Veedu Varai Uravu, JFK Terminal 4, and the Long Flight Home

Or: why life is basically an international holiday, and everyone eventually stops walking with you at a different gate.

There is a Kannadasan song that has been quietly following me around for about fifty years, like a well-behaved dog that occasionally sits on your foot to remind you it exists. You know the one — Veedu Varai Uravu, from Paadha Kaanikkai, TMS in that impossibly grave voice, Viswanathan–Ramamoorthy leaving space around every syllable the way a good chef leaves space around a piece of fish on the plate.

Four lines. That’s all. Kannadasan didn’t need eight.

Veedu varai uravu
Veedhi varai manaivi
Kaadu varai pillai
Kadaisi varai yaaro?

Relatives come as far as the house. The wife comes as far as the street. The children come as far as the cemetery. And then — that beautiful, slightly terrifying question mark — who comes with you all the way to the end?

Kannadasan, being Kannadasan, refuses to answer. He just leaves you sitting there with your coffee going cold.

I have been thinking about this song again, but from a very unpoetic angle, because I am a modern man and I fly Economy.

Life is a return trip you didn’t quite plan

Here is the thought that will not leave me alone.

Life, from the moment we arrive to the moment we leave, is structured exactly like an international holiday. Not the yoga-retreat kind. The messy kind. The kind where somebody forgets the adapter and somebody else insists on packing three kilos of murukku (a crunchy South Indian snack twisted out of rice and urad dal flour and deep-fried into little edible spirals — the kind of thing aunties smuggle across international borders in Tupperware) “just in case.”

Consider the arrival.

You land. The plane doors open. You are wheeled or carried out — because let us be honest, nobody walks off their first flight — and there, waiting at the gate, is your entire welcoming committee. In this case, the “airport” is a hospital, the “arrivals lounge” is a delivery room, and the welcoming committee wears surgical masks and holds you upside down until you announce yourself with a scream.

The doctor is the immigration officer. (“Papers, please. Weight, length, APGAR score.”)
The nurse is the ground staff. (“Sir, madam, this way to baggage claim, which is you.”)
The parents are the family who drove three hours to pick you up and are now weeping in the parking lot for reasons neither of you fully understand yet.

They take you home. They make sure you are comfortable. Someone puts a blanket on you that is objectively too warm. Someone else insists you eat something. This is the veedu varai uravu phase, and it lasts, if you are lucky, about eighty years.

The middle of the holiday, or: why we fight over the AC remote

Now — anyone who has ever been on a family holiday knows that the middle of the trip is where things go interesting.

Day one, everyone is delightful. “Shall we all have dosa?” (a thin, crisp fermented rice-and-lentil crepe; the South Indian answer to the pancake, only with more opinions attached to it.) “Yes, dosa is a wonderful idea.” “You take the window seat, no no you take it.”

Day four, someone is not speaking to someone else because of a comment made at breakfast about the correct way to eat curd rice (thayir sadam — cooked rice mixed with yogurt, tempered with mustard seeds and curry leaves; simultaneously the most comforting food on earth and the most fiercely litigated recipe in every South Indian household). Day six, there is a full diplomatic incident about who booked which taxi. By day nine, two people are communicating exclusively through a third person, who is themselves not on speaking terms with a fourth.

This is life. This is the entire arc between the veedu and the kaadu. Ego, opinions, small betrayals, big betrayals, the terrible things we say because we are tired and it is 41 degrees and the kulfi (the Indian ice cream cousin — denser, chewier, usually flavoured with cardamom, pistachio, or mango, and constitutionally incapable of surviving an Indian afternoon) has melted. And underneath it all, the strange and slightly embarrassing fact that we love these people so much we cannot quite bear it, which is precisely why we are fighting with them.

You never fight this hard with strangers. Have you noticed? Nobody has ever had a shouting match with the person selling coconuts on the beach. We reserve our finest performances for the people we plan to weep for.

The departure gate

And then the holiday ends.

You know this part. Somebody has to catch the flight back. The luggage is heavier than it was on the way in — it always is; this is one of the immutable laws of the universe, along with entropy and the fact that any samosa (a fried triangular pastry stuffed with spiced potatoes and peas — the samosa is to India what the sandwich is to England, except with better structural engineering) you drop will land chutney-side down.

Some people come to see you off at the door of the house — veedu varai. They stand in the driveway. They wave. They are already thinking about lunch.

A smaller, more loyal contingent comes to the street — veedhi varai (veedhi = street, in Tamil). They help you load the bags. They make jokes to cover the fact that they are sad. They insist you text when you land.

An even smaller, even more loyal contingent comes all the way to the airport — kaadu varai, in Kannadasan’s more austere vocabulary (kaadu literally means forest or wilderness, and in this context, the cremation ground — the last stop before there is no more road). They stand at the departure gate, that peculiar liminal space where you are neither here nor there, neither with them nor without them, and they hug you one more time than is strictly necessary. And you turn around and walk toward the security line, and they wave, and you wave back, and then — this is the part nobody warns you about — you have to stop waving and just walk.

And then it’s just you, your carry-on, and the long line to the metal detector.

The flight itself

Now, friend, here is where the song and the airline seat conspire against you.

You are in seat 34K. The person next to you is already asleep with their mouth open. The screen in front of you offers you three action movies, one romantic comedy, and a documentary about penguins that you know from experience will make you cry. You choose none of them.

Because at some point over the Atlantic — usually around hour four, when the lights have dimmed and the cabin has taken on that submarine hush — the ruminating begins.

Why did I say that to her at breakfast on day four?
What was the actual point of that argument about the taxi?
He was only trying to help. I made it about my ego. Why?
She said something kind and I heard it as criticism. Why?
I had eighty years. I spent forty minutes of it not speaking to my own brother because of a chair.

You cannot fight with anyone at 37,000 feet. There is nobody to fight with. There is only you, a small plastic cup of water, and a slowly dawning suspicion that most of what you took so seriously down there was — how does one put this politely — not that serious.

The plane is an accidental confessional. The tray table is an altar. The seatbelt sign is a mild but persistent guru: please remain seated. Please, please, remain seated.

The French have a phrase — l’esprit de l’escalier — the wit of the staircase. The perfect reply you think of only after you’ve left the party. The Tamil equivalent is even better and does not have a name: the wisdom of the return flight. The clarity you find only after the door has closed and the cabin has been pressurised and it is far, far too late to go back and un-say the thing.

Kadaisi varai yaaro?

And then Kannadasan’s question, which has been waiting patiently in the overhead bin the whole time, gently opens.

Who comes with you all the way to the end?

The relatives came as far as the house. The wife came as far as the street. The children came as far as the cemetery — or, if you prefer the modern edit, as far as the drop-off lane at Terminal 4, where they were shooed away by a very serious man in a fluorescent vest.

But someone is on the plane with you. That is the strange bit. That is the bit Kannadasan leaves as a question mark because he is too much of a poet to ruin it with an answer.

Pattinathar, who was less of a diplomat, said it outright a thousand years ago: what travels with you is what you did. The paavam and the punniyam (paavam = sin, the debits; punniyam = merit, the credits; between them, the only luggage the universe actually lets you check in). The way you treated the person at the coconut stall. Whether you let go of the taxi argument. Whether you called your brother back after the chair incident. Whether you were, on balance, kind — not to the people you were trying to impress, but to the people you had already stopped bothering to impress, which is the only real test.

The rishis would put it more mysteriously and say the witness in seat 34K is the same witness who was there in the delivery room, watching the whole holiday from the beginning, unbothered by the AC remote, uninvolved in the curd rice debate, present through every fight and every reconciliation, and — here is the punchline — not actually going anywhere at all.

The plane lands somewhere. The witness stays.

So what does one do on day four?

I don’t know. I really don’t. I am, as I have confessed elsewhere on this blog, an amateur at all of this. But here is what the return flight has been quietly whispering to me lately, and I offer it in the spirit of one economy-class passenger to another:

The next time somebody at breakfast says the thing about the curd rice — pause for exactly one breath before you answer. That is all. One breath. The length of a soham, if you like (soham — the natural sound of the breath itself: sa on the inhale, ham on the exhale; the mantra you’ve apparently been chanting since the delivery room without ever signing up for it). In that gap, you can sometimes hear the hum of the return flight already. You can sometimes see, faintly, how this scene will look at hour four over the Atlantic. And nine times out of ten, you will choose the reply of the person you’ll be at 37,000 feet — not the person you are at the breakfast table.

That is not enlightenment. That is just packing lighter.

Because veedu varai uravu is true. The relatives really do stop at the house. The wife really does stop at the street. The children really do stop at the cemetery. And that is fine. That is how holidays end. That is how they were always going to end. There was never a version of the trip where everyone got on the plane with you.

But the samosas you shared, the arguments you dropped, the person you were kind to when nobody was watching — those, apparently, come along as carry-on.

And they don’t count against your baggage allowance.

Kadaisi varai yaaro? Perhaps you already know. Perhaps you’ve always known. Drop it in the comments, or better yet, drop it in the driveway before the taxi arrives.

Shree Matre Namaha. (Salutations to the Divine Mother — the closing bow, in case She is the one in seat 34J.)

#NallaMadras #VeeduVaraiUravu #Kannadasan #TamilSongs #Pattinathar #IndianPhilosophy #NonDuality #Advaita #Kirtan #Devotional #TamilLiterature #Vairagya #LifeAndDeath #Impermanence #Spirituality #SouthIndian #Rumination #MindfulLiving #WitnessConsciousness #Soham

Peace Lives in the Crack Between Two Things

Or: why the most interesting real estate in the universe is the gap.

I have a confession. I do not find peace where most travel brochures promise it — not on a beach, not on a mountaintop, not in a spa with whale-song on loop. I find it in the crack between two things. The seam. The hyphen. The polite cough between two sentences in a movie.

Have you noticed? Peace seems to hang out exactly where two opposites bump into each other and, for a brief second, neither one is winning.

  • Where the sea kisses the sand — neither fully water nor fully land.
  • Where the mountains finally exhale into a valley.
  • The slot between dawn and day, and between evening and night — what the old yogis lovingly called sandhya, the “junction,” and treated like front-row seats to the universe (Wikipedia on Brahmamuhurta).
  • The moment opposite energies — masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti — meet and stop arguing about who left the cap off the toothpaste.
  • The micro-pause between your inbreath and outbreath — the doorway the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra has been pointing at for a few thousand years (Bhairav Aaradhyaa).
  • The silence right after a musical crescendo — when the room is still ringing but the speakers are off.
  • The dominant seventh chord leaning hungrily toward home — a C7 practically begging to fall into F major, a G7 with its B-natural pulling like gravity toward C — and that hair-thin moment of suspension before the resolution lands (Oxford Academic on tension-resolution).
  • Two dissonant melodic lines — a minor second grinding against itself, a tritone hanging in the air like an unfinished sentence — that suddenly fold into a clean major triad and the room exhales.
  • A 4–3 suspension in a Bach chorale, where a note held over from the previous chord forms a fourth above the new bass, hangs there for one beautiful, slightly painful beat, and then steps down to the third.
  • The gap between two thoughts — that suspicious little patch of quiet your mind tries to wallpaper over before you notice it.
  • And, since we are being honest, the silence in an action movie just before the hero punches the bad guy through a wall.

You start to wonder whether peace is shy and only shows up when the noisy twins of “this” and “that” briefly leave the room.

A short detour into the music itself

Since this is the part that musicians (and bass players, and the occasional kirtan-wala) feel in their bones, let us linger here for a moment.

The whole Western harmonic tradition is, basically, a four-century argument about delaying gratification. A composer creates tension — a dissonance, a dominant chord, a suspension, a tritone — and then waits. Sometimes for a beat. Sometimes for sixteen bars. Sometimes (looking at you, Wagner) for an entire opera. And the listener’s nervous system leans forward the whole time, waiting for home.

A small field guide to musical seams:

  • V7 → I. The classic. A G7 chord contains an F (the flat seventh) and a B (the leading tone) — two notes that are practically pointing at each other and shouting “resolve us into C, please.” When the C major arrives, your body knows before your mind does.
  • Secondary dominants. A C7 in the key of C is not strictly at home — it is a dominant pointing at F. It pulls the music sideways into a new gravitational field. The brief moment your ear adjusts to the new center is itself a small juncture.
  • The tritone. B and F together — the so-called diabolus in musica. Cranky, unstable, beautiful. It wants to collapse: B pulls up to C, F pulls down to E, and you get a sweet C major triad. The devil resolves into the angel.
  • Suspensions (4–3, 7–6, 9–8). A note from the previous chord refuses to move on, like a guest at a party who has not realized the dinner is over. The dissonance aches for a half-step. When it finally steps down, that step is the entire emotional point.
  • Picardy third. A piece in minor that ends, surprisingly, on a major chord. Sadness resolving into a quiet smile.
  • The deceptive cadence (V → vi). You set up the listener for the resolution — and then sidestep. The gap widens. Real life does this all the time, and so does Schubert.
  • Counterpoint. Two independent melodies, each minding its own business, occasionally grinding into a dissonance and then opening back into a consonance — the entire art of fugue is just opposites flirting in real time.
  • Indian classical examples. A long-held meend in Raag Yaman circling around the sharp fourth (tivra Ma) before finally falling onto Ga; the sam in a teental cycle after a tense tihai; the moment in a bhajan when the harmonium drone, the tabla, and the voice all land on the tonic Sa together after wandering far afield. That landing is not just musical. It is the same juncture the yogis are talking about.

Notice the shape of all of these: a charged opposition → a hairline pause → a homecoming. The musician is not really composing notes. The musician is composing the gap.

Which is the whole point of this essay, dressed up in concert clothes.

The swan with very specific tastes

Indian philosophy has a beautiful image for this kind of discernment: the Hamsa, the mythical swan that, when offered a bowl of milk mixed with water, calmly sips the milk and leaves the water behind (Self-Revelation Church). A very judgmental bird, one might say. But also a useful one.

Vedanta says we are walking around with a similar bowl — milk and water all mixed up — except in our case it is the real “I” (pure awareness, the witness, the thing that was there before your first selfie) blended with the projected ego (the busy little manager who insists on running your social calendar and your opinions about cilantro).

The Hamsa’s job — and, by extension, ours — is to gently separate the two. Not by yelling at the ego or sending it to its room, but by seeing clearly: this is awareness, that is content. This is the screen, that is the movie. This is “I am,” that is “I am the guy whose Wi-Fi keeps dropping.”

And here is the part that genuinely made me put my coffee down the first time I noticed it. The bird’s name is the breath. Ham is the natural sound of the outbreath — try it, it falls out of you. Sa is the natural sound of the inbreath — the soft hiss of air entering the nostrils. Put them together and you get Ham–sa. The mantra and the breath are not two separate things; the breath is already chanting the swan’s name, twenty-thousand-odd times a day, without filing for royalties.

Reversed and read continuously, Ham-sa-ham-sa-ham-sa… slides naturally into So-ham-so-ham-so-ham, which means “I am That.” Same syllables, same breath, different starting point — inhale-first gives you Soham, exhale-first gives you Hamsa (Psychologically Astrology on the Ajapa mantra).

Which means the swan that separates milk from water is also the rhythm of your breathing. The discernment is not something you have to manufacture; it is built into the bellows. The tradition calls this the Ajapa Japa — the “unrecited recitation” — a mantra nobody has to remember to say because the body has been saying it the whole time.

Hint received.

Outward, inward, and the lazy genius option

Here is the part that took me a while to appreciate.

  • When we live in the senses — chasing sights, sounds, snacks, notifications — we are spending energy outward. The bank account of attention drains into the world.
  • When we turn inward — meditation, self-inquiry, journaling, “who am I really?” at 2 a.m. — we are spending energy inward. Still a transaction. Just a more respectable-looking one.
  • But there is a third option, and it is the sneaky favorite of the sages: the pause. The point where energy is neither rushing out nor digging in. Neither seeking nor renouncing. Just… still.

That static point — where the seesaw stops creaking and balances perfectly — is what the tradition rather dramatically calls immortality. Not “you will live forever in this body and finally use your gym membership,” but: at that point there is no one to die, because the little “me” has briefly stepped out for chai.

Ramana Maharshi liked to push even the witness off the stage — because the witness, helpful as it is, is still a position, still a subtle “someone watching” (Going Beyond the Witness). The pause is what is left when even the watcher quietly clocks out.

A small map of where peace likes to hide

The oppositesThe juncture (where peace shows up)What is actually happening
Land and seaThe shorelineTwo worlds touching without merging — you are at the edge of both, owned by neither
Mountain and plainThe valleyTension of altitude resolved into rest
Day and nightDawn / dusk (sandhya)The mind is briefly unbooked; yogis call it prime time
Inbreath and outbreathThe pause betweenThe “doorway” of Vigyan Bhairava — stillness without effort
Masculine and feminineThe meetingTwo charges neutralizing into wholeness
Dissonance and consonance (V7 → I, tritone, suspension)The micro-pause before the resolution landsThe leading tone is still pulling, the new chord has not yet arrived — your nervous system catches a glimpse of grace
Two melodic lines collidingThe half-beat before they fold into a triadCounterpoint is just opposites learning to coexist
One thought and the nextThe gapAwareness without a costume
Hero in trouble and hero triumphantThe frozen second before the punchEven Hollywood knows the pause is the point
The “I” looking out and the “I” looking inNeither — just beingThe Hamsa stops sorting and simply is

If you read down that right-hand column, you will notice it is the same address with different street signs.

“Okay, but what do I do?”

A fair question. Here are some embarrassingly small experiments. Nothing requiring a Himalayan cave or a new wardrobe.

  • Catch one shoreline a day. Literal or metaphorical. The moment you walk from the noisy street into your quiet house, notice the threshold. Don’t rush through it.
  • Eavesdrop on your breath. Not to control it. Just sit for two minutes and feel for the tiny pause after the exhale. It is shorter than a sneeze and more valuable than most things on your calendar.
  • Listen past the last note. When a song ends — really ends — wait. Don’t reach for the next thing. The silence is part of the composition. (Composers know this. Streaming algorithms do not.)
  • Spot the gap between thoughts. You will fail. That is fine. The looking is the practice. Eventually the gaps widen, like potholes on a Madras road, except pleasant.
  • Greet the sandhya. Sunrise or sunset, even from a kitchen window. Three breaths, nothing fancy. The day is changing gears; you can borrow the neutral.

A small disclaimer from the management

None of this requires you to become a monk, quit your job, or develop strong opinions about ghee. The juncture is already there, several hundred times a day, free of charge, no subscription. The trick is simply to stop sprinting past it.

The Hamsa does not work harder than the duck. It just knows what to drink.

So the next time life hands you two opposing forces — work and rest, love and loss, the crescendo and the silence, the inhale and the exhale — try not to pick a side immediately. Linger in the seam. Sip the milk. Let the water go.

Peace, it turns out, was never at either end of the seesaw.

It was sitting cross-legged at the pivot, waiting for you to notice.

Sources and rabbit holes for the curious:

Who Is Blaming the Stars? Unpacking the Saturn Return Myth

The short version (for the busy and the skimmers — the scenic route is below)

The clock doesn’t make it 10:30; it only points at it. Confuse the pointer with the cause and you’ve made the oldest mistake in the book — like believing windmills create the wind. We do this everywhere, but the costliest version is blaming the planets and stars for our predicament: “Saturn is ruining my life.” Saturn, a ball of gas hundreds of millions of miles away, is no more the author of your hard year than the number 6 is the author of half past ten. The chart, like a mantra or a raga, can be beautiful language for the season you’re in — but it is not the culprit, and it is not the cause. And underneath it sits a quieter question the old non-dual texts love to ask: who is the “you” that’s even being ruined? Look closely and you find that you’re not the hard year — you’re the awareness watching it come and go. The stars can describe your life. They can’t author it, and they can’t touch the one who’s watching. That part is yours.

There’s a question I asked a friend the other day, mid-conversation, the way you sometimes blurt out something that’s been quietly rattling around in your skull for years:

When the little hand sits on the 10 and the big hand points at the 6, is it 10:30 because the hands are there? Or are the hands there because it’s 10:30?

My friend gave me the look people give you when you’ve clearly had one too many cups of chai. But stay with me, because this innocent little question is a doorway — and on the other side of it is one of the most useful, most freeing ideas I know. It begins with a clock and ends, if you’ll walk with me that far, with a much quieter question: who, exactly, is the one looking at the clock at all? Let me take you through. I promise to bring snacks.

The obvious answer (which teaches a not-so-obvious lesson)

The clock does not cause the time. Obviously. If your clock stops, the afternoon does not politely freeze so you can finish your nap. The bus leaves anyway. Your tea still gets cold. The clock is a reporter, not a boss. It points at the morning; it does not manufacture it.

There’s actually a famous one-liner for the mistake of getting this backwards. Reverse causation, the logicians call it, and the classic example is gloriously silly: “The faster windmills spin, the more wind there is — therefore windmills create wind.” (Wikipedia, on reverse causation) Right. And the rooster’s crow causes the sunrise. And my refrigerator light creates the inside of my refrigerator.

So far this is just a cute brain-teaser. But here’s the thing — once you learn to spot the windmill error, you start seeing it everywhere, and in some places it’s doing real damage to real lives.

Because here’s the principle, and I want you to carry it like a little pocket stone for the rest of this piece:

The pointer is not the cause. The thing that shows you something is almost never the thing that made it so.

The clock points at 10:30. The thermometer points at the heat — it doesn’t bake the day. The bathroom scale points at a number — it doesn’t decide your worth on a Monday morning. And the planets, drifting through their houses, point at the seasons of a life. They do not author them.

That last one is where I actually wanted to take you.

The most expensive version of the windmill error

Picture someone going through a brutal stretch. Career wobbling, a relationship under review, the existential 3 a.m. stare at the ceiling. They go to get their chart read, and the astrologer nods gravely: “Ah. Saturn return.” (Saturn loops back to where it sat at your birth roughly every 29 years, and tradition treats it as the cosmic strict teacher who arrives to make you grow up. (Cosmopolitan, “What is Saturn Return?”))

And out it comes, the line I want to gently push back on:

“Saturn is ruining my life.”

Friend — that’s the windmill in cosmic robes. You’ve taken the pointer and handed it the bill. Saturn, a ball of gas hundreds of millions of miles away (it orbits the Sun at roughly 886 million miles, (NASA via Space.com) and never comes closer than about 746 million miles to us), is doing exactly as much to your breakup as the number 6 on your watch is doing to make it half past ten. Which is to say: nothing. It is pointing. It is not pushing.

This isn’t me being a smug skeptic, by the way — and I’d never sneer at the symbolic. I make my living inside symbols; I sing mantras. But there’s a world of difference between a symbol you use and a culprit you blame. Even thoughtful astrologers will tell you the planets don’t do anything to you — that the craft is a symbolic language, not a set of cosmic levers. One of them reaches for the very image we started with: the planets describe a life “in much the same way that the hands on a clock tell you the time, but do not cause the time.” (Mark Flaherty, “A Former Sceptic’s Guide to Astrology”) In fact, whether the sky signifies events or causes them is one of the oldest arguments inside astrology’s own house, thousands of years old. (Taalumot, “Does Astrology Describe Signs or Causes?”) The honest tradition has always known the planets are signs, not switches.

Why blaming the sky feels so right (and costs so much)

Part of why “it’s my Saturn return” lands with such a satisfying thunk is that it’s almost impossible to be wrong. A frame vague enough to say “the next couple of years will test you and force you to grow” is guaranteed to look accurate later — because whose late twenties don’t contain something hard? Psychologists call this the Barnum effect: we read a description loose enough to fit anyone and feel it was written for us alone. (SciTechDaily, “The Barnum Effect”)

That’s harmless when it’s comforting. It turns costly the moment it becomes an exit. Because if Saturn did it, then you didn’t — and if you didn’t, there’s nothing for you to do but wait for the transit to pass. Blame is a beautifully upholstered chair: it’s so comfortable to sit in that you forget you have legs. Hand your hard year to the planets and you’ve also handed them your steering wheel.

And the planets, bless them, are terrible drivers. They weren’t even watching the road.

So keep the language — just don’t hand it the blame

Here’s where I refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the chart, held rightly, is not nothing. “Saturn return” is a rather lovely, compassionate way of saying: around 29, the scaffolding of your twenties gets stress-tested, that’s normal, and you’ll come out steadier. (Mercury Magazine, “Saturn Return in All Houses”) As language — as a way to name the weather of a life — it can console and steady you, the way a psalm or a raga does, without making a single claim that has to survive a laboratory.

A mantra I sing doesn’t bend the universe; it tunes me. “It’s 10:30” doesn’t summon the morning; it nudges me to stop dawdling and go make my music. “Saturn return” doesn’t sentence you to a hard year; it offers an old, gentle frame for a hard year you were going to walk through anyway. The clock and the chart and the mantra turn out to be the same kind of creature: invented vocabularies for a reality that was never asking our permission. The trouble only ever starts when we forget we made the words, and begin to suspect the words are making us.

The quieter question underneath

And here, if you’ll follow me one step deeper, is the part the clock was secretly pointing at all along.

When we say “Saturn is ruining my life,” there are two characters in that little sentence — the planet, and the “my.” We pour all our energy into interrogating the planet. Is it in the seventh house? Is it retrograde? Did it have it in for me specifically? But the stranger, older traditions I keep returning to — the ones I set to music — would gently lay a finger on the other word and ask the question almost nobody thinks to ask:

Who, exactly, is the “you” that’s being ruined? Who is the one suffering, and who is the one doing the blaming?

Sit with that for a second, because it’s not a trick. It’s the whole thing.

Notice that you can watch your hard year. You can observe the anxiety arrive at 3 a.m. and watch it leave by morning. You can see the career wobble, feel the grief, and — this is the strange part — still be there, aware, after each of those has come and gone. Whatever can be watched is not the watcher. The cold tea, the wobbling career, the breakup, even the thought “Saturn is ruining me” — all of it appears and passes across you the way 10:30 appears and passes across the face of a clock that is itself going nowhere. The hands move. The dial doesn’t.

The Ashtavakra Gita says it without flinching: you are the awareness in which all of it rises and sets, not the rising and setting itself. The Ribhu Gita goes further still and laughs the clock right off the wall — there is no time, it says, there is no world either, only erroneous conception. Which is a 3,000-year-old way of saying: friend, you’ve mistaken the weather for the sky. You’ve mistaken the passing cloud for the vast, quiet space that was only ever watching it drift.

So who is Saturn doing it to? Look honestly and you can’t quite find the victim. There’s the hard year — real enough, like the cold tea. And there’s the one aware of it, who was never on the chart at all, who no planet can reach, who isn’t 10:30 or 10:31 or any hour you could name. The stars can describe the weather of a life. They cannot touch the one who is reading the weather report.

That’s the real freedom hiding inside a silly question about a clock. Not “the stars don’t matter,” but something gentler and far more useful: nothing out there is holding the pen — and the one who could pick it up was never out there to begin with. The pointer was never the cause. It was only ever pointing. And what it was pointing back toward, the whole time, was the one looking.

So, the send-off

The clock does not make it 10:30. The stars do not make your life. Both are just pointing — and we began by asking who is the one looking at the clock at all. Here is the homecoming: the one looking is the same one the planets were pointing back toward the whole time. Not 10:30. Not a Saturn return. Just the quiet, unbothered awareness reading these very words, the dial on which every hour comes and goes without touching it.

So the next time the sky gets blamed for the storm, smile, let the planet off the hook, and remember who was watching the weather. The pen was never in Saturn’s hand. It was never even out there. It was always, only, yours.

Now your turn

Once you start noticing this pattern — the pointer is not the cause — you can’t stop, and I suspect you’ve met versions I haven’t.

Where else do we blame the pointer for the storm? The thermometer we curse for the heat. The scale we let pass judgment on a Monday. The credit score, the horoscope app, the calendar that turns one more lap around the sun into a verdict. Maybe something stranger and more wonderful from your own tradition or corner of the world.

Drop it in the comments. Tell me the windmill someone you know swears is making the wind. I’ll read every one — and the best of them might just become the next post.

It’s 10:31 now, by the way. Or so my windmill tells me.

THE PROBLEM WITH KRISHNAMURTI

For those who want an audio version!


Clarity, Magic, Mantras, Doubt. The Long Search Between Silence and Song.

There was a period in my life when Jiddu Krishnamurti was not merely an interesting philosopher to read over morning coffee. He was a full-blown obsession. The kind that makes you slightly difficult to talk to at dinner parties.

From my early teens well into my late twenties, I devoured his books with the intensity of someone who has misplaced their car keys and is convinced the answer is in the next room. I spent countless evenings at the Krishnamurti Centre at Vasanta Vihar in Chennai, listening to recordings of his talks. The voice. The pauses. The surgical precision. The relentless insistence on watching the movement of thought without distortion, without the comfort of a pre-packaged conclusion.

At that age, it felt nothing short of revolutionary.

No gurus.
No rituals.
No temples.
No comforting spiritual lullabies.

Just observation. Pure, unsentimental, slightly uncomfortable awareness.

And it worked. Mostly.

Except for one small problem.

Something inside me remained stubbornly hungry.

Not for truth, perhaps. But for magic.

THE CLEAN ROOM PROBLEM

Krishnamurti could dismantle illusion with surgical brilliance. But after a while, life began to feel — how do I put this — spiritually austere. Like living in a beautifully clean, well-lit room with no music playing and no one bringing tea.

The mind was alert.
But the heart was homesick.

And so, almost secretly — the way one quietly switches from a salad to a biryani when nobody is watching — I drifted elsewhere.

Into the fragrant, mysterious corridors of mantra and ritual.

I still remember buying the Mantra Mahodadhi of Mahidhara from the bookstore at the Theosophical Society in Chennai. That bookstore had a peculiar atmosphere — part library, part sanctuary, part doorway into dimensions that the management probably should have put a warning sign on. Seriously. “Enter with discernment. Do not attempt yantras at home without supervision.”

But I was fascinated. Entranced. Gone.

Soon I was memorizing mantras, studying rituals, exploring yantras, mudras, tantric procedures, obscure planetary invocations, and all the dazzling, incense-soaked architecture of sacred tradition.

Unlike Krishnamurti’s sparse philosophical landscape, this world was overflowing with texture.

Incense.
Sanskrit syllables.
Temple bells.
Sacred geometry.
Mystery.
And, frankly, much better aesthetics.

WHEN BEAUTY BRINGS FRIENDS YOU DIDN’T INVITE

And unlike the cool clarity of pure inquiry, this path offered something the heart had been quietly craving. Emotional warmth. Participation. Devotion. A sense that the cosmos was alive, responsive, and — most importantly — somewhat personally invested in your situation.

But there was a catch.

Along with the beauty came a slow, polite invasion of uncertainty.

Astrology entered quietly. Then tarot. Then auspicious timings. Then planetary periods, gemstones, and predictions. Before long, every inconvenience in life — a delayed appointment, a misfiled document, a bad cup of filter coffee — threatened to become cosmically sponsored.

The mind that Krishnamurti had once attempted to free slowly became occupied again — this time not by ideology, but by metaphysical traffic.

Was Saturn causing this?
Should this mantra be done 108 times or 1008?
Was this a sign?
A transit?
A karmic block?
Or just Tuesday?

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

The strange thing is this: nothing destabilized me during my Krishnamurti years.

But nothing enchanted me either.

And that, I think, is the uncomfortable truth that many seekers quietly avoid admitting.

Human beings do not merely seek freedom. We also seek poetry.

We do not survive on clarity alone.

A life stripped completely of myth, symbol, ritual, music, and sacred imagination may very well liberate the intellect — but it can sometimes leave the emotional body standing barefoot in an empty field, wondering where everyone went.

A TRUCE OF SORTS

Today, I no longer see these worlds as enemies. They were never really at war with each other. I just made them fight because that’s what I do when left unsupervised with large ideas.

Perhaps Krishnamurti cleaned the window.

And perhaps mantra taught me how to sing beside it.

I have found my balance somewhere between observation and devotion, between the silence that inquires and the sound that celebrates. Neither pure Advaita austerity nor astrology-driven anxiety. Somewhere in the middle, making music, singing kirtan, and occasionally still wondering what Rahu is up to.

As for astrology, numerology, tarot, and the rest of the cosmic circus?

Honestly… I still don’t know.

And I have decided that is perfectly fine.

Some questions are not waiting for answers. They’re just waiting for you to stop being afraid of them.

A NOTE ON SEEKING

If you’ve been through your own version of this journey — Krishnamurti to mantra, or silence to devotion, or skepticism to something-softer-than-skepticism — you’re not confused. You’re just human.

The path rarely looks like the map.

And the map, as Krishnamurti would remind you, is not the territory.

Though the territory, I should add, has much better music.

The Empty Beat Is Not Empty

Where Music, Silence and Consciousness Meet

When I first started learning music seriously, I thought music was made of notes.

This is a very common beginner’s disease. Fortunately, it is curable, though the treatment can take several years and may involve many stern looks from music teachers.

In the beginning, we are obsessed with the visible parts of music: the swaras, chords, tempo, raga, lyrics, tala, fingering, pronunciation, and the correct place to come in without looking like we just missed the bus.

All of that is necessary.

But somewhere along the way, if one is lucky, music quietly opens a side door and reveals something more mysterious.

The real music does not live only in the notes.

It lives in the interval between them.

The Space That Sings

It lives in the breath before the phrase.
The hesitation before the sam.
The lingering after a meend.
The silence after a temple bell.
The moment just before the mridangam lands.
The tiny pause where the listener’s heart leans forward.

That space is not empty.

It is alive.

Indian music has always known this. We may not always discuss it in fancy language, but the tradition itself breathes this truth.

Take the alap in Hindustani music. Before the tabla enters, before tala announces its authority, before anyone starts calculating whether this is Teental, Ektaal, Jhaptaal or “please don’t ask me, I am just here for the tea,” the raga slowly reveals itself.

There is no hurry.

A phrase appears. It rests. Another phrase answers. A note is approached, not attacked. The raga does not behave like a government office file being pushed from one table to another. It unfolds like dawn.

In that unhurried space, one begins to understand that rhythm is not merely counting.

Rhythm is breath.

Khali: When Emptiness Has a Seat

Then comes tala, and we imagine tala means beat.

Clap here. Wave there. Come back to sam without falling into the ditch. Very good.

But tala is far more profound than a counting system. It is cyclical time. It is memory returning. It is departure and homecoming.

And then there is khali — the so-called empty beat.

What a magnificent idea.

Only Indian music could look at emptiness and say, “We should give this fellow a proper seat in the cycle.”

Khali is not a mistake. It is not absence. It is marked. It is recognized. It has dignity. In a rhythmic cycle, even emptiness has responsibility.

This is a very deep spiritual statement hiding in plain sight.

Because life also has khali.

The pauses. The waiting periods. The years when nothing seems to move. The phone that does not ring. The prayer that appears unanswered. The project that refuses to take shape. The silence after loss. The strange empty space before the next chapter begins.

We usually panic during these periods.

We think nothing is happening.

But any good musician knows that silence is not necessarily the absence of music. Sometimes silence is where the next phrase is gathering strength.

Breath, Groove and the Human Pause

A bansuri player understands this intimately. In flute music, breath is not separate from the composition. The phrase exists because breath exists. The pause is not decorative. It is biological, musical and almost spiritual.

Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia can make a single note feel like it has arrived from somewhere beyond the visible world. But equally important is the breath around the note. The bamboo does not sing by force. It sings because air passes through emptiness.

That itself is a teaching.

A flute is mostly emptiness.

Yet look what happens when breath enters it.

The same principle appears in rhythm. A great tabla player does not merely play strokes. He plays expectation. He knows when to land, when to tease, when to disappear, and when to return with such inevitability that the listener smiles before the phrase is even complete.

The joy is not only in the bol.

The joy is in knowing where the bol is going.

This is why mechanical perfection alone rarely moves us. A computer can place every beat correctly. It can quantize rhythm until every note stands in line like passengers at airport immigration. Perfect, yes. Alive, not always.

Groove needs relationship.

A little leaning forward.
A little holding back.
A little human imperfection.
A little mercy from the metronome.

Ilaiyaraaja, Rahman and the Architecture of Space

In film music too, the masters understood this in different ways.

Ilaiyaraaja often fills the space between notes with astonishing inner architecture. His bass lines are not merely bass lines. They walk around like characters in the story. His counter-melodies answer the main melody. His strings do not simply decorate; they think.

A folk phrase, a Western harmonic movement, a Carnatic instinct, a rustic pulse — all of them somehow converse inside the same house without calling a family meeting.

With Ilaiyaraaja, the space between notes is often wired with invisible intelligence.

You may think you are listening to a simple melody. Then suddenly the bass moves, the flute responds, the strings open a window, and you realize there was an entire city operating beneath the surface.

A. R. Rahman approaches space differently.

Rahman often allows the space to remain open. His music frequently gives the listener room to enter. A pad floats. A voice appears as if from memory. A rhythm does not always announce itself immediately. Something distant glows before the song becomes fully visible.

Rahman once spoke of finding something special in the stillness of silence. That is not surprising. His best music often understands silence not as a gap, but as atmosphere.

And of course, one cannot speak of Rahman’s sound world without remembering H. Sridhar, the great recording engineer who helped sculpt that space. In a good mix, every instrument does not fight for the same chair. Each frequency is given room to live. The result is not clutter, but depth.

This too is philosophy disguised as engineering.

When everything shouts, nothing is heard.

When each sound has space, music becomes three-dimensional.

The Spiritual Interval

This is also true of devotion.

In bhajan and kirtan, repetition is not mere repetition. A line returns again and again, but each return is different because the listener is different. The space between repetitions does the work. The name is sung, received, absorbed, and returned.

Call and response is not only a musical format.

It is a spiritual model.

The devotee calls.
The universe responds.
Sometimes immediately.
Sometimes after several uncomfortable years.

Even japa works this way. The mantra is repeated, but the transformation often happens in the spaces between repetitions. One bead. Then another. Then another. At some point, the mantra continues even when the tongue stops moving.

The sound has entered silence.

Or perhaps silence has revealed itself as the source of sound.

Drowning in Notes, Starving for Music

Modern life has very little respect for intervals.

We fill everything.

We are drowning in notes:

  • notifications,
  • opinions,
  • content,
  • noise,
  • urgency,
  • endless stimulation.

Every silence must be interrupted. Every waiting room must have a television. Every elevator must have music. Every spare moment must be fed to a screen. Even boredom has been outsourced to algorithms.

No wonder so many people feel exhausted.

Life has become over-arranged.

No rests. No khali. No breath. Just constant input.

But music teaches another way.

Leave space.

Let the phrase breathe.

Do not rush to the sam before its time.

Do not be afraid of the empty beat.

The Space Around the Note

The empty beat is not empty.

It is where the next movement gathers. It is where memory and expectation meet. It is where the listener participates. It is where consciousness quietly does its work.

Maybe the same is true of spiritual life.

We search for dramatic experiences — visions, signs, breakthroughs, cosmic fireworks, some divine customer service representative finally answering our pending ticket.

But the real transformation may be happening in the intervals.

Between two thoughts.
Between two breaths.
Between the chant and the silence after it.
Between longing and surrender.
Between what we planned and what actually unfolded.

That is where music becomes prayer.

That is where silence becomes teacher.

That is where consciousness stops being an idea and becomes something quietly obvious.

The note is beautiful.

But listen carefully.

The space around it is singing too.

The Many Forms of the Mother

There are some forces in life that quietly shape us long before we fully understand them.

For me, that force was always Devi — the Divine Mother.

Even as a young boy growing up in India, I felt an unexplainable pull toward Her. Not out of fear, nor because of strict religious conditioning, but from something much deeper and strangely familiar. Looking back now, I sometimes feel it may have been the quiet continuation of spiritual impressions carried across lifetimes — a culmination of punya that naturally drew my heart toward the Mother.

And perhaps, like many of us, my first glimpse of the Divine Mother came through my own mother — through her care, sacrifice, protection, and quiet strength. Before we understand philosophy or spirituality, we first understand love through a mother’s presence.

Life eventually carried me far away from home. Nearly three decades ago, I relocated to the United States. Like many immigrants, I became absorbed in the practical realities of building a life — work, responsibilities, survival, family, adapting to a new culture. Yet through all the movement and noise of life, one thing remained constant:

My connection to Her.

Prayer continued. Worship continued. Even when life became turbulent, Devi remained the silent center I returned to again and again.

Then, through what first appeared to be a chance encounter with a professor at Rutgers University, life opened another unexpected door. One thing led to another, and I was blessed to meet Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati of Devipuram, who initiated me into the Shakti path through the sacred Panchadashakshari mantra.

Years later, Guruji asked me to help clean up some audio recordings; Viraja Homam and Rashmi Mala Mantras, and add musical interludes to them. During that process, I heard chants and invocations to Matangi Devi. Something within me immediately responded. It did not feel like discovering someone new. It felt like remembering someone ancient and intimate.

I was irresistibly drawn to Her.

Life, of course, did not suddenly become free from difficulty. Like everyone else, I have experienced uncertainty, disappointments, emotional upheavals, and periods where the road ahead seemed unclear.

But through every rise and fall, my faith in the Divine Mother has remained unwavering.

And perhaps that is what motherhood truly represents.

Not perfection.
Not control.
But unconditional presence.

The ability to nurture life even while carrying one’s own burdens. The ability to comfort, protect, sacrifice, forgive, and continue loving despite exhaustion and pain. The world often celebrates power loudly, but the quiet strength of a mother sustains humanity itself.

Over time, I began to realize that the Mother I worshipped in temples and mantras was also present in the women around me — in their resilience, compassion, intuition, creativity, and immense capacity to give of themselves.

To all women, I say this with great reverence:

You are blessed to embody Her Shakti.

Whether you are raising children, caring for family, supporting others emotionally, creating beauty, healing hearts, or simply carrying love into a difficult world — you are expressing the Divine Feminine in ways both seen and unseen.

And even if you are not a biological mother, the nurturing principle still lives within you. The ability to create, protect, inspire, and nourish life is itself sacred.

What greater gift can there be?

On this Mother’s Day, I bow to the Divine Mother in all Her forms — and with gratitude remember my own mother, through whom I first experienced Her love.

Shree Matre Namaha.

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

The Mahout, the Marma Points, and the Heavy Burden of Knowing Too Much

There is an old Indian legend about elephant trainers—mahouts—that perfectly explains why I sometimes sit in my studio staring at a Logic Pro session, completely paralyzed, while the rest of the world just goes ahead and makes music. 

Let me paint the picture. You have an Expert Mahout and an Inexperienced Mahout. The Expert has spent decades studying the ancient texts. He knows every single marma point on the elephant. (For the uninitiated, marma points are the vital, vulnerable energy centers in Ayurvedic anatomy. Strike the wrong one, and you either permanently injure the animal or, more likely, it turns you into a human dosa). 

So, when the elephant misbehaves, the Expert stands there calculating: “If I tap him behind the ear, I might hit the Sringataka marma… If I strike the flank, I might damage his spleen…” To his educated eyes, the elephant is basically a giant, walking minefield. There is hardly a single square inch of the beast that is safe to touch. By the time he calculates the optimal trajectory for applying discipline without causing a catastrophe, the elephant has already eaten a banana grove and wandered off to Kerala.

Then you have the Inexperienced Mahout. He hasn’t read the texts. He doesn’t know what a marma point is. The elephant acts up? Whack. He just taps it on the rump with his stick. No calculation. No Ayurvedic consultation. No existential dread. 

And the absolute best part? He gets away with it. The elephant just grunts, accepts the correction, and gets back in line. 

This story isn’t a critique of the beginner; it’s a tragedy of the expert. Why does knowing your subject inside and out make you lose your confidence? Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, but honestly, I often find myself envying that early stage. The beauty of not knowing the rules is that you aren’t terrified of breaking them. The more you know, the more hesitant you get. The curse of expertise is that you see marma points everywhere. 

Have you seen that viral video of the Malayali uncle, Reji Annan, singing the classic Yesudas track “Gange Thudiyil”? He isn’t in a treated acoustic room. He isn’t worrying about phase alignment, breath control, or whether his EQ masking is clashing with a backing track. He just opens his mouth and belts it out with pure, uninhibited joy and absolute conviction. He isn’t looking at the marma points. He’s just riding the elephant. And millions of people loved it, completely hooked by his raw authenticity.

Meanwhile, I look at my own vocal tracks in Logic Pro and freeze. I’ll spend three days agonizing over whether to use Waves Tune, terrified to send a mix to the sound engineer unless my TC-Helicon is dialed in to the exact millimeter. What if the venue’s acoustics hit a sonic marma point?! The knowledge that was supposed to empower my music ends up acting like a pair of handcuffs. 

You see it in spiritual sadhana, too. We study the scriptures and worry if we are pronouncing the Shyamala Dandakamwith the exact right phonetic intonation, terrified of offending the cosmic grammar police. We hesitate to chant because our Sanskrit isn’t flawless. Meanwhile, someone else is cheerfully butchering the grammar with pure, overwhelming devotion—and they are the ones getting all the grace. 

Knowing the marma points is a beautiful thing; it is what makes you a master. But the legend of the mahout is a humbling reminder. The goal of acquiring knowledge shouldn’t be to build a prison of hesitation around yourself. Sometimes, you have to realize that the elephant—whether that’s your audience, your art, or the universe itself—is a lot thicker-skinned than you think. 

Sometimes, we need to stop overthinking the marma points, let go of our expert hesitation, and just sing the song.

You didn’t hire the heart!

You Didn’t Hire the Digestion Department: On Ramana Maharishi and the Supreme Doer

The 3 AM Regret Committee

You know how it works.

It’s somewhere between 2:47 and 3:15 AM, and your brain, which had absolutely nothing useful to say during the actual meeting, has suddenly convened an emergency session. The agenda? Every bad decision you have ever made. The tone? Prosecutorial. The mercy on offer? None.

“Remember 2009? That thing you said to Ramesh? Remember the job you didn’t take? The relationship you didn’t value enough? That investment you made in what turned out to be the financial equivalent of a paper boat in the monsoon?”

And so the mind replays, rewinds, and re-examines, as if a 47th viewing of the blunder might somehow change the ending.

We’ve all been there. If you haven’t, please write a separate blog, because clearly you are an entirely different species.

Enter the Sage. No PowerPoint Required.

A devotee once came to Bhagavan Ramana Maharishi at Arunachala with exactly this question – not at 3 AM necessarily, but with the same existential heaviness. The weight of past deeds. The crushing burden of karmic ledgers that seem to carry interest at rates that would embarrass a credit card company.

“Bhagavan,” the devotee essentially asked, “how do I get out from under the effects of the bad things I have done?”

Now, another teacher might have assigned a few hundred rounds of a mantra, or perhaps a month-long diet of boiled vegetables and noble thoughts. Ramana’s answer was something far simpler – and, if you sit with it, far more earth-shaking.

He said, in effect: Look. Right now, are you digesting your lunch?

The Stomach Has Better Things to Do Than Take Your Opinions

Here is the miracle that happens every single day that we completely ignore.

You eat your idly-sambar. Perhaps some rice in the afternoon. Maybe, if you are having a particularly adventurous evening, some pasta that you told yourself was “light.” And then – and this is the remarkable part – you forget about it entirely.

You don’t sit there holding a clipboard, managing the acid levels, dispatching enzymes, supervising the peristaltic movement of your intestines. You don’t schedule a 4 PM reminder saying, “Check on protein absorption in the small intestine.” You just… live your life.

Meanwhile, an incredibly complex, unimaginably precise operation is happening inside you. Every minute. Every second. And you are not running it.

Your heart beats. Not because you remembered. Not because you set it up in a settings menu somewhere. It just beats – about 100,000 times a day – without a single conscious instruction from you. Your lungs breathe. Your liver quietly does something extraordinary with seventeen different toxins from last Tuesday. Your immune system, right now, is probably handling something that would have hospitalised you if it had waited for you to notice it.

You are hosting an operation more complex than ISRO’s mission control, and you are completely unaware of it.

And Ramana’s point was this: Who do you think is running that?

The Invisible CEO

Think of your body as a massive corporation. Thousands of departments, millions of processes, an unimaginably intricate supply chain running 24/7 without a single holiday or a “we are experiencing high volume, please wait” message.

Now – who is the CEO?

It certainly isn’t your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is that enthusiastic but slightly clueless intern who sits in the front office, takes all the credit, and panics when the WiFi goes down. The real operations are being managed by something far more capable, far more silent, and far more permanent.

The ancient texts call it Ishwara. Ramana called it the Self. Modern people might call it Source, or Consciousness, or if they are trying very hard to avoid Sanskrit, “the Intelligence underlying existence.”

The name doesn’t matter. What matters is this: it is running the show. It has always been running the show. You are not, and have never been, the Chief Executive.

“But What About My Mistakes?”

And here is where Ramana’s answer becomes genuinely revolutionary.

If the same Supreme Intelligence that runs your digestion and beats your heart is also the Force underlying all of existence – then who, exactly, was the “doer” of those past actions you’re so busy prosecuting yourself for?

This is not a hall pass for bad behaviour. This is not Vedantic permission to be careless. This is something far more precise.

It’s the recognition that the “you” who made those decisions – the anxious, grabbing, fearful, confused identity that acted back then – was itself a product of a web of causes and conditions so vast and so complex that no individual ego could have possibly directed it. Ramana is essentially saying: you were not the driver. You were, at most, the passenger who thought they were steering.

Think of it like the GPS on your phone. You think you’re navigating. But the GPS is using satellite data, traffic algorithms, map updates, real-time rerouting decisions – a million variables your eyes can’t even see. If you end up on the wrong road, is it really you who chose it? Or was it the signal, the map data, the moment of distraction, the imperfect information?

The Supreme Doer – that vast Intelligence – accounts for all of it. Every variable. Every condition. Every circumstance that led to every choice.

The Background App You Forgot About

Here’s another way to think about it.

On your phone right now, there are apps running in the background that you have completely forgotten exist. They are syncing your data, updating your contacts, managing your cloud storage – quietly, competently, without any drama or press releases.

Consciousness works the same way. It is the background process that runs everything – your autonomic nervous system, the movement of the planets, the water cycle, the growth of a child in the womb. It doesn’t send you notifications. It doesn’t ask for acknowledgment. It simply operates, with a precision and elegance that makes the most advanced AI look like a pocket calculator.

And here is the liberating part: that same Intelligence was also the background process behind everything that has happened to you, and everything you have done.

The good. The bad. The cringe-worthy. The regrettable. All of it arose from that Totality.

The Lighter Wallet of Guilt

Ramana’s teaching isn’t asking you to become irresponsible. It’s asking you to become honest.

The ego says: “I did that. I am guilty. I must carry this forever.”

The Supreme Doer teaching says: “That action arose from the Totality. You were the instrument. The instrument is not guilty of what the music is.”

When you truly internalize this – even for thirty seconds – something remarkable happens. The fist in your chest around that old regret… loosens. Not because you have escaped accountability, but because you have suddenly seen the full picture of what accountability even means when you are not, in fact, the independent agent you thought you were.

The cosmic laptop, as it were, has a much better virus protection system than your individual guilt-loop.

A Practical Experiment

Next time you find yourself spiralling into the past – whether it’s 3 AM or 3 PM – try this.

Take a slow breath. Notice the breath happening. Notice that you did not decide to breathe in the last sixty seconds – it just happened. Notice that your heart is beating, your cells are functioning, your temperature is being regulated, all without a single conscious instruction from you.

And then ask: who is doing all of that?

Sit with that question. Not to get an intellectual answer, but to feel the weight of the Intelligence behind it. The same Intelligence that handles your digestion with such extraordinary precision is also handling the full arc of your story – including the chapters you wish you could redact.

And maybe, just maybe, that Intelligence knows a bit more about the editing process than your 3 AM committee does.

The Final Word (From Arunachala, Not from Me)

Ramana was the quietest revolutionary who ever lived. He didn’t shout from rooftops. He didn’t run workshops with certificates and a merch table. He just sat, in stillness, and pointed to the one thing that was undeniably real: the Self – the Supreme Doer – that underlies everything.

His message on past karma wasn’t “don’t worry about it.” It was far more powerful: you were never the doer you thought you were. And the Force that actually runs this show? It doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t have a ledger of your sins. It’s too busy keeping your heart beating to hold a grudge.

So maybe go ahead and fire that 3 AM committee.

The Supreme CEO has it handled.

Published on Nalla Madras – All things movies, music, and philosophy, from a South Indian, Madras-born native’s perspective.

Life is a Time-Lapse: Why You Are the Camera, Not the Movie

The Stationary Camera: Why Time Doesn’t Exist (And Einstein Agrees with the Rishis)

You know that feeling when you look at a time-lapse video of the night sky?

The stars are streaking across the heavens, the Milky Way is spinning like a giant cosmic pinwheel, and the earth seems to be on a wild carousel ride. But the camera? The camera sits there—rock solid, unmoving, silently watching the show.

We usually think we are the ones moving through time, getting older, rushing to meetings, and chasing deadlines. But what if we’ve got it backwards?

What if Time doesn’t exist? What if we are the stationary camera, and it’s the environment that is whizzing past us?

This isn’t just a late-night “hostel terrace” theory. It’s a place where modern physics and ancient Vedanta decide to have a cup of filter coffee together.

The Photographer’s Philosophy

Let’s look at this “Stationary Camera” theory.

In a time-lapse, two things are happening:

  1. The Changing: The stars, the clouds, the rotation of the earth.
  2. The Changeless: The camera lens that captures it all.

If the camera started moving around, the video would be a blurry mess. The only reason we see the movement of the stars is because the observer is still.

Now, apply this to your life. Your body changes (grey hairs appear, knees creak). Your mind changes (happy today, annoyed at the traffic tomorrow). The world changes (new governments, new iPhones).

But YOU—the sense of “I am”—does that ever change? The “I” that felt the sun on your face at age five is the exact same “I” reading this blog right now.

You are the camera. The world is the Milky Way.

“But Saar, What About Science?”

I can hear the skeptics (and the physics majors) clearing their throats. “Nanda, time is real! Entropy! The Second Law of Thermodynamics! You can’t un-break an egg!”

Fair point. But here is where it gets interesting.

Einstein enters the chat.
In the old Newtonian days, we thought time was a steady river flowing at one speed for everyone. Then Einstein came along with Relativity and proved that time is actually bendy. It slows down if you move fast; it warps near black holes.

When his best friend died, Einstein wrote a letter to the family saying:

“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Science is basically admitting that “Time” isn’t the solid container we think it is. It’s an illusion. Or, as we call it back home, Maya.

The Vedantic Upgrade: Drg-Drishya-Viveka

Our ancient rishis didn’t have DSLRs, but they had this exact same theory. They called it Drg-Drishya-Viveka (The discrimination between the Seer and the Seen).

They would say your Camera theory is perfect, with one major “Pro Mode” upgrade.

In your analogy, you might think:

  • Camera = My Mind
  • Milky Way = The World

Vedanta says: Not quite.

If a bug crawls across the camera lens, the camera sees it. If the lens gets foggy, the camera sees the fog.
Your thoughts, memories, and emotions are like that bug or that fog. They are constantly moving. They come and go.

So, the Mind isn’t the Camera. The Mind is part of the movie!

The real Camera is the Sakshi (Witness Consciousness). It watches the world move, and it watches the mind think about the world moving. It is the Sat-Chit-Ananda—the existence that never moves, never sleeps, and never changes.

The Final Verdict

So, are there holes in this theory? Only if you try to make the “Camera” into your ego. Your ego is definitely moving (and usually running late).

But the real You? You are stationary in eternity.

  • Science studies the movie (the changing particles, the biology, the entropy).
  • Spirituality studies the Camera (the Observer).

You don’t have to choose between them. You can enjoy the science of the stars while resting in the stillness of the Self.

Try this today:
Next time you are stuck in a chaotic situation—maybe traffic on Mount Road or a heated meeting—just pause. Be the camera. Let the cars and the shouting be the Milky Way spinning around you.

You might find that while the world is noisy, the Witness is silent.

The Trap of Sensory Pleasures: How to Escape

This or that?

You know the feeling.

It’s 11:30 PM. You are doom-scrolling on Amazon, and suddenly, you see it. A noise-canceling headphone that promises to silence not just the traffic outside, but arguably your own thoughts. Or maybe it’s Saturday night, and that second slice of chocolate truffle cake is looking at you with the intensity of a long-lost lover.

In that moment, a powerful wave rises. The ancient texts call it Kama (desire), but let’s just call it what it is: The Itch.

The Itch says, “If I get this, I will be happy.”

And you know what? It’s not entirely lying. You will be happy. For about fourteen minutes. Maybe twenty if the cake is really good. But then? The happiness evaporates, leaving you exactly where you were, perhaps with just a slightly lighter wallet or a heavier stomach.

This is the trap of the sensory world. It sells us rental happiness and charges us ownership prices.

But there is a little game you can play to hack this system. I call it “This or That.”

The Two Menus

Imagine life is a restaurant with only two items on the menu.

Item 1: “This”

  • Ingredients: Sensory pleasures, shopping sprees, that extra glass of wine, the dopamine hit of a new gadget.
  • Guarantee: Instant gratification.
  • Side Effects: Transient. It fades quickly, leaving a vacuum that demands to be filled again. It is the hamster wheel of happiness.

Item 2: “That”

  • Ingredients: Satchitananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss).
  • Guarantee: Eternal peace. A subtle, unshakeable joy that doesn’t depend on what is in your driveway or your refrigerator.
  • Side Effects: A sense of invincibility. The realization that you are already full.

How to Play the Game

The game is deceptively simple. The moment a craving arises—whether it’s for a new car, a harsh retort to a colleague, or just mindless consumption—you pause.

Take a breath. Create a tiny gap between the urge and the action. And in that gap, ask yourself:

“Do I want This… or That?”

Do I want the fleeting thrill of the object (“This”)?
Or do I want the eternal stability of my own Self (“That”)?

When you choose “This,” you are choosing to be a beggar, asking the world to drop a coin of happiness into your bowl.
When you choose “That,” you remember you are the Emperor.

The “That” is Always There

Here is the secret the marketing departments don’t want you to know: The peace you are looking for in the object is actually what remains when the wanting of the object drops.

When you finally buy that gadget, you feel a moment of relief. You think the gadget gave you joy. It didn’t! The gadget simply removed the craving for a moment, revealing the natural joy (Satchitananda) that was already there underneath.

So why take the detour through the shopping mall? Go straight to the source.

The Practice

Next time the urge hits, catch it mid-air.

  • Craving for approval? Ask: This (someone else’s opinion) or That (my own inner fullness)?
  • Craving for distraction? Ask: This (social media noise) or That (the silence of being)?

You might still choose the cake. And that’s fine! We aren’t trying to be monks overnight. But simply asking the question breaks the trance. It reminds you that you have a choice.

You are standing at the crossroads of the momentary and the eternal fifty times a day.

So, my friend… This or That?