Chennai. Late 1970s. The air inside the College of Engineering, Guindy smells like chalk dust, machine oil, and ambition.
My nickname was “Quantum.” Earned, not assigned — the way nicknames get earned in engineering school. I was the one who stayed in the library after everyone else left, bent over Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, replicating diagrams on napkins, explaining wave-particle duality to anyone who’d sit still long enough. In Chennai in the late seventies, atheism was intellectually fashionable and skepticism was the current we all swam in. Science was the future. Ritual was dead weight. I had a specific contempt for religious markings — vibhooti on a forehead, to me, was a billboard for a weak mind. Superstition dressed up as tradition. I wasn’t just indifferent to it. It actively irritated me.
Then he walked in.
Tall. Clean-shaven. His face literally shining. Well-ironed white half-sleeve shirt, well-ironed white pants — immaculate, like he’d stepped out of something other than ordinary time. A Royal Enfield parked behind him completed the picture. He was a PhD candidate, a research scholar on campus.
And across his forehead: patta vibhuti — those unmistakable prominent ash stripes.
Every instinct I had said: here is exactly the kind of person I have no patience for. I gave him thirty seconds before I started sharpening my questions
The Man Who Stopped a Lecture Cold
A friend of mine, Paddy — two years my senior — was in a physics lecture on the De Broglie matter wave equation. Standard material. The principle that every moving object, from electrons to human beings, has a wavelength associated with its motion.
This PhD candidate stood up.
He asked a pointed question about reference frames. No theology. No mysticism. Pure physics. If every moving object has a wave nature, what happens when you shift to a reference frame that moves with the object? Relative to that observer, the object isn’t moving at all. Velocity equals zero. And if velocity is zero, the De Broglie formula collapses — the wavelength becomes undefined.
Does the object simply lose its wave nature depending on who’s watching?
The lecturer had no clean answer. He tried to work his way out. He couldn’t. The class watched him stumble through the loop.
Then the PhD candidate let the silence breathe for a moment, smiled, and delivered the line that made the whole room erupt:
“If that is true, sir — am I a DC Generator?”
A DC generator produces constant, unvarying current. No oscillation. No frequency. No wave of any kind. If the matter wave collapsed depending on the observer, then in some frames of reference, this man was simply constant. Featureless. Wave-free.
The lecturer was stumped. We laughed until our sides hurt when the seniors told us.
This wasn’t fuzzy mystical thinking. This was sharper than anything we were doing.
The Lab Confirmed It
My defenses started cracking. They finished cracking in the lab.
Paddy’s senior group was stuck on their Delta Antenna project, trying to prove a theory to a notoriously difficult professor we called the “Mad Engineer of Mylapore.” The calculations wouldn’t hold. They were going in circles.
This PhD candidate — the one I’d been prepared to laugh at — looked at their problem, applied skin effect theory on the spot, and sketched a solution. He connected it to J.C. Bose’s work on electrical activity in plants.
That was it. Done.
He was a PhD student who knew more about antennas than the senior undergraduates. He knew more about quantum mechanics than the lecturers. When I finally had the chance to debate him directly, he demolished my rational arguments with reasoning more precise than my own.
I had one thought: If his engineering logic is this flawless, maybe his spiritual logic isn’t superstition after all.
The High-Voltage Lab and the Royal Enfield
A small group of us started spending time with him. We’d drift from the high-voltage lab to the shade of a tree behind the engineering block. No ashram. No rituals. No incense. Just us, the quiet, his Royal Enfield parked nearby, and conversation that kept going somewhere unexpected.
He never lectured. He never instructed in any formal sense. He just was a certain way, and something in that presence gradually lit something up in us.
We would later come to understand what he was. A Siddha Purusha — a realized soul. Only twenty-three or twenty-four years old. There’s a line in the Bhagavad Gita about the mind being harder to control than the wind. This man had the opposite problem: he had to struggle to come out of meditation to perform ordinary tasks. Deep meditative absorption wasn’t an achievement for him. It was his default state.
Sitting under that tree, without fully understanding what was happening, something transferred.
I — the “Quantum” skeptic, the restless agnostic — found I could drop into meditation without much difficulty. A few rounds of pranayama, and consciousness would settle into stillness. No force. No struggle.
I hadn’t earned this. I hadn’t practiced for it. It had simply been transmitted — like downloading software I didn’t even know I was receiving.
Then I did what undisciplined people do. I dropped it.
Four Decades of Getting It Wrong
Here is where the story gets uncomfortable.
I was inconsistent. I practiced for a while, then abandoned it for years. Then decades. I drove the car to Vegas, metaphorically speaking — did everything you’re not supposed to do with a spiritual practice. Stopped cold. Picked it up occasionally. Dropped it again. Career, marriage, children, the whole cacophony of normal existence swallowed everything whole.
By any rational measure, whatever had been transmitted should have atrophied. Use it or lose it, right? Spiritual capacities are supposed to fade like muscles that haven’t been exercised, like a language you haven’t spoken since childhood.
Except this one didn’t. But the Wi-Fi password never changed.
Forty-five years later, whenever I sat down, closed my eyes, did a few slow rounds of pranayama — the signal was still there. Still accessible. Like a battery that had survived decades of misuse and neglect and still held its charge.
I found out in Tokyo, September 2023. My passport vanished in a food court — fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, washing everything in a cold, blue‑white glare — sixty minutes before the U.S. Embassy closed for a holiday weekend. The precise moment when panic is the obvious response.
Instead, something else happened: clarity.
I found a police kiosk, communicated through a stranger’s translation app, got a taxi at 2:15 for an embassy closing at 2:30, arrived at 2:28, walked out with an emergency passport, made the flight.
Nine months later, two friends — a dentist and a gastrosurgeon — mentioned they’d been talking about that afternoon. “I would’ve completely fallen apart,” one said. “You didn’t even seem rattled.”
What they noticed — and what I hadn’t — was something running quietly in the background. Not the absence of stress. More like space around the stress. Shock absorbers you don’t feel working until someone else points out that your ride is smoother than theirs. But something had kept the channel clear.
The full weight of the paradox came that November, at a friend’s home in Sacramento.
The Sacramento Paradox
November 2024. A Saturday evening at a friend’s place in Sacramento. Lassi, pakoras, saris, the usual laughter.
The conversation drifted to meditation. One woman — a brilliant, high-level executive at a major semiconductor firm, the kind of person others call when something complicated needs doing — said, half-laughing: “For the life of me, even if my survival depended on it, I just can’t meditate.”
Others jumped in. Vice presidents. Consultants. IT leaders. Surgeons. All accomplished. All stuck.
And then I thought of her—meine bessere Hälfte, my better half—superbly efficient. Extraordinarily disciplined. A master of multitasking who excels at everything she takes on. If anyone should be able to meditate through sheer force of will, it’s her. But she’s said it for years: “I cannot get into meditation.”
Then there’s me. The inconsistent one. The one who starts things and abandons them, who drove the practice to Vegas and left it in the parking lot. The last person anyone would expect to have uninterrupted access to inner stillness for forty-five years.
I sat in my Tesla before pressing the brake and putting it in drive. Something kept nagging. I started counting backward — how long had this actually been true? That I never found meditation particularly hard? Five years? Ten? Twenty?
No.
All the way back to 1978. Maybe ’79.
Which meant the answer wasn’t in Sacramento. It wasn’t in Tokyo. It was in Chennai, in the shade of a tree behind the engineering block, beside a Royal Enfield, next to a young man whose face literally shone and whose forehead I had once decided was proof of a weak mind.
The Shepherd and the Bird
Here is the mechanism, as clearly as I can state it.
There are two ways to move the mind toward stillness. The first is like a shepherd driving sheep into a pen — barking, using a stick, forcing them to go where they don’t want to go. The moment you look away, the sheep scatter. This is what discipline alone looks like. It’s an adversarial relationship with your own mind, and it’s exhausting. My wife is doing everything right by that model. The sheep just keep escaping.
The second way is completely different. Think of a bird returning to its nest at evening. Do you have to force it? No. The bird isn’t driven — it’s pulled. A magnetic attraction to home. It doesn’t struggle. It simply goes where it already belongs.
That pull has a name in the Yogic tradition: Pratyak Pravahata — natural inwardness. When a higher center in you awakens, it acts like a magnet. The mind doesn’t need to be forced inward. It wants to go there.
What happened under that tree in 1978, beside the high-voltage lab and the Royal Enfield, was this: something got switched on. The Yogi — the Siddha Purusha in the white clothes with the shining face — activated something I didn’t even have a name for. Not through instruction. Not through ritual. Through transmission.
My wife has the discipline of a master shepherd. But the bird in her hasn’t yet found its nest.
I didn’t earn the nest. It was given to me.
The Missing Variable
Here is the paradox that won’t stop haunting me.
The disciplined person struggles. The undisciplined person succeeds. By every standard rule of how these things are supposed to work, this shouldn’t be possible.
Discipline is supposed to be the foundation. Every spiritual text says the same thing. Practice, consistency, routine. She has all of that in abundance.
So what explains it?
The transmission under that tree in 1978 explains it. Not technique. Not discipline. Something else — something given by a twenty-three-year-old in white clothes with ash on his forehead and a face that literally shone, a man I’d been fully prepared to dismiss, a man who turned out to be sharper, deeper, and more real than anything my “Quantum” armor could defend against.
Whatever he gave me, it persisted through forty-five years of neglect. The battery held. The Wi-Fi password never changed.
That is the capacity I never earned. That is the missing variable.
And the question that followed me from that Sacramento parking lot all the way into 2025 — the question I still haven’t fully answered — is this: What is that variable, exactly? Can it be understood? Can it be passed on?
That question led somewhere I never expected. Somewhere involving not ancient wisdom, but modern technology.
That’s the next chapter.
If this story hit you, share it with someone who needs to read it in 2026.
This is from the opening chapter of a book I am writing:
