forest and the mountain, and why river-bank cultures, alone among civilizations, produced the philosophical imagination.

Water as chaitanya — rivers not as metaphors but as mothers, goddesses, living persons — and the vast difference between the English word “consciousness” and our own chaitanya, cit, prajñā, bodha.

Water as sacrament — in the palm of arghyam offered to the sun, in the kalaśa at the heart of the homa, in every sprinkling of prokṣaṇa that prepares the ground for Agni.

Water as the seven streams within — Sṛṣṭi, Śuddhi, Snāna, Smṛti, Srotas, Saundarya, Samādhi — the inner architecture of jala-tattva.

Water as the great teacher — flexible without losing essence, low-seeking, patient, cleansing without resentment, forever moving toward the ocean.

And water, finally, as the silent teacher of what we are. Because we are water beings. The cosmos is a water cosmos. The pañca-mahābhūtas are not five dead substances — they are five modes of the one living intelligence — and water is the mode in which that intelligence most clearly flows.

āpo jyotī raso’mṛtaṁ brahma

The waters are light, are essence, are immortality, are Brahman.

When you drink your next glass of water — pause.

When you step into your next bath — remember.

When you see a river — bow.

When it rains — receive.

When someone weeps near you — know that the divine waters are flowing through them also.

Because the divine has been flowing through you at every moment of your life and has never once stopped.

Addendum: From Contemplation to Daily Practice

If the waters are chaitanya — if Gaṅgā is a person, if every drop is a descending stream of the infinite, if every meal we eat is a miniature homa — then something follows. Philosophy cannot stop at philosophy. Āchāra — conduct, the daily doing — is where the teaching proves itself.

The ṛṣis did not separate jñāna from āchāra. The one who knows the waters as Brahman and the one who wastes them cannot remain the same person for long. Knowledge bends behaviour, or it was never really knowledge.

Here, then, are some small acts and larger contemplations — the practical yield of everything that precedes.

Everyday Acts: Honouring the Waters

Bathe from a Bucket, Not a Shower

A traditional snāna is a slow, deliberate act. You fill a vessel. You pour. You feel the water touch you. You are present to what is touching you. A shower in modern plumbing runs continuously whether you are noticing it or not — roughly eight litres a minute, most of it pouring unseen down a drain. A bucket, filled once, is fifteen to twenty litres total. A ten-minute shower is eighty. The arithmetic is clear.

But the deeper point is not arithmetic. The bucket restores attention. You know how much you are using because you can see what you have. Each cupped palm is a small choice. Water honoured becomes water noticed, and water noticed becomes water saved.

Use Cool Water at Room Temperature, Not Hot

Our grandmothers knew this before the Āyurveda textbooks formalised it. Cool-water snāna — water at room temperature, neither icy nor heated — invigorates the prāṇa, tones the skin, wakes the agni, and does not leach the body’s natural oils. Heating water, besides, is energy-intensive. Every geyser is a small tax on the grid, on the coal somewhere that becomes the heat, on the planet that holds both.

The traditional mangala-snāna with warmed water was reserved for the ill, for a new mother, for winter at high altitude — not a daily default. For most of us, most days, the stream from the tap is already what the body wants. Meet it as it comes. The brief shock at the first touch is itself a kind of tapas.

Do Not Use Cauvery Water to Wash Your Car

Living in Bengaluru, this one is close to home. The Kāverī that reaches our taps has already travelled a long way — through turbines and treatment plants, through inter-state disputes and tribunals, through the patient labour of generations who built the channels and pumping stations to bring her here. She is tīrtha that somehow arrived in your kitchen. She has crossed districts to find you.

To spray her across a car bonnet — to mix Kāverī-jala with soap and let it run into a storm drain — is not merely wasteful. It is a small, daily irreverence. If the car must be washed, use a bucket of reclaimed water, or grey water, or rainwater from the tank. A damp cloth does most of what a hose does. Often the rain will do it for you, if you let it. And it is worth asking, quietly and without self-judgement, whether the car truly needs to be washed as often as we wash it.

Every litre of municipal water you spare is a litre that reaches someone downstream who has none.

Six Contemplations for the Longer Practice

These are not tips. They are orientations — things to sit with over a season, or a year. They are meant to change the way you see, and from that, the way you act will follow on its own.

One. Know the cycles of water — inside you and outside you. The water cycle of the planet — evaporation, cloud, rain, river, ocean — is mirrored in the water cycle of the body. You drink, the water enters your cells, passes through your blood, is exhaled as breath-moisture, excreted, wept, perspired, returned. Watch both cycles. Notice the seasons of rain outside and the seasons of thirst inside. Two rivers, one flow. The outer jala-cakra and the inner jala-cakra are not two systems. They are the same system seen from two angles.

Two. Develop systems thinking. Nothing in nature stands alone. The drought in one district is connected to the forest cleared in another. The borewell that ran dry this summer is connected to the apartment complex that rose last decade, and to the lake that was filled in twenty years before that. Train the mind to see the lines between things — the feedback loops, the delays, the thresholds at which a gradual change becomes a sudden collapse. Pratītya-samutpāda — dependent origination — is not a Buddhist technicality. It is the grammar of the real world. The dhārmika is, by vocation, a systems thinker.

Three. Understand the environment as a system — its parts, and the whole they compose. Soil, water, air, forest, insect, bird, microbe — each a role, none replaceable. The temptation of the modern mind is to protect one piece at a time: save the tiger, save the river, save the bee. But the tiger needs the forest, the forest needs the rain, the rain needs the ocean, the ocean needs the plankton, the plankton needs the climate. Pṛthivī is not a list of items. She is an organism. Learn to see the whole that the parts are faces of.

Four. Trace the full lifecycle of water. Where does the water in your tap come from? Which river? Which reservoir? Which catchment? Which monsoon fed it? And where does it go when it leaves your house? Which drain? Which treatment plant? Which discharge point? Which aquifer? Most urban Indians have no answer to these questions, and the not-knowing is itself the problem. A stranger is easy to waste. A known guest is not. Knowing the lifecycle of the water that passes through your home is the beginning of a relationship with her.

Five. Do not think of water in isolation — think of her within the pañca-mahābhūtas. Water does not exist by herself. She rises from the earth, rides the wind, falls through the sky, is warmed by fire, held by space. To drain the earth of its forest is to drain it of its water — because the roots held the rain. To pollute the air is to poison the rain — because the cloud carries what the atmosphere holds. To light too many fires, too fast, is to dry the rivers. The pañca-mahābhūtas are not five separate things. They are five faces of one living body. Disturb one and you disturb all.

Six. Understand your own relationship with each of the five elements. This is the most intimate practice. Which element do you love? Which do you neglect? Which frightens you? Which calms you? Your prakṛti — your constitutional nature — is a particular mixing of the five. Your sādhanā is, partly, the work of bringing them into balance. The ātman does not live in a skull. It lives in a body that is five elements held together by prāṇa and illumined by chaitanya. Tend all five, and the inner waters run clear.

The Water Crisis Is Not About Water

One last thing has to be said, and said plainly.

No number of fines, bans, quotas, or regulatory frameworks will solve the water crisis. Piling on more rules will not reach the root. The water crisis is not, at its core, a crisis of water.

Water has not changed her nature. The monsoon still comes. The rivers still flow when we let them. The rain still falls where we have not paved over the ground that used to receive it. The fault is not in the waters. The fault is in us.

What we call a water crisis is a crisis of knowledge — because we do not know what water is. It is a crisis of commonsense — because we have forgotten what a river is for. It is a crisis of logic — because we pump an aquifer for fifty years and are astonished when it runs dry. It is a crisis of ethics — because we have quietly agreed to privatise what belongs to all beings. It is a crisis of compassion — because we poison her and call it industry. And above all, it is a crisis of responsibility — because we inherited a living trust and are handing our children a dry one.

It is, in short, the consequence of a species going against the very nature from which it came and of which it remains a part.

The Strangeness of the Present Moment

Consider this. We are spending billions exploring Mars — a planet we can barely reach and cannot live on — while we have still not understood the planet we were born on. We send probes looking for traces of water on distant worlds while letting the waters of this world die in full view. We call this progress.

No civilization before ours would have recognised this as wisdom. Our tradition has a word for it: pramāda — a kind of intoxicated inattention, a heedlessness that does not know it is heedless. It is the first thing the śāstras warn against, and it is the signature of the age we are living in.

Without Dharma, No Sustainability

Without re-establishing Dharma — that which sustains the world, the planet, and society — there can be no true sustainability. The English word sustainability is itself a pale echo of the Sanskrit dhāraṇa — that which holds, that which upholds, that which keeps a thing in its own nature. Dharma is not religion in the Western sense. It is the ordering principle by which life holds together. Its abandonment is not merely a spiritual loss; it is a structural collapse.

The way we think of water — and of all the pañca-mahābhūtas — has to change. The Indic way of relating to nature is not one civilizational option among many. It is a vision whose hour has come round again, and not for India alone. The world needs what our tradition has been quietly saying for four thousand years.

A Design Problem in Philosophical Disguise

When a city encounters a water shortage, it does not have a water problem. It has a design problem. It has a construction problem. It has a philosophical problem wearing the costume of an engineering problem.

We design cities without asking where the water will come from and where it will go. We build urban centres that seal over the ground so the rain cannot soak back in. We site manufacturing clusters on riverbanks as though the river were an infinite sewer. We pave the catchment, fill the lake, concretise the storm-drain, and then hold emergency meetings about the borewell. We do all of this because we have decided, collectively, to see nature as inanimate. As matter without chaitanya. As resource.

Imagine calling your own mother a resource.

Imagine, at her funeral, her grandchildren tallying what she produced. Imagine drawing up a balance sheet of her service. Imagine extracting her until she is spent, then complaining about the shortfall. This is what modernity has done to prakṛti, who is the mother of us all. We came from her. We are made of her. We will return into her. And somehow, over two or three short generations, we have been taught to call her a resource.

The word itself is the wound. Until we stop using it, we cannot begin to heal the relationship.

The Dharmic Enterprise Model

This is why, over many years, I have been developing what I call the Dharmic Enterprise Model. In the standard enterprise model inherited from Western capitalism, the stakeholders of a business are its shareholders, its employees, its customers, its suppliers, and — vaguely, in the fine print — its community. The environment is a cost centre, a compliance line-item, an “ESG” metric to be managed.

In the Dharmic Enterprise Model, the rivers, forests, mountains, oceans, air, and soil are stakeholders. They have standing. They hold seats at the table — in the design of the factory, in the siting of the campus, in the choice of material, in the disposal of waste. Every enterprise decision must account for what the river loses and what the forest gives. Every quarterly report must answer not only to the shareholder but to the bhūmi on which the enterprise stands.

This is not romantic. It is a practical necessity. An enterprise that does not treat prakṛti as a stakeholder is an enterprise that is hollowing out its own substrate. Sooner or later — and many have discovered this already — it learns that there is no shareholder value to maximise on an uninhabitable earth.

Unless we move to this model, and see rivers, forests, mountains, and oceans as the primary stakeholders of every enterprise, we will run out of liveable earth faster than we are ready for.

When the Real Sounds Ideal

Some will call all of this idealistic. I want to meet that word directly.

When a mind does not understand the real, it calls references to the real ideal. The word “idealistic” is what we say when reality has grown too large for our mental model. It is a confession, not a critique. The Indic vision of nature is not idealism. It is the most ruthlessly empirical position available — because it accounts for more of what is actually happening than any model that treats rivers as sewers and mothers as resources.

True change requires a change in mental models. Without a shifted model, the worldview does not shift. Without a shifted worldview, our actions and interactions with nature do not shift. Without shifted action, we will arrive — sooner than anyone imagines — at the line Coleridge wrote two centuries ago:

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

That line is already true for millions on this planet. It will become true for hundreds of millions more unless we recover what our ṛṣis always knew — that water is not a resource. She is a goddess. She is a mother. She is Brahman.

And the way we treat her will decide what the earth becomes.

The post Jala-Brahma: The Sacred Intelligence of Water first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

On why creativity is really about receptivity — not transmission!

Using an elephant gun to shoot a fly!

This, I have come to see, is the condition of the Buddhi almost everywhere.

The Buddhi is an extraordinary instrument — the faculty of discernment, of clarity, of right decision. And yet, in the daily life of a modern entrepreneur, it is handed the most absurd tasks. Strawberry ice cream or raspberry? Tan shoes or blue? The Buddhi, which was designed to discern Dharma from Adharma, truth from appearance, essential from peripheral, is reduced to a shopping assistant. And we wonder why decisions feel exhausting. Because there is an inner voice that tries to guide us on the path of dharma but our training and education goads us to focus only on wealth maximization and blinds us to everything else.

Dharma is that which sustains everything in the world and is necessary to ensure everyone’s wellbeing. We defined the four-fold framework of Dharma-Artha-Kama and Moksha. This works if the buddhi is trained from early on to understand and apply the principles of dharma. And artha (wealth) is dharmically earned. And Satvic desires (Kama) are fulfilled within the means of dharmically earned wealth slowly progressing towards moksha which is the freedom from everything that is false. If the harmonizing principle of dharma and the elevating principle of moksha are missing, then you are operating in the purely “Artha-Kama” plane. Operating in the Artha-Kama plane and within an ethical framework based on rules the idea of sustainability becomes external to the functioning of an organization. And this is the current reality based on imported organizational models and imported management and governance models.

Thus, despite having been born with the faculty of “buddhi”, many entrepreneurs make decisions that are not aligned with dharma and cause large scale harm in the world.

These are the Five Dharmic Filters I recommend to all entrepreneurs:

• Consciously Avoid Harm,
• Create Tangible Good,
• Strengthen the Existing Traditional Social Fabric,
• Sustain Healthy Lifestyles, and
• Protect & Regenerate Nature—applied across eight domains: individual, society, nation, world, economy, ecology, culture, and health.

The tragedy is that we have never been taught that we have them and how to use them. Which is why not everyone is creative — not because creativity is rare, but because the instrument remains unexamined and unused.

The Fourfold Inner Instrument

While the whole world calls it just the mind, The Indian tradition (there are many schools of thought) gives us a precise cartography of the inner instrument, the Antaḥ-karaṇa. Four faculties work together: Manas (the gathering mind), Buddhi (discerning intellect), Chitta (the memory-storehouse of impressions), and Ahaṅkāra (the I-maker).

Ahaṅkāra in a leader lays claim to all the good that happens. When Ahaṅkāra softens, something remarkable happens — you begin to see others as part of yourself. You stop seeing your people as numbers. You start seeing them as conscious beings and not machines.

This is not a minor semantic quibble. Virtually all management theory we have inherited is borrowed from manufacturing. Output. Performance management. Throughput. Efficiency. We apply a vocabulary meant for machines to human beings — who are made of consciousness. Until the vocabulary itself changes, the relationship cannot.

Creativity Is Reception, Not Transmission

Here is a question worth sitting with: when a thought arises in you, are you creating it, or are you receiving it? Neuroscience seems to be coming around to the idea that we are receiving thoughts instead of creating thoughts (as we have always believed) and the brain predicts what is happening in front of it based on past data rather than see things as they are happening. Thus, cognition is clouded by the residual memories of the past.

If you observe closely, you will notice you are not the author of your thoughts. They arrive. You are not a transmitter. You are a receiver. This single shift in self-understanding reorganizes everything — how you conduct meetings, how you sit with a customer, how you design a product.

You cannot be creative on demand, the way a factory produces units. Nobody walks into an office and says, Today, I will create a Nobel Prize-winning invention. It does not work that way. Creativity has conditions. First, you must understand its source. Second, you must understand yourself. And third, you must place yourself in the receptive posture.

I often frame it around three qualities I call the CEO of the inner life — Creativity, Enthusiasm, Ownership.

Creativity without enthusiasm is inert; the idea never leaves the notebook. Enthusiasm without creativity burns bright and solves nothing. Creativity with enthusiasm but without ownership evaporates — someone else finishes the work, or no one does. All three must be present. And each of them rests on an even deeper foundation — awareness. It is like the fire triangle – you need fuel, oxygen and a spark to create fire. And the number one, most important ingredient of innovation is a problem. Apply CEO to problem solving and you get creativity which leads to innovation.

Energy Follows Awareness

Right now, as you read this, you are sitting somewhere. Perhaps on a two-hundred-acre campus. Hundreds of things are happening around you — a bird nesting in a tree, a conversation in the next room, a leaf turning colour. Are you aware of any of it? Are you even aware of what is happening inside your own mind?

Most of the time, we are not.

For creativity to meet a real problem, one must enter a state of heightened awareness. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree attention. Complete receptivity. And crucially — one is not creating when one is listening to the problem being described by a customer. This is not the moment to generate solutions. But most people start generating before they have even heard what the problem is. I have watched it happen a hundred times — a customer has barely begun speaking and the entrepreneur across the table is already mentally building a proposal. We have worked with many designers. We have built many websites. We have seen this before. The client has said three sentences, and already the designer has stopped listening. An entrepreneur who cannot listen with his body and mind will not make a great entrepreneur.

That entrepreneur has no interest in understanding the customer. Worse — he does not even have the capacity to. The Chitta is so cluttered, the Manas so busy and the Buddhi so untrained and mis utilized that there is no room to receive. It is like the condition of the American priest whose mind was too full to learn from the Japanese Zen master.

Presence, Intention, Visualization

The architecture of receptive creativity, as I have come to understand it, has five movements.

The first is invocation — the acknowledgement of a field larger than yourself. The second is Saṅkalpa, intention. The third is energy. The fourth is expression. The fifth is the outcome.

Most management literature has reduced Saṅkalpa to the ritual of a vision statement. Bring everyone off-site for a day, buy nice food, write vision and mission and values on butter-paper, photograph it, frame it, hang it on a wall. I did this for companies for many years. And I noticed — once hung, it had no life. Business continued as usual. The wall became decoration.

Saṅkalpa is something else entirely. It is the quiet, unshakable seed of intent you plant inside yourself before any outward action. In India, even the barber knows this. Even the vendor selling fruit on the pavement knows this — before starting the day’s work, a small flame is lit, a moment of acknowledgement is offered. We have labelled this religion or superstition, but that judgement comes from elsewhere. In India, the dichotomy between science and non-science never existed. Our inquiry itself began by observing the cycles of nature — that is Ṛta. From Ṛta comes Satya, truth. From Satya comes Dharma — having known the truth, what is my duty? What do I owe my customers? My students? The team that builds with me? The ecosystem that supports me?

This is the foundational architecture. It has no conflict with science because it is science — the science of how to live rightly amidst what is.

The Visualisation That Receives

When people hear the word visualisation, they imagine the practitioner producing an image, sculpting it in the mind. But there is another kind of visualisation — one where you are receiving the image.

Because visualisation is not only for the creator. It is also for the listener. When someone is describing their problem to you, are you constructing their picture inside your own mind? Can you see what they see?

This is why Vivekananda said — if he had another chance at school, he would study nothing. He would only learn how to concentrate the mind. Because with a focused mind, any problem can be solved.

Surrender and Flow

Once you have stopped the mental chatter, once you have stopped pre-generating solutions while the other is still speaking, a quieter state opens. This is surrender — not passivity, but the pause in which receptivity becomes possible.

This is hard to explain in words. The capacity has to be developed in practice, not merely described. A two-thousand-page manual about orange juice is useless until you drink orange juice. I can offer you the pamphlet. The drink itself is found in Sādhanā.

Honestly, how many of us can do this — enter a state of inner silence while a customer describes their problem? I once worked with an employee who would hear roughly fifty percent of what was said. The rest of the time his mind had gone somewhere and returned, and whatever he had missed he decided must not have been important. He missed the most important things every single time. You have surely seen the famous diagram — what the customer asked, what the company delivered. Why does that gap exist? Only Indian thought has an adequate explanation. It is not linguistic misunderstanding. It is not cultural difference. It is that the listener was not there at all. Physically present, mentally absent.

And someone will say, but this is spirituality, this has nothing to do with business. How little one must know about business to say that. The only instrument you have to build a business is your mind. Rather, your Antahkarana. In fact your manas and buddhi can be your best friends if properly trained and aligned with the right goals.

The Five Factors of Success

Sri Kṛṣṇa names five factors of any successful action.

अधिष्ठानं तथा कर्ता करणं च पृथग्विधम् |
विविधाश्च पृथक्चेष्टा दैवं चैवात्र पञ्चमम् || 14||

adhiṣhṭhānaṁ tathā kartā karaṇaṁ cha pṛithag-vidham
vividhāśh cha pṛithak cheṣhṭā daivaṁ chaivātra pañchamam

BG 18.14: The body, the doer (soul), the various senses, the many kinds of efforts, and Divine Providence—these are the five factors of action.

Of these five, which one can you work on? The ground is largely given. The outcome is largely unseen. The intensity of your effort with a sharpened instrument is the key.

Think of the master chef and the sous-chef. If the sous-chef has cleaned the vegetables, chopped them precisely, laid out the masalas, prepared the mise en place — the master chef arrives, works for five minutes, performs his magic, the dish is complete. But if the sous-chef has brought rotten vegetables and missing ingredients, the master chef will still arrive, will still perform his art, but the result cannot be what it should be.

Refine and sharpen your mind / perception and put your most intense effort. While hard work has always been talked about and taught almost nowhere is a person taught how to master his mind.

The Problem as Guru

I keep saying this to entrepreneurs — become intimate with the problem. Most of the failures in the world are not failures of execution. They are failures of comprehension. The solutions produced by a mind that is not trained on dharma gives birth to the next big problem.

In systems engineering we say — a problem correctly defined is half-solved. To a person with only a hammer, every situation looks like a nail. If you are carrying a pre-formed solution, you will hunt for a problem that fits it. The healthier direction is the reverse. Let the solution emerge from the problem — because the solution is always contained in the problem itself.

When you sit with a problem long enough, it begins to speak to you. This is not metaphor. In parts of South America, healers use a plant called Shankapieda — stone-breaker — for kidney stones. Researchers went in and asked, you have never seen a kidney. You have never seen a stone. How did you know? The healer said, the plant told me. Westerners dismissed this as superstition, until a new field emerged called biosemiotics — the study of communication between living systems, including between plants and humans. Look it up. Science is beginning to catch up with what our traditions always knew — everything is conscious. It is not a human speaking to a plant. It is consciousness speaking to consciousness. In fact, all things are in a vast field of unified consciousness.

If you become that intimate with your customer’s problem, something extraordinary happens — you can articulate the customer’s problem better than the customer can. And that is what the customer will label as an expert. Contrast this with the doctor who takes no history, orders no tests, and prescribes three pills — red one in the morning, blue one at noon, yellow at night, come back in a week. But what is my problem, doctor? He has no idea. He has given you the solution without knowing the question.

Most entrepreneurs I meet are exactly like this. Given five minutes on stage, they begin to speak, and they never state the problem. They leap straight to the product. The number one ingredient for innovation is not creativity, not capital, not talent. It is the problem.

Where Your Attention Goes, Your Energy Goes

Peter Drucker said it. Many have said it. But it is worth returning to — attention and energy are the same phenomenon viewed from two angles. Whatever you attend to grows.

We must distinguish here. There is the problem you sit with as an entrepreneur — a defined, solvable challenge your customer is facing. And there is the problem of complaint — the existential grumbling that has no solution because it is not seeking one. These are entirely different. One refines you. The other depletes you.

It’s not about making a laundry list of all possible problems and getting rid of them. It’s about knowing the distinction between the vital few and the trivial many. The Pareto principle is not arbitrary arithmetic — it is a practical instruction about where to direct the scarce resource of your attention.

When I teach a class or deliver a talk, I hold a Saṅkalpa — let whatever these people need to hear the most come through. Not what they want. What they need. If you mean it, if you have truly moved the intention and connected with that larger field, it will happen. But the condition is that you must step aside. You must not be the one performing. Your intent must be that the other benefits — not that you impress. The receptivity and state of mind of the audience also plays a big role. Sometimes they do not want to receive because they have pre-judged, made up their minds in advance. And sometimes we may forget to activate the listeners which makes them receptive. You want to give but they should also want to receive.

From Ingredients to Expression to Outcome

Invocation. Saṅkalpa. Energy. Then expression — the outward action, the processes, the craft. Then outcome.

Most entrepreneurs begin at expression. They skip the first three and wonder why the outcomes are hollow. The creative and innovative mind is not built by stacking more tools on top of an unexamined inner life. It is built by quieting the Chitta, giving the Manas a holistic goal, freeing the Buddhi to make proper Dharmic decisions, and allowing Ahaṅkāra to soften. That sequence, in that order, is what produces a leader whose work bears fruit.

The capacity to receive is available to each of us. Whatever you turn your attention toward, you can receive from. This is the forgotten art.

Mental Models

Forty people in a room watch the same event. Forty different reports emerge. Two newspapers describe the same accident with two different chronologies. Why? Because everyone carries a different mental model. You can read the same book and not read the same book. You can look at the same thing and not see the same thing. Every experience is being processed through your inner structure.

So the first question is — are you aware of your own mental models?

What is your idea of business? What is your idea of a businessman? What is your idea of a founder? What does a founder do? Why do your customers come to you? What is your definition of success, right now, at this moment, as you read this?

Your mental models are silently shaping every decision you make. Your idea of cause and effect is shaping your strategy. Your idea of what customers want is shaping what you deliver. Your idea of success is shaping what you are willing to sacrifice.

Before you attempt to scale your business, clean your mental models. Because if you have forty unexamined assumptions, and you hire a hundred people, you will now have a hundred people walking around executing those forty assumptions, multiplying the mess at scale.

A useful exercise — write down what surprises you. What shocks you. What delights you. What upsets you. What scares you. And so on. And then ask, why does this surprise me? What hidden assumption of mine has been violated? The shocks are diagnostic. They reveal the shape of your inner model more clearly than any self-assessment tool. Before you learn the world, learn yourself. Microcosm and macrocosm have the same geometry. Mental models are hidden and need to be exposed and the underlying assumptions have to be tested against reality.

When your mental models are cleaner, your perception becomes clearer, and your decisions become sounder. Because every stage of building anything is a decision. Plastic or paper. Circle or square. What it will be called. Where it will be sold. At what price. How most entrepreneurs make these decisions is by looking at what others in the industry are doing. How many of your choices are genuinely your own original thought?

This is why India, despite sitting on one of the richest knowledge traditions in the world, is not considered innovative. We have stopped using our own tools. Look at the Hoysala temples. Look at Rāmappa temple. Look at Brihadeeshwara. These are not only places of Pūjā — they are engineering masterpieces. The world is finally waking up to this.

So how did we come to discard our own inheritance? A simple analogy. When a small child is holding something delicate and precious, how do you get them to release it? You offer them something shinier. Here, leave that, take this instead. That is what was done to us. Drop that stupid, dead language. Meanwhile, Germany has built twenty Sanskrit research universities. The whole world is studying and learning from what we have been convinced to abandon. The trick succeeded — we dropped it, they picked it up. If we reclaim our own knowledge system, India becomes genuinely innovative. The power of innovation has always been ours. What we lack is the confidence to use it.

The Five Afflictions

Patañjali names five Kleśas — afflictions that cloud the mind. Avidyā (ignorance of one’s true nature). Asmitā (the mistaken sense of a separate, fixed self). Rāga and Dveṣa (attraction and aversion, the two ends of the same stick). Abhiniveśa (clinging to continuation, fear of dissolution).

These five are the reason your inner state is disturbed. And the equation is strict — inner state shapes perception; perception shapes clarity; clarity plus values produces decision quality. If the first term is corrupt, everything downstream is corrupt. You will misunderstand the problem. You will have no clarity on how to solve it. And without a Dharmic value framework, you will find yourself incompetent in front of a genuine challenge — which is when ethical shortcuts begin to appear attractive. Once a shortcut becomes a habit, you are going down the wrong path. Not because the market punishes you — it may not, immediately — but because your instrument has been irreversibly dulled.

Ardhanārīśvara and the End of Binaries

Here is where decolonizing the mind becomes a practical business skill, not an ideological posture.

In the West, thought moves in pendulum swings. The French Revolution, then the counter-revolution. This is the logic of binaries — everything is either good or bad, progressive or regressive, for or against. Something is positioned as better than something else or as the opposite of something else.

Indian thought has a different answer. Ardhanārīśvara — the form in which Śiva and Śakti are one body, one being, the two halves neither opposed nor merged but integrated. Transcend the binary. Integrate the opposites into a higher third.

Many of the creative blocks in entrepreneurship come from exactly this — you have defined the problem as a binary. Either we cut costs or we invest in growth. Either we serve the premium market or we serve the mass market. Either we keep the team small or we scale fast. But what is the third organising principle that dissolves the choice? The Ardhanārīśvara posture is to refuse the binary and look for the integration. Once this habit becomes natural, unbelievable creativity is unlocked. Sometimes you must choose between two options if they have been well studied and well understood. Often the framing of it as a choice between two is arbitrary. It is important to be able to know when a third alternative exists that overcomes being stuck in binaries.

The Work Ahead

Let me recap for you. The most important tool you have is your mind as defined above and it can be sharpened. Sharpening requires Chitta-śuddhi, the cleansing of the inner storehouse. Everything you have lived through — every childhood impression, every daily disappointment, every experience you have registered as trauma rather than as learning — sits in the Chitta. Left unprocessed, it pumps continuously into the Manas, which then pumps distortion into the Buddhi, which then produces decisions you will later regret.

If you had a chance to reconstruct your inner instrument — to make it resilient, clean, and receptive — there is no entrepreneurial problem you could not creatively address. The blood of the Saptaṛṣis already flows in you. The creativity is already inside. It only needs to be activated.

Whatever your business is — whatever its scale, whatever its sector — it can be completely reimagined from the inside. Not by new concepts bolted on the wall. But by changing how you think about your business, how you think about the problem, how you think about the customer, how you think about the product. And by consciously dissolving the contradictions that keep you stuck in binaries.

A Closing Note on Books, and on Finding One’s Path

People often ask me — which books should I read for all of this?

The idea that knowledge will arrive primarily through reading is itself an imported idea.

Take one of the most quoted verses in the world — Yogastha Kuru Karmani. Kṛṣṇa says, establish yourself in yoga, then act. But how do you establish yourself in yoga if you have not learned how to from one who has mastered it? You cannot do it just by reading that sentence. This is the chicken and the egg. Reading the verse cannot answer it. Only practice can. Through practice, your body-mind-Buddhi-Chitta-Karmas align into one, and that is when you become capable of genuinely creative action. You cannot get there through merely reading.

That is why I chose “residential retreats” and “deep dive workshops” as the model for helping people and entrepreneurs evolve. In three days, you can produce enough of an inner shift that a person is ready to go deeper. The transmission requires time. The inner instrument cannot be tuned in forty-five minutes with a handheld microphone.

“An organization cannot grow beyond its people. For an organization to grow and transform, its people need to grow and transform. and that cannot happen through lectures, conferences and cookie-cutter, run of the mill training sessions. this transformation involves a learning journey – and everyone’s journey is unique.” – Vinay Kulkarni

The Alchmi Experience
What happens during an Alchmi retreat? We cannot fully describe it, because each one unfolds uniquely, responding to the specific constellation of leaders present.
What we can tell you is this – Each retreat begins with guided discovery—an exploration of participants’ mental and emotional states, unconscious behavioral drivers, and self-imposed limitations. From there, Vinay creates the exact conditions needed for breakthrough, operating from a state of deep connection with your organization and its people.
His singular intention: that each participant walks away with precisely what they need to take powerful next steps in their growth journey.

Schedule a transformational retreat for your team today: Send a Request

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Session 3 — IKS Certificate Course

Integrating Indian Knowledge Systems in Academia through NEP 2020:

A Vision for Civilizational Reclamation

Resource Person: Śrī Vinay Ji  Kulkarni

Moderated by: Nidhi Ji (NLD Platform)

Collaborating Institution: Śrī Guru Teg Bahadur Khalsa College, Śrī Anandpur Sāhib, Punjab

10-Day IKS Certificate Course

Welcome and Introduction

Recap of Previous Sessions

The last two sessions that all of us participated in — we sincerely hope those were fruitful for you. We started with a session on Patañjali Yoga Sūtra, which was extremely experiential, where all of us as a collective, as a group, participated in meditation, reflection, and expression of gratitude. Yesterday, our discussion went into Śrī Aurobindo’s idea of nation and nationalism, , wherein the lecturer wonderfully explained the ideas, philosophies, and values that Śrī Aurobindo envisioned for Bhārat.

Today, Vinay Ji -ji is going to speak on a very important topic: Acharya Devo Bhava — The Sacred Role of the Teacher in Rebuilding Bhārat. We had some discussion on what an appropriate topic could be, and all the ideas Vinay Ji -ji shared with me were very interesting in terms of discussions on pedagogy, discussions on the role of the teacher, and I’m glad he has chosen to speak on this topic.

Master’s Thesis and the Roots of Pedagogy

Out of all the areas where I’ve had some thinking done, I think teaching, pedagogy, and learning are the areas closest to my heart. My master’s thesis at the University of Arizona, where I was doing my master’s in systems and industrial engineering, was on teaching, learning, systems thinking, and mental models. My research committee was four professors who each had forty years of teaching experience, and I was presenting to them how it should be done. That was kind of ironical, but they really appreciated it.

I realized these thoughts and insights were also coming from IKS. In fact, one of the greatest teachers the world has ever seen is Śrī Krishna himself, and one of the greatest examples of amazing pedagogy is the Bhagavad Gītā itself — the Krishna-Arjuna Samvāda.

Diagnosis — The Current State of Education

Interactive Discussion: How Did We Get Here?

What do we want to talk about today? I want to try and make it interactive. Just to set context — why are we having to discuss this? Why are we in this state? Think of it as a diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, and cure. The current state of education — how did we get here?

Nidhi Ji: Vinay Ji -ji is asking: how did we get to today’s state of education? Any quick responses?

Participant Responses

• Prachi: Education is student centric.

• Participant: There is influence of western thoughts in the current state of education.

• Pallavi: English education — that’s the current state of education.

• Rajni: It is not skill-based education.

• Chandra Mohan-ji: Only subjects are taught; personalities are not groomed.

• Pallavi: Values are missing in today’s education.

• Umesh: Education is just for getting service — it has become too transactional in nature.

• Rajni: Curriculum is not revised on a timely basis.

Root Cause: Colonial Education and the Content-Container Gap

I think one of the core issues we are having today is that the person is not worked upon — only the content is the focus. The root cause is not merely a western influence; it is western education itself, put in place by our colonial masters. We got infected with it and rarely is an infected person able to cure himself. We had the methods, but we were in deep slumber, and slowly we’re waking up.

We are at the cusp where, while we’re going in the right direction, a lot of effort and attention is going into creating content. What’s happening is we’re replacing westernized content with Indian content. But our education system was not only about the content. It was also about the container — the person.

If I’m the teacher, my main concern is: what kind of seed or sapling do I have in front of me? Is it a sapling of a mango tree, a neem tree, or a banyan tree? Based on that, my dharma would be different, because each one has a different purpose, different potential. My purpose would be to help each of those saplings realize their full potential.

The purpose of the western education system was to create workers for the factories. Totally different. That is why we are not producing those Vivekānandas or Śrī Aurobindos anymore. But anybody born in this land — that potential is there, that ṛṣhi tattva is there.

Vidyā versus Śilpa

We always made a distinction between vidyā and śailpa. Śilpa is skill, but vidyā — sā vidyā yā vimuktaye — vidyā is that which leads to liberation- let’s just say liberation from false notions, ideas, beliefs and identities. In a typical western educational context, if you talk about mokṣa, it’s treated as a nonsensical idea. That happens because in the western model there’s a separation between the purpose of life and the purpose of education.

There’s a dichotomy between nature and man, life and nature, nature and divinity. A tripartite struggle is going on. To become truly Bhāratīya, we must drop the colonial lens and transcend those binaries. We must understand the concept of Ardhanarishvara — go beyond the duality, transcend and integrate the two opposing parts.

The Colonized Mind

What is the condition of a colonized mind? We think in binaries. When you think in binaries you observe that it is always pitting one part of nature against another. How can you pit one against the other? That’s why we have Ardhanarishvara. In nature, there is design. Everything has a very important role — even that squirrel in the Rāmāyaṇa had an important role. It is a beautiful creation, and everything has a role.

There is a separation between life purpose and purpose of education. Our culture is built on dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa. The goal is mokṣa, but we don’t demonize desire. We don’t say desire is the root cause of suffering. We need to know how to handle desire and how to have sāttvic desires. First, we learn what is dharma. Once the buddhi is trained through dharma, then you generate artha through dharmic ways, and then kāma can be fulfilled through the artha generated through dharmic ways.

The “Transactionalization” of the Guru-Śiṣya Relationship

Another important thing that has happened is the transactionalization of the guru-śiṣya relationship. This is the biggest thing that has happened. It has become a transaction. The teacher is considered a service provider, and the student is a consumer. That is the biggest problem.

The Purpose of Education — Insights from Śrī Aurobindo and Avatāras

The Mind Must Be Consulted in Its Own Growth

Śrī Aurobindo offers an important idea: The mind must be consulted in its own growth. The idea of hammering the child into a shape desired by the parent or teacher is an outdated and less enlightened practice. Every person has within them something divine, something uniquely their own — a chance for strength and perfection in however small a sphere, which they can choose to embrace or reject. The task of education is to help the growing soul draw out that which is best within and make it perfect for a noble use.

Avatāras and Their Gurus: A Message for Teachers

Take the example of our avatāras. Śrī Rāma — who was Rāma’s guru? Vasiṣṭha. And we have the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha coming out of the dialogue between Vasiṣṭha and Rāma. Now, one question is: if he was an avatāra, why does he need a guru? Śrī Krishna also had Maharṣi Sāndīpani; he also had to go to gurukula. Why?

They come to show how to live through their own life. And secondly, it is also a message to teachers: see each student as an avatāra, a potential Rāma or Krishna. See the divine in the student. Don’t see the student as a stupid, lowly creature that you’re going to educate and enlighten.

The beauty of the relationship between Vasiṣṭha and Rāma — knowing that Rāma is an avatāra, knowing the divinity, Vasiṣṭha still executes his role as a teacher, only to awaken the divinity that is already there. Think of each student as a Rāma. The divinity is already there. How are you going to awaken it? For that, certain sādhanā is needed for the teacher. If the transformation has not happened in you, how are you going to bring it about in somebody else?

The Teacher as the Eternal Student

The attitude with which you teach matters. While teaching, you are also learning. I’m going to reference a book which is not from India or by an Indian author, but it’s interesting: Illusions by Richard Bach. Inside that book, there is a section called the Messiah’s Handbook. It says: you teach best what you most need to learn.

Even Dattātreya, the guru of gurus, said: be a śiṣya all the time. That is what my guru also said. When there is a class going on, you are taking on the role and executing that role, but don’t be locked into the idea that you’re the guru. Let there be a two-way flow of knowledge.

Elements of Pedagogy

Interactive Discussion: Who Is a Teacher?

What is a teacher? What is a teacher’s role? Who is a student? What is the relationship? What is knowledge? What is teaching? What is pedagogy?

Participant Responses on the Teacher’s Role

• Sheetal: Teacher is a torchbearer.

• Sunman: Teacher is one who inspires the students to learn, to gather knowledge. More than a person who gives skill, a teacher is a person who inspires students to learn.

• Pragi: Teacher is a person who makes learning possible and has a capacity to change behavior of the student.

• Pallavi: A gandhār — a guide.

• Rajni: Teacher is someone who imparts knowledge with learners.

• Chandra Mohan: Teacher is a friend, philosopher, guide.

• Murugal: Teacher should be a holistic guide.

• Arpit: Teacher kindles and nurtures curiosity of the child and guides them in a proper direction.

• Kalpana: Teacher is a facilitator.

• Dr. Mudita Agnihotri: Teacher is a person who transforms someone.

• Dr. Shailaja: Teacher is a medium.

The Transformation Question

Those are all beautiful responses. Now I want you to think: if a teacher is going to be one who transforms, then what should be the quality? What should be the level of consciousness of such a teacher? How many teachers are there in India? Out of the total number, what percentage are the type that actually help to transform students?

• Participant: 25%.

• Dr. Shailaja: 0.1% only.

How many of you can honestly say you have been able to transform your students?

Two or three teachers raised their hands. Dr. Sadvi responded: not much.

The US Study: Why Teachers Don’t Teach the Way They Know They Should

There was a study done in the US. They studied 4,000 teachers and professors. These professors were asked: how should students be taught? What is the correct way of teaching? They all said it should be experiential, nonlinear, and so on — all the things we normally tend to say about how to make it easy for students to understand.

Then the researchers went and sat in their classrooms and observed how they were teaching. They found that a very small percentage — or probably none — were teaching the way they said students should be taught.

They tried to find out why. The conclusion: people tend to teach the way they were taught. Even when you’re going through your studies and somebody’s teaching you and you’re already feeling they’re not doing it the right way, and you tell yourself, ‘When I get an opportunity, I’ll teach differently’ — when the time comes, people end up teaching the way they were taught.

This cycle has to be broken. We need a whole generation of teachers who are taught the way they need to teach.

Mental Models and Perception

What Is a Mental Model?

When I ask the same question to ten different people, there’s some processing that happens in their mind, and out comes an answer. More often than not, the ten answers are going to be different. Why is that?

• Suman: Mental model means perspective.

• Arpit: It’s a sort of framework on how we solve problems.

• Abhishek: Nature and mindset.

I’m using it in the sense of your combination of samskāras, your svabhāva, and so many different things that make up the lens through which you see the world. Nature and nurture, both.

From an Indian perspective, your life did not begin when you were born in this lifetime. It has been going on, and you’re carrying samskāras and vāsanās from so many lifetimes. This worldview has been taking shape over a long time. But then when you’re born, your parents, grandparents, teachers, and everyone around you pass on certain ideas, thoughts, views of the world — what is safe, what is not safe, cause and effect, this is friendly, that is not, this is good to eat, that is not — all these things go on to shape your mental model.

By the time a person begins to think, there is a whole layer upon layer of thought that is undigested, ill-formed — in whatever shape — that’s been passed on from different people. So, when you start thinking, your first thought is built on those layers. As you grow, you never examine this layer. It’s like the basement — the door is always closed. You never evaluate the contents of that basement, but it’s always there and it’s influencing your thought.

The Teacher’s Role in Mental Model Transformation

Part of the role of the teacher is to expose these mental models and bring out the assumptions on which they are based. When you hold those assumptions side by side with facts and reality, the person holding those mental models is more likely to be willing to adapt and change.

Unless the mental model changes, no true learning takes place. It is all just surface learning, and that is exactly what is happening with our current education system. You can go through sixteen or twenty years of education, but it still has no impact on your thought process. Even after all that education, if somebody came from a regressive thinking family, they still carry the same thought process. The education had no effect.

You Become the Object of Your Meditation

One other idea I want to share: you become the object of your meditation. If you understand this, you can apply this construct to understand most of what we call sanātanī culture and civilization. I become that which I meditate upon.

Knowing this, so many systems were built to keep on elevating our consciousness. The whole objective of the civilizational system we created is the elevation of human consciousness. Nārāyaṇa-tattva — that’s what it is. And then śravanā, manana, Nidhi Jidhyāsana — the fundamental process of learning in our culture.

Reimagining the Classroom, Subject, and Textbook

The classroom: Space, Shape, and Energy

Teaching and education must be made free of the dependence on a classroom—not bound by a classroom.

But I know you all work for a school and must teach inside a classroom. So, think about how the classroom setting can be made more interesting. I have experimented when doing workshops — with small kids, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged people, CEOs, senior executives — no matter who it is: when people sit in a square, typical classroom format, it creates a particular kind of learning atmosphere. When you make people sit in a circle, it’s different. A semicircle, it’s different. A triangle, it’s different.

I looked at the shapes of the homakuṇḍas. You have different shapes for homakuṇḍas, and what is the effect of those shapes? I found a correlation. I generally prefer a circular format where there’s no rows of people one behind the other — more of a 360-degree view or a semicircle.

Also consider what kind of pictures are on the wall, how you can create the right environment.

The Subject: Reconnecting Knowledge to Life

Nature, existence, and reality are a continuum. They are not broken up into subjects. As we are speaking right now, biology is happening, chemistry is happening, physics is happening, mathematics — everything is happening. But in a mathematics class, the teacher says ‘don’t talk biology here,’ and in a physics class, the teacher says ‘don’t talk civics here.’ It’s all bifurcated.

Because of this conditioning, when people come out, they’re not able to look at life as a whole. They’re not able to think at a systems level. That is the biggest problem. Indians were masters of systems thinking. When I was doing my research in the US on systems thinking, I told my professor that I don’t think Forrester, who is credited with systems thinking, was the real creator of this — it comes from India. And he agreed with me.

They’ve taken very essential branches of knowledge and removed the prāṇa from them, made them dry and disconnected from real life. That’s why students feel that going to school is drudgery, a pain, and they ask: what is the use of all these things in my life? Your job is to reconnect the subject to life before you start teaching it. Teach your curriculum, follow the structure your school has given you, but initially have an orientation — set the context, put the prāṇa back into the subject, connect it back to life, and then teach.

Define the role and use of the textbook

Our modern education is fixated on the textbook. Students are learning entire textbooks by heart. Somewhere in the beginning of the course, during your orientation, you must set the context: what is going to be the role of the textbook in this course? How much importance are you going to give it? How are you going to use it?

If your school is autonomous and gives you some freedom, prescribe other reading materials from our own sources in addition to the prescribed textbook.

The Process: Mapping the Learning Journey Through Mental Models

What is going to be the learning journey of students through your course? You must map it out — from where to where? At the beginning, you must capture their existing mental models. It might be the same course you teach every year, but every batch of students is going to be different. Every time, it’s a new experience.

Based on your understanding of the mental models of the current set of students, you’ve got to map out a journey that evaluates their mental models, helps them evaluate their own mental models, helps them evaluate the mental models of their classmates, and your mental models. You’re all learning from each other. You must map out that journey of mental model transformation. For that, your concepts, your ideas, your basics must be rock solid.

Developing Your Own Creative Teaching Methods

If you want to develop your own creative, innovative teaching methods — because that is where the innovation really needs to happen — this could be like a three-day workshop. If somebody’s interested, we can conduct one where everybody can walk out with their own manual of innovative teaching methods. But I’ll go through the key elements very quickly.

Key Elements for Innovative Pedagogy

First, write down for yourself your definition and understanding of knowledge and its purpose. Be able to clarify the context of education and knowledge for your students. Differentiate between content and knowledge. When we say jñāna, it is basically knowledge of the self. Knowledge of the world is vijñāna. For us, both were important. As Ādi Shankarāchārya said, we’re interested in both material and spiritual progress of a human being — ābhyudaya and niḥśreyāsa. Pravṛtti and Nivṛtti both. You must have clarity on what is vidyā and what is śilpa. You can think of it as the meta concept and its application.

Activation of the Learner

This is the most important concept I want to leave you with. Just because fifty students are sitting in your class physically doesn’t mean fifty students are there. You must do a check-in every time: how many of them are mentally present? You need a process that brings them completely into the class, paying full attention to what you’re going to teach.

I call it the activation of the learner. You may find that you came to teach something, but the students cannot receive it. Then you must drop whatever your plan is and work on the student — relieve them of whatever is causing distress and bring them back into a state of high receptivity. And then, only then, teach. The same thing applies for meditation: they say don’t meditate when your mind is very disturbed. Get into a calm, peaceful state first.

You also must establish the sacred relationship between teacher and student. Spend some time with them early on. Read up on neuroscience, which is proving a lot of things we already knew. Work on identifying, exposing, and exploring mental models. Matching teaching and learning styles is another element — but in general, if you make it very interactive and experiential, you’ll cover most learning styles.

Personalize the lessons for the learners

Whether you have a mango tree, a neem tree, or a banyan tree — the svabhāva of people are different. The challenge for the teacher is: you are teaching the same subject to all fifty students. Think about how are you going to make it meaningful for each person who is so different?

Know Your Learner Exercise

My suggestion: do a ‘Know Your Learner’ exercise at the beginning of the class. Ask them: Tell me about yourself. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Tell me about your parents, how they raised you, what they taught you. Tell me about the environment in which you grew up. How would you describe your life up to this point? What have been the major highs and lows? What have been your greatest achievements?

Has anybody here been part of a course where they were asked these kinds of questions?

Nidhi Ji: Probably not.

And has any teacher here done this kind of exercise with their students?

Shubhangi: Yes, ma’am. I have done this exercise with my students before starting my class. Any new session, I interact with them first to know their minds — what kind of thought process they carry — and then I start my lecture.

That’s wonderful. What is the class size?

Shubhangi: Approximately 60 to 80 students.

So, you would need two or three sessions just to get to know people and go through everything.

Chandra Mohan: Namaskar. I am involved in competitive coaching. First, I do it not orally. I introduce myself and ask them in writing — where they have been born, their educational qualifications, their parents’ background, whether they come from a rural or urban background, their interested areas, their favorite hobbies. First, I keep those things written on paper. Later, after five or six days of the course, whoever is lacking something, I personally contact and interact with them. This is my model, very humbly and honestly, I’m saying.

That’s good. I think you can take it up one notch further — have office hours where each student can come and meet you one-on-one. Not directly going into counseling and teaching. Just creating a safe space where the student feels safe to come and discuss anything with you.

The Upadeśa-śravanā-Manana- Nidhidhyāsana Model

A Two-Way Framework for Teacher and Student by Vinay Kulkarni

Everybody knows about śravanā, manana, Nidhi Jidhyāsana. I have slightly modified it. There’s a two-way model: what the teacher does and what the student does.

1. Upadeśa-śravanā (Teaching and Listening)

First is Upadeśa — the teacher’s essential teaching. śravanā here is listening. Not simply listening but we want full body listening listening deeply, intently, and with śraddhā.

You may have any kind of material, but you must boil it down to: what is the ultimate truth of this subject? What is the boiled essence? What is the thing I can be sure every student will walk away with? Boil it down to the most essential part and convert that into your upadeśa. Meditate on it and test it out in your own consciousness — do you honestly believe that? Do you understand it? Bring it to that level.

2. Manana and Chintanā (Reflection and Contemplation)

This is deep reflection and contemplation. This is the most powerful faculty we have, and it doesn’t get developed in the modern education system. Structure every classroom so that after the upadeśa, there is time for manana and chintanā. Students should be able to reflect and contemplate: Is this true in my own life? Can I find examples? Can I find illustrations? How can I put prāṇa back into this subject? How can I find correlations in my real life?

3. Samvāda-Satsaṅga (Dialogue and Sacred Association)

Everybody thinks satsaṅga means going to some temple and hanging out with saffron-clad people. But Ādi Shankarāchārya explained in Vivekachūḍāmaṇi: it is evident that a student silently sitting like a statue, even before the greatest of teachers and for an endless period, can have no benefit of any spiritual evolution. The student must rub his ideas and thoughts against the experienced head and heart of the teacher and gain for himself a polish, a fragrance, at once divine and perfect. Discussion is the heart of satsaṅga.

There is a format, a way it is done. Even Śrī Krishna is not simply saying ‘Here is the deal, just take it and follow.’ There are no commandments. Arjuna can go on asking as many questions as he wants. It takes eighteen chapters to clarify his doubts. Krishna is demonstrating how to be a teacher with lot of patience, lot of empathy, showing different aspects of the same thing, teaching the same truth in different ways, but finally leaving the decision to the person.

For this to happen, the teacher needs to be very secure in his own knowledge. The teacher also needs to honestly be able to say what he knows, what he doesn’t know, and demonstrate that kind of honesty to the students.

4. Sādhanā-Nidhi Jidhyāsana (Practice and Internalization)

Normally it is just Nidhidhyāsana. But Nidhidhyāsana is not possible if you don’t have a sādhanā practice. Incorporating sādhanā into your own life and into the teaching itself is very important, and it’s possible.

The purpose of the teacher is not to make the student dependent on the teacher, the textbook, the exams, or the school. The purpose is to make the student independent, dependent only on his own mind, on his own self. For that, you must become that. If you’re not at that level, this is where the gap is.

Nidhidhyāsana is meditating on the teaching and internalizing it, making it a living truth. Unless that happens, the subject has no meaning in my life and it’s a waste. How can you convert that into something in the student’s life? Incorporate it into their dinachāryā. Find a way where at least one part of your course, one element, becomes part of their dinachāryā — then it has something to offer in their life.

Summary of the Framework

Upadeśa → śravanā → Manana → Chintanā → Samvāda-Satsaṅga → Sādhanā-Nidhi Jidhyāsana

You can take any subject and apply this framework. First, the teacher boils the material down to its essential truth and delivers the upadeśa. Then students listen with śraddhā, reflect and contemplate, engage in structured dialogue with peers and teacher, and finally internalize it through sādhanā, making it a living truth in their daily life.

Questions and Discussion

Question 1: Is This Practical in the Modern Era?

Participant: You are talking about all these things. These are the old things. Now, in the modern era, is it possible to follow all these things? The students follow social media and technology. Practically, this is not happening. Teachers and students rely mostly on the textbook.

That is what we started off with — it’s not happening, and it needs to happen. In my own personal experience, because I’ve taught kids of various ages, you’ll be amazed — even six-year-old kids are so self-aware and perceptive. When we opened up samvāda, the groups were age 6 to 14, and six-year-olds were having samvāda with 14-year-olds. We have prejudged and misjudged them.

Nidhi Ji: I would just like to add: all that Vinay Ji  has suggested is quite feasible and possible in the so-called modern era. Maybe we are not trying enough. If we put in systematic efforts based on the ideas Vinay Ji  has shared about mental models, making the classroom more engaging, and bringing Indic approaches — it does work. We just have to make it more consistent, as Vinay Ji  rightly said, ensuring that at least some idea or practice becomes part of the students’ dinachāryā.

When I was teaching IKS to my students, by the end of the semester they were really interested. They were so self-motivated that they wanted to explore the subject on their own — architecture, Nāṭyaśāstra, Bhagavad Gītā, urban planning from an Indic perspective. I think even in the modern system with all its constraints, there are opportunities to make a difference. We just have to plan our time well.

Me: During COVID, I used to sit in Zoom classes with my daughter. I noticed that teachers were under pressure to cover the curriculum. They had fifty slides and felt they had to rush through all of them. The focus was on ‘I need to finish my thing and get the tick’ rather than on what was happening to the students. But if they could boil the fifty slides down to one slide — what is the fundamental, essential truth of this? — and cover that first, then spend more time on the two or three fundamental truths about the subject, you can do śravanā, manana, Nidhi Jidhyāsana, you can go deep. Twenty-five percent of it you can do in class; the rest you can do in other ways.

Question 2: How to Get Students Away from Mobile Games?

Prachi: How can we get rid from the mobile game habit among students during free time, even in the gap of two lectures? How can we motivate them to read books rather than engage in mobile surfing?

A lot of this is also the parents. First, parents are giving them the phone. I had to give a phone to my daughter because she’s always going to dance classes and going far away, and we needed to have a way to stay in touch. But you must find ways of regulating that and making other things more attractive, which means parents must be very involved. This problem happened because the phone became a babysitter. The phone became the only way the child would eat. Parents started relying on it when the child was a baby, and now to fix it is very hard.

Question 3: Teachers, AI, and Undisciplined Students

Abhishek Namo: New students are very influenced by AI. What character and image must a teacher have at this point? And when we teach in institutions where multiple students are undisciplined, what should be the teacher’s attitude?

First, look at the students as each of them being a potential avatāra. Let me give a real-life example.

I went to a business school for a whole day of presentations. The students were making a lot of commotion, throwing darts — it looked like a rowdy high-school crowd. The teachers looked as if these were totally useless characters. Everybody was using PowerPoint and was more interested in their own slides and how much time was left.

When my turn came, I said I would not use the PowerPoint. Let’s just have a conversation. I took up one topic, and we started having a dialogue. I asked them, ‘What do you think about this?’ We just started talking. The same group of people — they were engaged for 30 to 45 minutes, all of them. They wanted to keep talking after the event. Night and day difference.

The biggest problem is that what you’re teaching and what they’re facing in their life — there’s no connection. I started with asking them: tell me about your life. What is going on? What is bothering you right now? Four or five people started opening up. ‘I’m worried about what’s going to happen after I graduate.’ ‘Why are you worried?’ ‘I’m worried I might not get a job.’ ‘Why do you think you won’t get a job?’ We went on talking like this. Everybody got pulled in. After some time, there is reason to bring in a structured element too. It’s just a matter of how you engage with them.

Nidhi Ji: Rapport building and helping them be part of the safe space — that’s also very important. It may seem challenging initially, but over time it works. Each teacher has their own unique approach and style.

Closing

Nidhi Ji: It’s been a wonderful session, very interactive, fruitful dialogues we have engaged in. Through Vinay Ji -ji’s vast experience in the field of education and his multifaceted experience in business, entrepreneurship, and running so many successful dharmic initiatives, we were able to procure insights we can take to our classrooms and probably do a better job as teachers — especially in the process of decolonization, in the process of integrating Indic traditions, and in the preservation of our civilizational heritage.

I am deeply grateful to Vinay Ji -ji. You can follow Vinay Ji  on LinkedIn. I would urge everyone to please subscribe to his newsletter on LinkedIn. If you are able to read what he’s writing in the newsletter, I think a lot of us can use that as a tool in the classroom — discuss these aspects and take IKS forward into the classroom, because IKS in action in the classroom is what we are all looking at.

Closing Remarks

Thank you so much. Really great audience. And I must say, Nidhi Ji-ji, you’re a fantastic moderator — from what I’ve seen so far, one of the best.

Nidhi Ji: Thank you so much, Vinay Ji -ji. Thank you, everyone. You are a wonderful group, wonderful audience, and great learners. We are so happy to be together through this platform.

The post Acharya Devo Bhava first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

Viewing the World Through the lens of Indian Knowledge Systems

From Ancient Wisdom to Living Ways of Seeing, Being, and Healing

Taught by  Vinay P. Kulkarni
JAIN (Deemed-to-be University)  |  24th January, 2026
A note of gratitude to Dr. Avanish Kumar, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations Centre for Research in Social Sciences and Education (CeRSSE)

Some experiences stay with you. Not because they were perfect, but because they were real. This course was one of them.

I want to begin by placing on record my deep gratitude to JAIN (Deemed-to-be University) for creating the space for this kind of conversation — one that goes well beyond the conventional boundaries of academic instruction. And a very special thanks to Dr. Avanish Kumar, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations.

Teaching this course was, quite honestly, one of the most fulfilling things I have done in recent times. The students brought energy, curiosity, and an openness that is rare. There were moments in that classroom where something genuinely shifted — not just in what people were thinking, but in how they were thinking. And for that, I am deeply grateful.

What the Course Was About

The full title of this course — Viewing the World Through Indian Knowledge Systems: From Ancient Wisdom to Living Ways of Seeing, Being, and Healing — is itself a kind of manifesto. This was not a history lesson. It was not a survey of ancient texts. It was, at its heart, an invitation to examine the lens through which we see the world.

We began with a deceptively simple question: What if everything we thought we knew about success, progress, happiness, and even health was built upon borrowed assumptions — mental constructs we never consciously chose? What if the very framework through which we perceive reality was shaped not by cosmic truth, but by historical accidents and colonial legacies?

That question opened a door. And once open, we walked through it together.

The Invisible Architecture of Our Minds

We rarely pause to examine the mental models that govern our lives. Yet these models determine everything — what we consider valuable, what we pursue, how we measure success, and ultimately, who we become. The course was structured to surface these invisible architectures and hold them up to the light.

We explored the contrast between Western and Bharatiya worldviews — not to romanticize one over the other, but to understand that the questions we ask shape the answers available to us. Is happiness an individual pursuit or a collective one? Is time linear, marching toward some future destination, or cyclical, breathing through the eternal rhythms of creation and dissolution? Is death an ending or a doorway?

The Dharmic framework — the Bhāratīya operating system, if you will — does not separate the secular from the sacred, the material from the spiritual, the individual from the collective. Dharma is not religion in the Western sense. It is based on the cosmic principles that sustains life at every level, from the movement of galaxies to the beating of a human heart.

Decolonizing the Mind: The Heart of the Matter

Perhaps the most charged territory we entered was the question of epistemic colonization — how colonial history has reshaped not just our institutions, but our very sense of ourselves.

Indians have internalized colonial descriptions of their own society — descriptions that portray Indian culture as irrational, religiously fragmented, caste-ridden and morally regressive. These portrayals, originally produced within Western theological and philosophical debates, continue to shape Indian self-understanding through modern social sciences, constitutional law and public discourse. As a result, indigenous experiences and narratives are treated with suspicion, while Western analytical categories are accepted as neutral and universally valid.

— Prof. S. N. Balagangadhara, Seeing Ourselves as the Colonizer Saw Us

Prof. Balagangadhara’s observation cuts deep. When asked what it means to be Indian, many respond either with silence or with borrowed clichés drawn from Western political or sociological vocabularies. This epistemic alienation — this estrangement from one’s own inheritance — is not a small thing. It contributes to persistent struggles with social cohesion and institutional legitimacy, despite formal political independence.

The task we took up in this course was not political in any partisan sense. It was something more fundamental: the recovery of an independent, rooted way of seeing. Not a return to some idealized past, but the conscious reclamation of a shastric dṛṣṭi — a way of seeing grounded in the profound understanding of prakṛti and puruṣa, of the manifest and the unmanifest.

The Sustainability Crisis — and Its Inner Roots

The course gave significant attention to our current ecological and civilizational crisis — not as an external policy problem, but as a direct consequence of inner disconnection.

When an entire civilization operates exclusively in the Artha-Kāma plane — driven by desire and accumulation — and forgets Dharma (the harmonizing principle) and Mokṣa (the liberating principle), the results are predictable. Unlimited desires pressing against limited natural resources. One planet is simply not enough to satisfy the untenable demands of a humanity operating without the counterweights of inner restraint and ecological wisdom.

The antidote, we explored together, is not more regulation or technology. It is Chitta Shuddhi — the purification of consciousness. Viveka — the capacity to discriminate between the ephemeral and the eternal. Without this inner work, no external solution holds.

Purifying the Antaḥkaraṇa: The Inner Technology

Patañjali’s definition still reverberates across millennia: Yogaḥ citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ — yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind-stuff. Not a gym class. Not a wellness trend. The complete technology of inner transformation that our ṛṣis developed and refined over generations.

We explored the four faculties of the antaḥkaraṇa — the inner instrument: manas (the processing mind), buddhi (the discriminating intellect), ahaṅkāra (the sense of individual identity), and chitta (the storehouse of impressions). Each requires specific attention. Each is a field of practice. And together, they constitute the terrain on which the whole of inner life unfolds.

The Pañcakoṣa Paradigm and Mokṣic Design

One of the most illuminating frameworks we worked with was the Pañcakoṣa model — the understanding that the human being exists simultaneously across five sheaths, from the gross physical body (Annamaya Koṣa) to the bliss body (Ānandamaya Koṣa).

What became clear — and this visibly moved many students — was the breathtaking intentionality embedded in traditional Bharatiya culture. The food we ate, how it was prepared. The temples we built, the mūrtis we worshipped. The houses we lived in, the clothes we wore, the professions we chose, the cities we designed. Every aspect of life was carefully crafted so that even the most ordinary person, going about the most ordinary tasks, was being slowly, gently moved from the Annamaya toward the Ānandamaya koṣa. Day by day. Hour by hour. Task by task.

Such compassion. Such karuṇā. Such love for every living being.

We also explored Mokṣic Design as an economic and civilizational principle — the understanding that true material prosperity cannot be achieved through material goals alone. Design oriented toward liberation and expanded consciousness naturally generates material well-being as a byproduct.

The Pedagogy: How We Taught

I have always believed that the most important thing a teacher can do is make the student want to think — not tell them what to think. This course was built on that conviction.

Rather than delivering information, we created conditions for inquiry. Every session began with a provocation — a question designed to destabilize comfortable assumptions. Students were invited to notice their own reactions: What surprises you? What depresses you? What elevates you? These emotional responses, we discovered together, are doorways into the unconscious architecture of one’s worldview.

The pedagogy was explicitly participatory. Interactive discussions, reflective pauses, real-time examples drawn from contemporary life — these were woven throughout. Sanskrit terminology was introduced not as jargon but as precision tools: words that do not have adequate English equivalents, concepts that open new cognitive spaces when encountered directly.

The Pañcakoṣa framework, for instance, became a live taxonomy through which students began re-examining their own daily routines, relationships, and choices. The antaḥkaraṇa model gave them language for inner experiences they had always had but never been able to name.

One student described it beautifully: an innovative way of teaching — a participatory teaching method applied intelligently. That, honestly, is the highest praise a teacher can receive.

What the Students Said

162 students completed the course feedback. The numbers tell one part of the story. The words tell a richer one.

At a Glance — 162 responses, average score 4.62 out of 5.00

Rating Distribution — 116 students (71.6%) awarded a perfect 5 out of 5

Score Summary — 92.6% of students rated the course 4 stars or above

Qualitative Feedback Themes — coded from 162 open-ended responses

Selected Voices

“Thought provoking and wonderful session.”

“Innovative way of teaching. Participatory teaching method applied intelligently.”

“Knowing the real meaning of sustainability — nothing else needed.”

“Lot of inputs involving the kosha concept was too informative.”

“The session was awesome. Interactive and thought provoking. Thank you sir.”

“Very erudite presentation.”

“Learned to stabilize the mental health through yoga etc.”

“Amazing content integrating IKS concepts.”

“Most Informative, Inspiring, Enlightening, Excellent — Crystal Clear Wonderful Session.”

“Very informative and extensive.”

“Many activities were suggested by the expert which provoked reflective thinking.”

“Wonderfully organised.”

“Very informative and reflective.”

“Fantastic session. Learnt a lot.”

“Today’s session was very enriching and deep.”

“This was really amazing.”

The feedback was not solicited in a closed environment. These were genuine, uncoached responses from students encountering many of these ideas for the very first time. And they landed.

Closing Reflections

The world does not need more information. It needs transformed minds. It needs people who have done the inner work required to see clearly — without the distorting filters of borrowed assumptions and colonial conditioning.

That is what this course was attempting to do. Not to give students a new ideology to replace the old one, but to give them the tools to think for themselves. My attempt here was to replace colonized lenses we were born with decolonized Indianized lens. Activate that Bharatiya Dristi. Of course in short course we can only give students a taste of it.

Did we succeed? The students themselves seem to suggest we took meaningful steps in that direction. But more than the ratings and the kind words, what stays with me is the quality of attention in that room — the feeling that something real was being touched, that minds were genuinely opening.

The ancient wisdom has always been here. Patiently waiting. The question is never whether these teachings are relevant — their relevance only grows with each passing crisis. The question is whether there are minds ready to receive them, and hearts open to their transformative power.

I left this course believing, more deeply than before, that there are. IKS is not something new. It is our culture, our history, our civilization, our traditions, our way of life, our worldview. We just need to recollect and restore! Kudos to universities like JAIN for their efforts in this direction.

Here is a more detailed article on based on the course:

Viewing the World Through Indian Knowledge Systems: From Ancient Wisdom to Living Ways of Seeing, Being, and Healing

— Vinay P. Kulkarni, January 2026

You can write to me at vkulkarni@vedikzen.com / Whatsapp: 9945731953

The post 36-Hour Certificate Course on Indian Knowledge Systems first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

Moderated by Dr. Vinayachandra Banavathy, Chanakya University

An insightful dialogue on honouring the past and innovating for the future–exploring how Indian Knowledge Systems can shape modern education, research, and innovation.

Prof. Shailaja Sharma, Azim Premji University

Shri Vinay Kulkarni, Founder, ALCHMI

Dr. Prathosh A P, Asst. Professor, IISc

31st Jan | 5 to 6:30pm

Tripura Vasini Palace Grounds, Bengaluru

Click here for Article Based on the FULL Panel Discussion

I am sharing here a summary article based on my responses to questions asked during the above panel discussion by our moderator Dr. Vinayachandra Ji and the audience. Overall it was a wonderful panel discussion and I enjoyed engaging with the questions, the audience and my fellow panelists Dr. Shailaja and Dr. Pratosh. I thank Param and Vedanta Bharati for the opportunity. I have not included the responses of the other panelists to avoid misrepresenting their statements.

From Wonder to Wisdom: What We Actually Mean by Indian Knowledge Systems

When people say “Indian Knowledge Systems,” I smile a little inside.

Not because the term is wrong. But because the words knowledge and system carry a certain weight in English that doesn’t quite capture what we’re pointing to.

In many modern contexts, “knowledge” implies something we use to manipulate the world—to gain advantage, to extract, to control. And “system” sounds like a machine built for regulation. Put them together, and you risk making something living sound bureaucratic.

A Continuous Chain, Not a Museum Piece

What our ancestors did—and what we are part of as a continuous chain of people this land has produced—was simply this: they arrived into a world already in motion, and they paid attention.
Imagine waking up in a place where everything is already happening. Beautiful mountains. Rivers that move with purpose. Forests that breathe. And then you discover something called hunger.
But hunger doesn’t arrive randomly. It arrives cyclically—at particular times. You eat, and it goes away. Then it returns.

So you observe: there is repetition.

Then you notice it gets bright, and then dark. The sun rises, the moon appears. Again—a cycle. The seasons turn, the rivers flood and recede. Again—pattern. Order.

A mind that is truly awake starts to see that things are not happening in chaos. There is cyclicity. There is rhythm. There is something that could only be called design.

And then the questions arise—not as intellectual exercises, but as genuine encounters with reality:

Who created this? How did this begin? Has it always been going on? Is something thinking about me?

That last question is worth sitting with.

Because when our ancestors noticed that they experienced hunger—and that creation had already provided something to satisfy it; that they needed shelter—and that the materials to build it existed; it began to feel less like accident and more like intention.

As if something in the universe was actually oriented toward their welfare.

The most important response our ancestors had to what they encountered was not arrogance. It was not conquest. It was not the urge to control.
It was wonder.

“What an astonishing and beautiful thing this is.”

That sense of wonder—that vismaya—is where every genuine inquiry begins. And from that place of wonder, many different schools of thought emerged. Because when human beings face the same profound questions, they don’t always arrive at the same answers.
Some said: yes, creation happened through an intelligent cause. Others said: it unfolds on its own. Some focused on careful observation. Some developed methodologies of inquiry. Some did what we would today call experimentation. Over centuries and millennia, a certain understanding took shape.

Rishis Didn’t Demand Belief—They Offered a Path

At a deeper level of consciousness, what we call rishis perceived creation in ways that went far beyond ordinary observation. They perceived the whole—cause and effect, how things arise, how they unfold—almost as an integrated living reality.
But here is what matters most.

They didn’t say: “This is what I saw. Now believe me.”
They said something far more radical—and far more mature:
“There is a path. If you walk it, you may come to see what I saw. You may experience what I experienced. You don’t have to trust me. Verify it yourself.”

That is a foundational principle of what we call IKS today. It is not a collection of claims to be accepted on faith. It is a civilization that built methods of arriving at truth—across every domain of life.

And the knowledge that came from those methods was captured with great care: in sutras, in shastras, in oral traditions of astonishing precision. A body of knowledge emerged. But behind it was not intellectual ambition alone. It came from compassion—the recognition that other people in society should also be able to access these insights and live from them. Not through belief. Through realization.

No False Divide Between This World and That

One confusion that keeps surfacing is the idea that we were somehow divided between the material world and the spiritual. That we had to choose between prosperity and liberation.
For us, this was never a contradiction.

Think about what you wish for the people you love. You wish them material prosperity. And you also wish them ultimate welfare—peace, fulfilment, freedom. Both. Simultaneously.
You cannot have the wheat without the husk. You cannot have only the husk. Spiritual evolution and material prosperity come together, like grain and its covering. That is why our knowledge systems covered the full spectrum of life.

We had frameworks for dharma—right conduct, social order, the ethical fabric of life.
We had deep thinking on artha—economics, governance, the art of building flourishing societies.
We had paths oriented toward moksha—the ultimate questions of existence and liberation.
And we had multiple darshanas—schools of inquiry, each valid, each illuminating a different face of the same truth.

When someone says “Indian Knowledge Systems,” what they are pointing to—at the most fundamental level—is this body of knowledge. Born from wonder. Refined through observation. Deepened through consciousness. And shared with compassion.

The Lens You Use Determines What You See

One of the greatest challenges today is not lack of information. It is the lens through which we approach it.

Before we evaluate anything—before we ask whether something is valid or superstitious or scientific—we must examine the mental models through which we are seeing. Because those models completely determine the answers we will find.

We first have to cleanse our lenses of the colonial imprint that was installed in the mind.
Here is a simple example. I was doing a course recently, and someone said: “I’m amazed we had such a vast knowledge system… but why are people so superstitious?”

I stopped and said: before you ask that question, write it down and examine it.
What do you mean by “superstitious”? How did you arrive at that definition? What makes something superstitious to you? And what makes something else not superstitious?
Where did this question come from? Was it yours? Or was it planted in you?
This is difficult work. But it is necessary work. Because the most dangerous questions are the ones we never think to question at all.

Take epistemology—what counts as valid knowledge, and what methods of inquiry are admissible. Many modern Western approaches tend to stop at what the Panchakosha framework calls the Annamaya level—the domain of the physical and the sensory. Our inquiry goes further. We understood that there are ways of knowing that go beyond the senses.
And that is where much of the conflict arises.

But then we should ask a simple question: is yoga not science? That depends entirely on what you define as science, what methodologies you consider legitimate, and what you accept as valid evidence. Define the terms, and the argument often dissolves.

IKS in Education Is Not About Swapping Content

When it comes to integrating IKS into education, I feel very strongly about this: it is not as simple as replacing “Western content” with “Indian content.”
IKS is not primarily about content.

It is about pedagogy. It is about the person standing in front of you.

Look at the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna could have told Arjuna: “Just stop asking questions and fight.” But he didn’t. He took eighteen chapters. He answered in so many different ways, through so many different frameworks. He never grew impatient with Arjuna’s persistence.
Why? Because he genuinely wanted Arjuna to understand. He was truly invested in the progress of that person.

That intention—it is my dharma to enable the flowering of this individual in every possible way—is the starting point of IKS in education.

Start With the Child in Front of You

Let me give you an example from my own experience.
I was working with a group of children. The topic was supposed to be Indian culture. But the children were completely restless—this was just after COVID. Some couldn’t sit still. Some were practically rolling on the floor.

And they were aware of it themselves. They said to me: “I can’t control my mind. Help me.”
In that moment, I said to myself: forget the curriculum. The objective is not the curriculum. The problem is right here in front of me.

So I reframed the session entirely.
I said: “Your mind is a pet. Let’s figure out how to train it.”

They named the pet. They drew the pet. They described how the pet behaves—unruly, unpredictable, refuses to listen.

Then I asked: “What do you want your pet to do?”
They made a list.

Then: “Now speak to your pet. Tell it what you want.”
To do that, they had to close their eyes and turn inward. They were meditating—but I never used the word “meditation.” By the end, the stillness in the room was palpable.

That is pedagogy. Activating the learner. Being genuinely interested in whether this person is actually growing.

Teach Children to Ask Real Questions

Another practice I use is asking children to bring a question—not an answer. A question that truly matters to them. Something their parents, their teachers, nobody has been able to answer, but it sits with them.

At first, a six-year-old might ask: “Is the sun yellow or orange?”
I ask: is that important to you? What would you do with that answer?
And then they reach deeper.

An eleven-year-old girl once asked me: “Have we stopped evolving as human beings? Can we evolve beyond this?” That is Sri Aurobindo-level inquiry.

My five-year-old niece asked: “Why do we sleep?” That is a Stanford PhD-level question.
The capacity is there. It just needs to be drawn out, not suppressed.

Language, Culture, Consciousness

I am not a fan of translations – really good translations are few and far between.
Language is not merely a tool for communication. Language shapes cognition. Language carries culture. Language carries a worldview embedded so deep that you cannot separate the words from the way of seeing. It carries mental models. Language itself is a mental model in fact, if you think about it.

IKS: A Living Continuum – letting the river of knowledge flow again unabated

So when we speak of Indian Knowledge Systems, we are not speaking of a dead archive.
We are speaking of a living continuum—a civilization that responded to existence with wonder, built methods of inquiry, captured insight with rigor, and shared it with compassion. Not so that the next person would believe truth, but so they would have a way to arrive at it themselves.
If we are serious about bringing IKS into education, into our institutions, into our lives, we must begin not by swapping textbooks but by restoring something deeper: the intention, the pedagogy, the language, and above all, the frameworks through which we define knowledge itself. In fact take a look at all our current ideas, assumptions, frameworks, structures and models related to education really look at it with a clear eye and cleanse them all of the persistent and troublesome colonial lens and baggage and look at it all afresh with the Bharatiya Shatric Dristi and redefine what education means and how it is to be engaged with, offered and developed in the interest of national sovereingty, the welfare of present and future generations and the revival of Bharatiya Civilizational flow.

That restoration is not a backward glance. It is how we move forward—rooted.

Link to Article that Is based on the fULL PANEL DISCUSSION.

The post Exploring IKS as a framework for education & research first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

What if everything we thought we knew about success, progress, happiness, and even health was built upon borrowed assumptions—mental constructs we never consciously chose? What if the very framework through which we perceive reality was shaped not by cosmic truth but by historical accidents and colonial legacies?

This is not a philosophical exercise. This is the ground beneath our feet.

The Invisible Architecture of Perception

We rarely question the lenses through which we view the world. Yet these lenses—our mental models—determine everything. They shape what we consider valuable, what we pursue, how we measure progress, and ultimately, who we become. The idea and concept of life itself, the purpose of human existence, the source of truth, the nature of happiness, the relationship between individual and society—all of these rest upon foundational assumptions that most of us have never examined.

Consider just a few of the questions that lie at the heart of every civilization’s worldview: Is happiness an individual pursuit or a collective endeavor? Is wealth accumulation a sign of progress or a symptom of imbalance? Is time linear, marching relentlessly toward some future destination, or cyclical, breathing through the eternal rhythms of creation and dissolution? Is death an ending or a doorway?

The Western paradigm offers one set of answers. Indian Knowledge Systems offer another. And the difference is not merely academic—it is civilizational.

The Dharmic Framework: A Different Operating System

The Bhāratīya worldview rests upon a sophisticated understanding of reality that cannot be reduced to religious belief or cultural practice. It is, at its core, a comprehensive framework for perceiving, engaging with, and transforming existence itself.

Where modern frameworks separate the secular from the sacred, the material from the spiritual, the individual from the collective, Dharmic thinking recognizes these as inseparable dimensions of a unified whole. Dharma is not religion in the Western sense—it is the cosmic law that governs all existence and derives from the natural order (set of governing principles) that sustains life at every level, from the movement of galaxies to the beating of a human heart.

This distinction matters profoundly. When we speak of rule-based ethics versus consciousness-based ethics, we are pointing to two fundamentally different orientations toward moral life. Rule-based systems create external frameworks of do’s and don’ts, policed by authority and enforced through punishment. Consciousness-based ethics emerge from an awakened awareness of interconnection—when we truly see that the boundary between self and other is illusory, compassion becomes not a duty but a natural expression of being.

Our current sustainability Crisis

We are in this situation because through many colonial and other processes the whole world followed the lead of the west and started operating in the “Artha-Kama” plane and totally forgot about Dharma – The Harmonizing Principle and Moksha – The Elevating and Liberating Principle. Unlimited desires and Limited natural resources. This is the result of unstable minds leading weak minds to chase a model of sustainability that is inherently unsustainable. That inner conflict spills out into the world. One planet is not enough. More planets are needed to satiate the untenable greed of a humanity operating without control or responsibility. There is an urgent need for powerful political and business leaders to work on their own antahkarana. Chitta Shuddhi is the need of the hour. Let Viveka dawn and prevail.

Purifying the Chitta: The Inner Technology

Patañjali’s definition resonates across millennia: Yogaḥ citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ—yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind-stuff. But this is not mere psychological technique. It is the recognition that all external transformation begins with inner purification.

The antaḥkaraṇa—our inner instrument—comprises four distinct faculties: manas (the processing mind that receives sensory input), buddhi (the discriminating intellect that evaluates and decides), ahaṅkāra (the sense of individual identity that claims ownership), and chitta (the storehouse of impressions and memories that colors all perception).

Each of these requires specific attention. Stabilize and direct the manas so that attention flows consciously rather than being hijacked by every passing stimulus. Sharpen and train the buddhi for viveka—the capacity to discriminate between the eternal and the ephemeral, the real and the apparent. Dissolve the ahaṅkāra through practices that expand identity beyond the narrow confines of the individual body-mind to embrace unity consciousness. And most fundamentally, purify the chitta—for it is the accumulated impressions stored here that create the gravitational pull of past conditioning.

This is yoga sādhana. Not the physical postures that have become synonymous with yoga in contemporary fitness culture, but the complete technology of inner transformation that our ṛṣis developed and refined over millennia.

Individual and Collective: The False Dichotomy

One of the most insidious mental constructs of modernity is the opposition between individual freedom and collective welfare—as if what benefits me must somehow diminish you, as if life were a zero-sum game played out across scarce resources.

The Dharmic understanding reveals this as an illusion born of limited perception. Individual happiness is, in truth, a collective pursuit. When we recognize our fundamental interconnection, we understand that a polluted environment sickens all bodies, that widespread suffering disturbs all minds, that collective unconsciousness dims every individual awareness. The pursuit of purely personal happiness within a suffering world is like trying to create a pocket of pure air within a burning building.

Equally, collective welfare is an individual pursuit. The great ones—Ādi Śaṅkara, Vyāsa, Vasiṣṭha, Ramaṇa, Vivekānanda, Aurobindo—did not distinguish between their own liberation and the upliftment of humanity. They understood that the highest expression of individual evolution is the capacity to serve loka saṅgraha—the welfare of all beings.

This is the profound mathematics of Dharmic life: Individual Happiness + Collective Welfare = Dharmic Pursuit. The pursuit of truth and knowledge leads to the state of the sthitaprajña—one of stable wisdom—naturally oriented toward universal good. The pursuit of wealth, tempered by vairāgya (dispassion) and karuṇā (compassion), becomes not accumulation but circulation for collective flourishing. The pursuit of security transforms into the protection of jñāna (knowledge) and artha (resources) for future generations. The pursuit of beauty becomes the creation of rasa and ānanda—aesthetic delight that elevates consciousness.

Decolonizing the Mind: The Essential First Step

Before we can build anything new, we must see clearly what already occupies the space. The task of decolonization is not primarily political or economic—it is, at its root, a matter of consciousness. We must learn to identify the borrowed mental constructs that masquerade as common sense, the imported assumptions that we have mistaken for universal truth.

This requires a particular kind of attention. What surprises you? What delights you? What depresses you, elevates you, destabilizes you? These emotional responses are doorways into the unconscious architecture of your worldview. Every strong reaction reveals an assumption, a belief, a conditioning that you have taken for granted. Ask why. Keep asking until you reach the bedrock of borrowed beliefs.

Then comes the harder work: dismantling unnatural, illogical, and alien mental constructs regarding health, wealth, happiness, success, progress, and growth. Not replacing one ideology with another, but developing a mind capable of thinking independently—a mind grounded in ṛta, the cosmic truth, and aligned with the natural order that sustains all existence.

The goal is not to become Bharatiya in any superficial sense—to change costumes while keeping the same mental furniture. The goal is to develop a Bharatiya shastric dṛṣṭi—a way of seeing rooted in the profound understanding of prakṛti and puruṣa, of the manifest and the unmanifest, of the eternal dance between consciousness and energy that creates, sustains, and transforms all worlds.

The Panchakosha Paradigm

When we look at our cultural assets we can slot each one of them into one of the five koshas. We will find that our cultral assets, which include rituals, customs, traditions and processes were designed to slowly lead us from the Annamaya to the Anandamaya kosha, be it the food we ate, how it was prepared, the temples we built, the murtis we worshipped, the houses we lived in, the clothes we wore, the professions we chose, the cities we designed – every aspect of life was carefully crafted such that even the lowliest creature amongst us would be slowly truding towards the mokshic ideal, day by day, hour by hour and task by task. Such compassion. Such Karuna. So much love for everyone!

Mokṣic Design: The Wheat and the Chaff

Here lies perhaps the most radical insight of Dharmic thinking: true material prosperity cannot be achieved through material goals alone. The pursuit of material success, disconnected from spiritual evolution, inevitably leads to imbalance, exploitation, and ultimate collapse. We see this playing out across the contemporary world—environmental devastation, social fragmentation, epidemic loneliness, and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness despite unprecedented material abundance.

The ancient understanding reverses our modern assumptions. Design based on mokṣic goals—liberation, expanded consciousness, unity with the cosmic order—naturally generates material well-being as a byproduct. This is not wishful thinking but cosmic law. When we align with the fundamental frequencies of reality, when our actions emerge from dharmic consciousness rather than egocentric grasping, resources flow, communities flourish, and even the earth responds with abundance.

No wheat without chaff, as the saying goes. The chaff is not waste to be eliminated but an integral part of the process. True material growth and progress require a model based on spiritual goals. Knowing this, our ancestors invented various forms of yoga, vidyā, śilpa, and kalā—paths of discipline, knowledge, craft, and art that simultaneously served material needs and spiritual evolution. Every potter, every weaver, every farmer understood their work as sādhana, their profession as a doorway to the divine.

How did the cow get into the ditch?

The first exercise we need to do after donning decolonized lenses is to understand how we got into this position in the first place. Evaluate our mental models and see what needs to be thrown out. What is valuable and what is not. Then we need to make sure our cow does not get into the ditch again. For that we need to make sure our future generations are free of these colonial lenses.

Envisioning a Sustainable World from First Principles

Truth based on cosmic order. Dharma based on cosmic truth. Stable mind nurtured by dharmic imperatives. Stable mind combined with cosmic consciousness creating sustainable growth and evolution for all beings.

This is the sequence. This is the only sequence that has ever worked, the only foundation that can support lasting civilization. Every attempt to build sustainable systems upon unstable foundations—whether materialist ideologies or superficial reforms—eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Stability rooted in cosmic order and truth is the basis of sustainable growth and evolution for humankind. Not stability imposed through control, not order maintained through fear, but the natural stability that emerges when individual consciousness aligns with cosmic consciousness, when human systems reflect rather than violate natural law.

Testing Our Decolonized Vision

Once we begin to see through dharmic eyes, the contemporary world appears very different. Physical health crises, mental health epidemics, societal conflicts, geopolitical tensions, environmental pollution, overcrowding of cities, traffic problems, deforestation, resource scarcity, youth alienation in the face of technology and social media—all of these reveal themselves not as separate problems requiring separate solutions but as symptoms of a single fundamental disease: disconnection from cosmic order.

Each of these challenges becomes an opportunity to test our developing vision, to create new solutions that emerge not from the same consciousness that created the problems but from the expanded awareness that sees connections, patterns, and possibilities invisible to the fragmented modern mind.

This is the invitation. Not merely to study Indian Knowledge Systems as historical curiosities or philosophical abstractions, but to inhabit them as living ways of seeing, being, and healing. To allow these ancient frameworks to reshape our perception, reorient our priorities, and reconnect us with the cosmic rhythms from which modern life has so profoundly disconnected us.

The world does not need more solutions generated from the same consciousness that created our current crises. The world needs minds that have been transformed, visions that have been clarified, hearts that have been purified. It needs human beings who have done the inner work necessary to perceive reality without the distorting filters of borrowed assumptions and colonial conditioning.

This is the path forward. This is the re-imagining that our times demand. Not a return to some idealized past, but a conscious recovery of timeless principles—adapted, applied, and embodied in response to the unique challenges of our present moment.

The ancient wisdom awaits. It has always been here, patiently waiting for minds ready to receive it, hearts open to its transformative power. The question is not whether these teachings are relevant—their relevance grows more apparent with each passing crisis. The question is whether we are willing to do the difficult inner work required to receive them, embody them, and transmit them to a world desperately in need of a new—or rather, very ancient—way of seeing.

Vinay P Kulkarni is the Founder & CEO of ALCHMI Strategy Consulting, E-com Elephant E-Commerce Tech Services, and Vedikzen Ventures Pvt. Ltd., which houses Indic civilizational initiatives including The Upadesha Academy, Darshana Books & Gifts, Samvada Bistro, and the Shastra Research Lab.

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A civilizational nation – a Rāṣṭra is one in which immense diversity—of languages, beliefs, practices, temperaments, and ways of knowing—coexists with a fundamental unity of vision. This unity is not enforced or ideologically constructed; it is lived, sensed, expressed and often silently intuited. It arises from a shared orientation toward human potential, purpose, and consciousness. What binds such a society together is not uniformity of belief, but a common spiritual destination and a deeply ingrained harmonizing principle—subtle, situational, contextual, and balancing—operating beyond codified rules, commandments, or externally imposed ethics. It is this civilizational grammar that enables the sustained presence of truth, beauty, and peaceful coexistence.

Such a society is not held together merely by laws, markets, or institutions. It is sustained by a shared civilizational orientation—a collective sense of direction regarding what it means to live well, to mature inwardly, and to contribute meaningfully. Within this framework, ethical balance is maintained not only through formal regulation, but through lived discernment, contextual judgment, and situational awareness. These softer, internal regulators of civilization often prove far more resilient than rigid prescriptions or mechanical compliance.

An economy grounded in this civilizational ethos can accommodate difference without losing coherence, encourage creativity without descending into fragmentation, and enable pluralism without eroding harmony. Prosperity, in such a worldview, is not measured solely by material accumulation or consumption. It is understood as the capacity of individuals and communities to live with meaning, dignity, vitality, and well-being—internally and externally.

For such an order to sustain itself, a critical mass of citizens must operate at a higher level of consciousness. These capacities do not emerge automatically from information, incentives, or institutional design alone. They are cultivated through sustained inner disciplines that develop awareness, self-regulation, depth of attention, and clarity of perception.

Across cultures and civilizations, individuals engaged in serious contemplative and reflective practices—whether through meditation, disciplined self-inquiry, or structured inner work—tend to develop greater balance, insight, and ethical sensitivity. When these practices are lived rather than merely discussed, they quietly elevate not only the individual, but also the social and institutional environments in which they participate. Only such societies are capable of nurturing leaders who operate from higher consciousness and possess the Viveka to make decisions that serve not narrow interests, but the well-being of humanity as a whole.

An education system and social culture that legitimizes and supports such inner work—without mandating belief, dogma, or ideology—strengthens the collective field of judgment and responsibility. In doing so, it creates the conditions for economic and institutional systems to be guided not merely by intellect or technical competence, but by mature discernment. This is the deeper foundation of enduring prosperity and civilizational flourishing.

First the purpose of human life as enshrined in the framework of Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha (purusharthas). And Dharma begins with Swadharma. So Artha is that which is dharmically earned and allows one to follow one’s swadharma and fulfil one’s satvik desires while following the Samanya Dharma.

Thus, first the individual life is designed around the fulfillment of the purusharthas and the design and function of the family is to help the family group achieve individual purusharthas through collective and individual effort. And the design of the society is to again facilitate the individual to follow swadharma and achieve purusharthas. The function of the state then is to create the conditions where society can collectively move towards achievement of purusharthas for every individual and to remove roadblocks and obstacles that may arise. The purpose of the collective wealth is to sustain this system and maintain cosmic order.

So overall, the twin goals for individuals, families and society from a Bharatiya perspective: Abhyudaya and Nihsreyasa (निःश्रेयस).

यतो अभ्युदय निःश्रेयस् सिद्धि सह धर्मः। — महर्षि कणाद

“That, which directs and leads to the attainment of abhyudaya in the world (material prosperity); and get the one to nihshreyasa (ultimate good or moksha) thereafter, is Dharma.”

And is for this reason that Chanakya gave us this formula:

Sukhasya Moolam Dharmaha

Dharmasya Moolam Arthaha

Arthasya Moolam Rajyam

Rajyasya Moolam Indriyaanaam Vijayaha

Indriya Jayasya Moolam Vinayaha

Vinayasya Moolam Vruddhopaseva

And therefore, traditionally the eldest / wisest member of the family as the most valued and respected and everyone followed his / her guidance. Not because of a kind of an oppressive, hierarchical structure – because he had entered a field of consciousness having lived for so long by following his swadharma, saamanya dharma and vishesha dharma as required that he had access to Viveka, he had experience, insight and foresight. Thus, even the King took the guidance of the Rajaguru. That is why we had a good percentage of the population which was purely engaged in the pursuit of truth and higher knowledge, and the society supported them through dana (food, clothing and shelter). And when such saints and seers arrived somewhere they were venerated and people asked them to give “Upadesha” – wise teachings / lessons.

Thus, purpose of life was moksha, dharma was the guide and artha and kama purti happened within the framework of Dharma and Moksha. So, all life was yoga. At this this was the intention and this thought informed and guided all other human endeavors – be it the building of temples, homes or public spaces. Clothing, food and lifestyle were based on the individual and familial situation and station. So, diversity manifested in every aspect of life which created diverse production and consumption patterns. So, there was no question of making everyone eat the same thing, wear the same thing and live in the same way. Thus, there would be natural brakes to prevent unbridled and unsustainable consumption.

Thus, civilizational core metaphysics, social structure, individual fulfillment, the relationship between the state, society, family and the individual, culture, educational system and the model of economy – are all interrelated. Therefore, governance and policymaking and implementation should be born out of this level of understanding and the individuals that make up these governing bodies should be operating at that level. And where can you find such individuals?

Well, for all this to happen our education system has to be built on this foundational knowledge and understanding and for that you need educators and teachers who are in it because it is their Swadharma and not because of any other reason. Thus it is time once again to invest in building a large army of learned and capable teachers.

It is also time to stop pretending that modern science is value-neutral and in fact accept that in any field of human endeavor, values play a major role and thus infuse scientific education and commercial science with the right dharmic values which can then flow into industry and governance.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00451/full

We need leaders who have a systems view of things – a holistic and well-rounded understanding of the world, human beings, society, science, technology and economics and can make policies that are rooted in truth, beauty and cosmic balance. And leaders are a product of the society in which they live which is a again a product of its civilization. A society that forgets where it came from and gets disconnected from its civilizational basis will soon find itself confused and directionless. Even if it achieves, Abhyudaya without an equal effort on Nihshreyas, it is bound to meander and lose its way. This is where Bharath can guide the rest of the world – provided it retraces its steps and finds its own natural swing – natural rhythm again.

Let us close with Sri Aurobindo:

“So, with India rests the future of the world. Whenever she is aroused from her sleep, she gives forth some wonderful shining ray of light to the world which is enough to illuminate the nations. Others live for centuries on what is to her the thought of a moment. God gave to her the book of Ancient Wisdom and bade her keep it sealed in her heart, until the time should come for it to be opened. Sometimes a page or a chapter is revealed, sometimes only a single sentence. Such sentences have been the inspiration of ages and fed humanity for many hundreds of years. So too when India sleeps, materialism grows apace and the light is covered up in darkness. But when materialism thinks herself about to triumph, lo and behold! a light rushes out from the East and where is Materialism? Returned to her native night.”

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The Great Awakening: Why India’s Young Students Hold the Key to Our Civilizational Renaissance

Just a cursory search on Gemini yielded some interesting numbers. This is neither 100% accurate nor is it a comprehensive survey. But that is not my point.

Crores of young people, let us say 10 crore (a random number) spend 16 years of their lives going through our current education system. Let us take high school onwards for our calculation – that is 9 years. Assuming they spend 100 hrs per month on homework, projects, assignments etc it comes to 1200 hrs per year and over the 9 years it comes to 10,800 hours. Now multiply this with that 10 crore and you get a mindboggling number!

One wonders how much of that homework, project work, assignments etc results in actual skill development, learning and intellectual growth. I am sure some of it is helpful. But having interviewed hundreds of students over the years, this work is mostly boring drudgery, and the students do not enjoy it. Yet, they simply must go through the grind in order to get that piece of paper at the end.

Have we lost all our intelligence and imagination? And have we lost our compassion? And commonsense?

Two Critical Questions

(1) Why are thousands of successful, smart and intelligent parents okay to make their kids go through this senseless grind?

(2) And there is a great opportunity (a beautiful silver lining) in all this – why is no one is seeing it!

The Buffalo Watching Itself Being Eaten Alive!

Now, take a city like Bengaluru. You have a mini-India there and probably the highest number of tech millionaires, engineers, doctors and professionals of every kind. Some of the smartest people in India live in Bengaluru.

Yet, no one has been able to solve the problems of a modern metropolis bursting at the seams and growing without any plan, sense or direction. Worst is no one cares other than offloading their frustration on X! We have become so immune to it.

Have you seen videos of lions eating a buffalo alive starting from its rump – the buffalo helplessly watches as the lions have their fill. We are doing the same.

How About We Marry the Two Problems?

Instead of letting our kids waste precious years of their lives just to get their grades, why not put that energy, imagination and intelligence to work – on solving key and critical problems plaguing the country?

I have been making this point in every forum or platform where I am invited to speak and also in various conversations with kindred spirits who are interested in doing something about our education system, our infrastructure governance, public policy etc.

Also, our educational system was designed to create workers for the factories. And while we have made significant changes to the curriculum and much more is being done, we still need to address four important things:

First, the Pedagogy. I keep harping on this and recently I conducted a retreat where I got a chance to test out a pedagogical method I have developed.

Second, giving direction, purpose and meaning to the curriculum and the whole educational effort of 16 + years.

Third, marry that purpose with the needs, aspirations and goals of the nation.

Fourth, align both the goals of the nation and the educational system with the ideals of Rta, Satya and Dharma (and Nyaya).

Education as Defense Expenditure

Another idea is to bracket the spend on education as part of our defense expenditure. Defending our culture through providing the right kind of education is an important part of defending the sovereignty of the country. You let the culture slip away and the whole nation becomes weak.

Only when the education is focused on preserving, propagating and enriching the ancient culture of our nation will we have the possibility of developing leaders who are civilizationally grounded, know their history, live their culture and understand the value of the freedom we fought so hard to earn.

Also, if you look at what is happening all over the world, it is even more important for us Indians to realize, understand and appreciate our own ancient culture and civilization and to protect it against all attempts to appropriate it, damage it and sully its reputation.

Dharmic Innovation: Not Innovation That Creates New Problems

All things considered it is very important for India to install and develop a culture of creativity and innovation that will help us become self-reliant. But not innovation of the kind that solves one problem and creates a hundred others.

I have discussed this earlier in my article titled, “The Dharmic Dilemma in Tech.” Our method and process must be aligned with Satya, Rta and Dharma. It must be Dharmic Innovation that:

1. Does no harm

2. Does positive tangible and large scale good

3. Does not give birth to new problems

4. Does not exploit the vulnerabilities of people or planet

5. Does not disturb the natural balance between different aspects of nature

What Can Dharmic Innovation Do for Our Education System?

By introducing a focus on dharmic innovation from the school level we can rejig our educational system:

(1) We produce generations of critical thinkers, problem solvers and inventors.

(2) We groom dharmic innovators who bring a new approach to science and technology.

(3) We enrich science itself by incorporating ideas from other streams of knowledge such as Alankara Shastra, Natya Shastra, Nyaya and Yoga.

(4) We reorient a significant portion of the energy of our demographic dividend towards creative problem solving, innovation and nation building.

(5) We teach whole generations of young Indians from diverse fields of study to work together, collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and innovate to create products, services, methods, systems and processes that help India advance, become resilient and contribute positively not only to the country but to the whole world – we have always thought of the whole world.

(6) We combine the creative energies of the engineering, arts, science, commerce and humanities students to create explosive, exponential possibilities that the human mind has not even thought of.

Imagine This…

Engineers who are exposed to art, linguistics and commerce.

Commerce students who are exposed to engineering, science and tech.

Science students who are trained in Shastras.

Gurukula students who are working on the cutting edge of dharmic AI.

Some of this is already beginning to happen. More is yet to come.

The Question I Hear a Lot –

“Why has India not produced a Meta, a Microsoft or a Google?”

I have some detailed thoughts on this which I will share at a future time. I am happy we did not create Meta. I am happy we did not create products that exploit the vulnerabilities of the human mind and land young children in the loony bin.

Let me put it simply: the only way to sustain an unsustainable idea and drive for consumption is to jack up human desire to unsustainable levels and keep it going that way. That is exploiting the vulnerability of the human mind which associates and conflates sense gratification with the true and permanent state of bliss which one already is but is being constantly led away from it in a wild goose chase.

Dharma stands in stark and direct opposition to this exploitative paradigm.

Anyone who understands the basics of human psychology as explained through IKS will naturally and easily and necessarily arrive at the same realization.

That is why we need dharmic enterprises which see their own good and growth and sustenance and thriving in the good, growth, sustenance and thriving of human beings, society and the planet. Which requires a dharmic Rajya or state and state policy which is dharma compatible, dharma oriented and dharma based. Consequently a dharmic economy with dharmic economic—ashtalakshmi based metrics and indicators for a holistic economic system whose objective is to allow every human being to achieve Purushartha.

The Indian mind is fundamentally dharmika—to a large extent. The consumption driven behaviors we see are externally engineered with great effort and expense. So marketing has to become dharmic.

First culture and cultural knowledge has to define a sustainable lifestyle for individual, family and society and the industry has to create products and services that support and sustain that sustainable lifestyle. Current industry is focused on disrupting an otherwise sustainable culture and lifestyle.

Venkatesha Murthy, Founder and Chief Mentor of Youth for Seva, puts it beautifully:

“Responsible consumption is not just about buying what’s on sale or what looks appealing. It demands a deeper awareness, a practice rooted in the Dharma, that guides us to live in harmony. Before acquiring anything, ask yourself four questions:

(1) Is this good for me as an individual, nourishing my health and well-being?

(2) Is this good for my family and the society around me, nurturing relationships and community bonds?

(3) Is this good for nature, respecting where it comes from and where it will go after use?

(4) And finally, does this choice support my spiritual growth, connecting me to a higher purpose and the greater whole?”

This is the kind of framework we need. Not just for consumption, but for innovation itself.

We already had an Ayurveda informed sustainable lifestyle. Eat what is local and seasonal. And follow the circadian rhythm. Modern economy and lifestyle is at odds with the knowledge of Ayurveda. Which is based on Rta.

How many take pride in the thousands of beautiful, thoughtfully designed and built ancient temples (some of them 1000+ years old) which continue to fulfill their purpose today long after the original builders are gone? Thousands may visit these temples but very few understand the technology, the impact and the implication of such grand temples still standing today and fewer even understand how they can be used for raising human consciousness. These are too advanced for even the current scientific minds to understand.

But What About Real Innovation?

And consider this: isn’t yoga itself an innovation? A technology?

Yoga is something so vast, so powerful, so deep that the world hasn’t even scratched its surface. Billions practice asanas, yet this represents perhaps one percent of what yoga actually is. The technology of consciousness transformation. The science of inner exploration and knowledge. A complete system for human evolution that works across cultures, across centuries, across every possible human condition.

What about Ayurveda? A medical system that treats not symptoms but root causes. That sees the human body as inseparable from mind and consciousness. That recognizes individual constitution rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions. Modern medicine is only now beginning to understand what Ayurveda has known for millennia.

The nature, purpose, and quality of Indian innovation cannot be understood through the lens of modern day tech. We measure innovation by market cap and user growth. Bharat measured innovation by how many generations it would serve. By whether it elevated consciousness. By whether it created harmony rather than disruption.

But here’s what excites me: Bharat has the potential to create tech, modern tech that will be powerful, benefit mankind and yet be dharmic. Tech that doesn’t exploit but empowers. That doesn’t extract but enriches.

And it’s beginning to happen. Right now. In pockets across the country. Young innovators who understand both their civilizational roots and cutting-edge technology. Who see no contradiction between ancient wisdom and modern capability. Who are building the future on foundations laid thousands of years ago.

The Time Is Coming Soon

India’s knowledge, science, mathematics, art, spirituality and so on continue to provide work to modern scholars, scientists and inventors (whether they acknowledge it or not).

But Bharat is not done. It is just getting started.

The time is coming soon – when India will once again give mind-blowing innovations, inventions and discoveries to the world. India’s contributions won’t be innovations that create billionaires while destroying societies. They’ll be dharmic innovations. Innovations that heal. That balance. That elevate.

This transformation begins with education. With recognizing that crores young minds spending 10,800 hours on meaningless work represents the greatest waste of our most precious resource. With choosing to redirect that energy toward problems that matter. Toward solutions that last. Toward innovations that serve not just profit but purpose.

Do read and share your thoughts and reactions. I am eager to hear them.

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