Life Lens

  HOME IN ITS FULL CIRCLE We began in a rented house— walls borrowed, hope our only possession— and slowly, brick by brick, we built a house on Bannerghatta Road, a place with no pedigree but filled with the pride of first foundations. Life shifted, paperwork turned, and the house we thought was ours became a lesson in impermanence. we bought a flat, believing it would hold our future, and yet never lived in it, for distance has a way of telling truths that blueprints cannot. So we let it go, and once more returned to the simplicity of a rented home. But life had already taught us that space is not measured in square feet, and worth is not inscribed in property papers. Its lessons came quietly, in the years spent with family (in-laws) elders who shaped the air of the house into something sacred. A home that felt like a temple not because of rituals or incense, but because of the discipline of kindness, the practice of restraint, the daily, ordinary worship o...

  Beyond the Thermometer A thermometer reads only temperature — a narrow truth, a small surface ripple of a far deeper disturbance. It cannot read the weight of decisions carried too long, the strain of holding a team, a family, a world on shoulders quietly turned into everyone’s point of balance. It cannot measure the exhaustion that accumulates in layers unseen— the kind shaped not by effort, but by expectation. It has no scale for the hidden cost of leadership: the quiet negotiations with the self, the fragments of sleep surrendered for clarity, for duty, for the illusion of control. It does not sense the slow burn of questions without answers, the friction between what must be done and what one can bear. A thermometer knows nothing of the soul’s temperature— where doubt condenses, where resolve evaporates, where a single decision can shift the seasons. It records the symptom, never the source. It cannot register the erosion of boundaries, the bargain...

  Many Ramayanas, One Afternoon We stood in line for a signature— just ink, just a name on a page— and yet it felt like waiting at the edge of a great river. Anand Neelakantan had spoken of many Ramayanas, many doors into the same sky, and somehow, as we queued, we became part of those retellings— strangers stitched together by stories older than memory. We spoke of what we carried: grandmothers’ voices, fathers’ evening tales, the fragments of Rama and Ravana we had grown up with, each a little different, each somehow the same. It was easy to talk— liberating even— as if in that half-hour we stepped outside ourselves and into the companionship of shared myth. No one knew anyone, yet everyone belonged. That is what stories do— they dissolve the distance between two hearts standing in a queue. And when at last the book was signed, ink settling into paper like a blessing, we smiled, nodded, and drifted away— carrying with us not a name, but a moment o...

  Welcoming the Three Wise Men I brought them home today— three quiet elders painted in flame and dust, their eyes carrying whole pilgrimages in a single, unblinking gaze. It felt less like choosing art and more like recognising old companions— as though the soul, in its private language, had whispered, These are yours. Each face, weathered by wandering, held a different lesson: one, the warmth of a road well-walked. one, the fierce clarity of truth. one, the soft power of stillness that does not need to speak to be heard. And as they settled into their place on the wall, the room changed— not brighter, not louder, but deeper, as if a temple had quietly unfolded in the ordinary corners of a home. Perhaps this is what we truly seek— not the object, but the echo; not the painting, but the mirror; not the holy men, but the highest ideals we hope are still alive within us. Tonight, the three of them watch over us— not as gods, not as relics, but as reminder...

  O G od, let awakening be a discipline — not a distant illumination promised at life’s end, but a deliberate practice of the living soul. Teach us to wake while breath is strong, while thought still shapes destiny, while the heart is capable of choosing what truly matters. Give us the audacity to S eek Y ou N ow — not later, not when the world grows quiet, but in the very midst of noise, ambition, uncertainty, longing, and imperfect days. Let the search for You be woven into the hours we inhabit rather than the moments we are leaving. Let Jñāna rise in us as the inner clarity that refuses sleep. Let Bhakti deepen us until devotion becomes a way of seeing. Let Viveka guide our steps with the precision of truth. Let Vairāgya loosen the knots that bind us to what does not endure. And let Mukti begin not as an ending, but as a widening within — the first quiet bloom of freedom in a life that has begun to understand itself. O God, grant us the courage to ...

  Paapa There is a word the heart speaks long before the tongue learns it — paapa — a small syllable of softness, a widening of breath, a hand that loosens its fist without being asked. A calf stands trembling in the roar of a busy street, and something within us leans forward — paapa , we whisper, not out of sorrow, but out of a quiet wish that the world be gentler to the small and the unsure. What if this became our way of seeing? Not judgment first, not the sharpened edge of reaction, but a thin veil of tenderness laid across the moment. When someone falters, when a word lands wrong, when a mistake spills into the day — paapa , we could murmur, and suddenly the weight shifts, anger loses its authority, and kindness becomes the truer instinct. For life is a long procession of beings trying, failing, learning, all of us calves in some unseen traffic, startled by noise we do not yet understand. If we could hold one another with this simple generosity — ...

Gita Jayanti- My Summary of a End to End reading of Gita- 1st Dec 2025  Across all 18 chapters, the Gita keeps circling back to one core theme: What is in my hands, and what is not? Krishna keeps reminding Arjuna that action is ours , outcomes are not , obsession with results is a form of bondage , and clarity in effort is liberation . It is not passivity. It is full engagement without psychological dependence on what the world gives back. This is an advanced kind of adulthood — the courage to act, the humility to accept. The Gita also frames yoga as a balanced mind — an inner architecture rather than a physical discipline. It is evenness in success and failure , stability under praise and blame , alertness without agitation , purpose without anxiety , and presence without clinging . Yoga is the art of maintaining the right quality of mind in the middle of life’s noise. Not escaping the battlefield — but staying centered within it. In that sense, yoga is not a chapter. It is a w...