Back from the Dead

Was there any need to write this at all? For a long time I kept turning the question over. Why am I doing it? what is the point of telling the world about a transformation it never asked to hear?

And the answer slowly took shape. Right now as I write this, someone is trapped in the same corner I once was. Some further gone, some not as far but in the end it hardly matters, because when the darker half of the mind takes the control, the shape of it is almost the same for everyone. The same fight. The same battle. The same certainty that there is no way out.

So the most probable answer I keep arriving at is that this story, hopefully, ignites strength and offers a ray of hope to the fallen, to the minds trapped on the dark side. If it reaches thousands, good. But if it reaches one person, on the single night that decides everything, that alone is enough.

This was written for you.

In a couple of months I turn thirty. About a year ago I picked myself up off the ground and started my life over. Before that, I spent close to half a decade in isolation, at war with what I called the voices. For a long stretch I was walking the same road as Kurt Cobain, Chester, Avicii. I use their names because I came from that world too. If you have wandered through this website, you already know music was my life. So from an artist, to the doorstep of a psychiatric ward, to building a technology company. I have come a long way.

I could make a flex of all of this. I could tell you that I worked hard, that I never once gave up, that if I clawed my way out then so can you. It would be a lie, or close enough to one that the difference hardly matters. The truth is stranger, and quieter than that. What happened to me, and the turn toward technology most of all, was nothing but a miracle. I did not climb out of the dark. I was carried out of it.

The Life Before

For almost a decade, I was a professional artist. A music composer. But it started long before anyone paid me for it, back in my early teens, with a guitar and playing my favourite songs.

I learned by doing covers. I still remember my favourites. The intro riff from Tears Don't Fall. Kirk Hammett's solo in Master of Puppets. The guitar pieces from the album Rock On. I had a band, and we used to perform live. Headbanging, screaming, walking out to the edge of the stage to play the solos. Complete rockstar vibes.

Then, slowly, I began writing my songs. I taught myself the craft one piece at a time — production, arrangement, recording. A few friends and I put together a small studio at the back of my house, and that is where I first tried my hands at a software called Logic Pro. The tracks, the buses, the aux channels, the colour codes. Mixing, acoustics. Wuff! I miss it already, just writing this down. I would sit with it into the odd hours of the night, hunting for a sound I could hear in my head but hadn't found yet, trying plugins I couldnt afford. When i say couldnt afford i mean I used to pull it off torrent sites. (sorry). A couple of years in, I was making complete tracks of my own. You'll find a few in the Music section, from around 2013 and 2014. One of them even did okay.

I moved to Mumbai later, to be where the dream was.

It moved faster than I had any right to expect. Within a few months of landing I was doing background scoring for television. Daily soaps, on Colors, on Star, on Zee, on Sony. It was truly something, to hear my music playing on TV. I used to ask my mum to watch the episodes and then i used to tell her which music piece that was playing in the background was mine!

Then the most unexpected thing happened, about a year later. I had done the music production for a film track, and it was recorded by Sunidhi Chauhan. Oh yes. The Sunidhi Chauhan, in the studio, singing over a track I had programmed. The song was for a film that never got made, so it has never been released. If it ever comes out, it goes up on this website with everything else. If it doesn't, I might ask the owner whether I can put a snippet up. It was a good song. I later got the chance to work with very respected artists, Asees Kaur, Krsna Solo, Shahid Mallya, and many more. All of those tracks are in the Music section of the website, which you can check out later.

I won't pretend I was anything but hungry. I came up following Kurt Cobain, Metallica, Linkin Park, Bon Jovi, the ones who stood up in front of all that noise and made it mean something. That was what I wanted. I wanted to be a recording artist..a rockstar. And I won't lie to you, I was close. Close enough to feel it. One of the biggest composers in the Bollywood industry offered me a job as one of the programmers for his company that he was building, and gracefully i had to turn it down. Because a job was never the dream. I was after the sky. I had to be a recording artist. A rockstar. Like Bon, like Kurt, like Queen. Nothing less was ever going to do it. But what i got from that job offer was validation! that my music was good enough that i get a call from an artist like that.

There's a track in the Music section called Milkha Sitare. It wasn't a comemrcial hit, but that was never the point. Because the whole of it, the writing, the producing, the recording, the direction, the camera, the cut, the VFX, the colour grade, was all done by a team of 3. Me and my very good friends, Sharan and Tejas. Go and take a look. Listen to the sound. Watch the visuals. That was a complete, finished thing, start to end. And this time it wasn't only the music. We took the filmmaking just as seriously, how a shot is framed, what a lens does, how light sits in a room. We were twenty years old, running it like we owned a production house. It's alright that it didn't do well. What stayed with me was something else, we could finally do the whole thing ourselves, start to finish, from lyrics on paper to the final render in DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro. What I still think about is what we'd have made if we'd kept going. My guess was two years. Two years, tops, before it all broke open.

I know, too many details. But maybe now you get what I meant when I said I was standing right at the edge of my dream. Not luck. None of it was luck. I'd built it myself, piece by piece, with skill and with work.

And then the universe stepped in with other plans. Darker plans...

Why It Hit So Hard

Before I tell you the collapse, you have to understand what I was climbing away from. Because losing music didn't merely cost me a career. It stripped away the only answer I had ever found to a much older, deeper question.

I didn't make music only because I loved it, though God knows I did. I made it because I needed to prove something. To the world, yes. But more than that, to myself.

Life was hard from the very start. Bullying. Public humiliation. Loneliness. Very few of you will be able to imagine what sustained humiliation does to a child's sense of self. Outside my home, I was the joke everyone was in on. Inside it, there was nothing but fighting. There was nowhere to retreat to. And people, by and large, did not want my company, I was already too damaged to sustain anything resembling a real friendship.

People who grow up like that do drugs, anything to numb the pain! i was just 13 and i was fighting the world alone! One fine day the 13 year old reacted! took a train without a ticket for mumbai! thats one story i would write a seperate blog for! today it feels normal but at that time the scene was bad! police force searching for me! then the photo in newspapers! drama dude! Anyway I found music instead of drugs! today i understand that in the self help and spirituality domain its called channeling.

That was what was truly at stake. Not a career. The entire architecture I had built to survive.

So music became my drug of choice, and I gave myself over to it completely. I called it workaholism, it was a more respectable word than the truth. But something else came in through the same door.

I turned into a maniac, if that is the word, and I suspect it's close enough. Life had been cruel and bitter, music was the only exit I could see, so I did it twenty-four hours a day. And in that obsession, I forgot how to be a human being.

My pain was my responsibility. Mine, and no one else's. I had no right to offload it onto the innocent souls who tried to know me in the years that followed. I didn't even register it happening. But somewhere along the way I had crossed a line, stopped being the victim, and become the aggressor myself. And the moment I saw it clearly, I understood the cruelest irony of all, I had become the very thing that once broke me.

And I paid for it. In loneliness. So much of it, and an agony so deep that I carry it still, even today.

The Fall

Now the fall from the peak. My peak, at least, from getting recognized by the top composers, winning awards, working with top artists! and finally arriving at the stage where i felt that am going to be making official music videos. I felt like a conqurer really. But you see this blue dot we live on, its too tiny in the context of how big the universe is, and the universe always always has other plans, and when the universe plans there is nothing you can do.

So. Anyone who has known OCD, or schizophrenia, will recognise what follows in an instant. It goes into too much detail, I know that. But the detail is the only door into understanding how far down the darkness actually went, and therefore what kind of miracle it is that I am sitting here at all, writing to you. I know precisely what the light is, because I know precisely what the darkness was.

It started with COVID.

When the first lockdown arrived, it seemed harmless enough. Everyone was indoors. So was I, and my work had always been a solitary thing, so at first it felt as though nothing had really changed. I was building the next singles I meant to release, sharpening my production, sinking deeper into DaVinci Resolve. For that extra icing for the color grade i also ended up buying a cinema camera just to get that raw 12-bit footage which could be later used for extra spectrum of colors. i thought this feels like a good opportinity to gain more theorotical knowledge, as all of us were locked down in our rooms.

i wish i knew that the isolation was going to play with my mind. Everything started to happen slowly, one day at a time. To this day I cannot point to the hour it happened, or the morning, or the week. It simply began.

No one warns you about a mind coming apart, it does not arrive all at once. It seeps. A little more each week, a little more each month, one fear laying the quiet groundwork for the next. I did not understand what was happening to me. I only understood that it was happening, and that it was no longer mine to govern. I was not the author of any of it. I was a passenger, watching myself be dismantled, piece by piece, while every ounce of will and reason I owned failed to slow it by a single degree.

It began, as these things do, with fear. I became afraid of everything. The sound of vehicles. The sound of footsteps beyond my door. I built entire architectures of paranoia in my head, people conspiring to harm me, plotted out in detail, with names attached. Today it sounds absurd. In those moments it was total, and it was real, as real as this sentence is to you. And then the voices came. Once they started, they never stopped. They ran the length of every day. And they were strong enough to move my hands, to make me do things.

And this was the part that frightened me most, I could watch myself do these things and have no idea where they came from. There was a guy I had not seen in ten years. I built a LinkedIn account for the single purpose of finding him, wrote to him, and apologised for a fight we'd had a decade before. An ordinary fight. From another life. One neither of us should have carried a day past it. He must have thought I had lost my mind. And for hours afterward, I felt relief. my mind was creating scenarios that felt real.

It bled into everything. Let there be an argument, or not even an argument, some small and trivial thing, and a spiral would open in my head and convince me that the other person was now going to harm themselves. That whatever had taken me would reach out and take them too. So I apologised. To everyone. Sorry, sorry, sorry, until the word itself wore thin in people's ears. I apologised to people insulting me. I apologised to people telling me to go and die. Why? Because I was certain my ruin was leaking into their lives. I had harmed no one. I had only asked for help. And still, the mere noise of my suffering reaching them was enough to make me apologise for existing anywhere near them. i had a friend, a very close friend, who was very mature and understood my situation a little better than others. She understood that i was facing severe mental health issues and she tried to pull me out, but eventually she gave up, and i dont blame her, because every day i told her that she was the enemy and that she was planning to harm me.

And then the compulsive behaviour began. Disinfectant on the doorknobs, because I was certain they carried something. i bought those use-and-throw medical gloves that are used for surgeries, why? because i had to wipe my phone, my watch, my glasses, the keys, every single day. I could not sit on my own sofa, for reasons I was never able to name. And though I still cannot fully explain it, to set foot on the terrace of my own house I kept a separate pair of trousers and separate slippers, and the moment the walk ended I changed straight back. I was frightened of everything that existed. I believed a mob would lynch me. I believed the government would come, take me, and torture me. And hear this one out, I was convinced my phone was tapped, that the intelligence agencies were listening to all of it, and I arranged my days around the certainty.

Self-harm became something close to routine. And when a memory of the old life surfaced, a sharp, metallic pain would pass through me, physically, as though something had been struck clean inside my chest. Those years taught me the truth about the world in a way nothing else ever could, or ever will.

And it kept going down. That was its particular cruelty, there was no floor. Each time I was certain I had reached the bottom, the bottom opened onto something lower. Until, in the end, it had become a thing with a will of its own, so deep, so complete, that escape no longer felt difficult. It felt impossible. Like sitting at the base of a well, watching the last coin of light narrow and close overhead.

And then the day came. The day I sold my equipment.

The speakers went first. Behringers, I'd owned them since the very beginning. Then the headphones. I gave away my condenser mic. I gave away the acoustic panels I had built with my own hands, panel by panel, so the room would sit right for recording and mixing.

I have tears in my eyes as I write this, because that was the day it became official. Whatever else had happened to me, some small part had gone on believing this was a phase, that it would lift, that one day I would return to it. Selling the gear took even that. There was nothing left to return to. A decade-long career, gone in the space of a few months, and I no longer had the faintest idea what to do with myself.

I remember that day. The speakers gone, the panels I had built with my own hands stripped back off the walls, the studio suddenly bare, wrong, unrecognisable. I sat in that hollowed-out room and cried for hours. Because it is one thing to walk through something like this. It is another thing entirely to walk through it with no one beside you. That kind of aloneness does something to a person. It turns you toward the one question you are never supposed to ask. What is the point of breathing air at all?

I remember writing, in my notes, in those days, that I felt like an injured stray dog lying in the corner of some road, waiting quietly for its end to come. Everything gathering around me seemed to point toward the same miserable conclusion.

And when every human door has closed, I think it is only natural that a man turns, at last, toward the unseen.

It did not come easily to me, turning anywhere near it. I had always been an atheist. I used to laugh at the people who carried religion and God around in their hearts. I mocked them for it. I was a practical man. Science was truth. Progress was reality. How could a thing called God possibly be real?

And yet, with no human help left anywhere, I began to feel a pull toward the unseen. A strange one. Slowly, I started going to the temple. I chanted the Hanuman Chalisa every single day. Something like an anchor had dropped, an unseen energy that handed me a single percent of hope that there might be something beyond all this. And I took it. I started to read. I started to believe. I started, for the first time in my life, to have faith.

The arrogant, practical man who had spent years mocking God and every soul who believed in Him was now being saved by that very God. The injured stray dog in the corner of the road was being lifted by the hand it had laughed at. Given hope by the God it had ridiculed.

And I was healing. Slowly. I could feel it happening. The nightmares were no longer what they had been at their worst.

Little did I know that a new journey had already begun, and that what was coming next would change everything, in every possible way.

The Night I Left

And all the while, underneath the wreckage, something else was quietly gaining ground. A pull toward the spiritual, faint at first, then a little stronger with each passing day. The only way I know to describe it is this, it was like a medicine that has begun, very slowly, to work. A sense of getting better by degrees, even as the disease itself still raged, undiminished, at its absolute peak. Two forces moving in me at once, in opposite directions.

And then, somehow, Hyderabad called.

If I am ever given the chance to tell you how I came to be in Hyderabad, I will, because that, too, is part of the miracle, part of the entire transformation. For now, one thing is enough for you to know. Going to Hyderabad was not a decision I made. I did not choose it. I was put there.

And when I say put there, I mean the unseen was already at work, arranging what I could not see. In Hindi there is a word for it. Leela. Prabhu ki leela. The play of the Divine. His doing, unfolding through me, moving my feet, while I stood there wholly convinced that I was the one making the choices.

It would take me two more months to realise it had been leela all along.

Hyderabad

I came into Hyderabad in the morning, and by way of a broker, I found a place to stay. Let me stop here for a moment on this place.

It was a penthouse. Fourth floor. The deal handed me half the terrace along with it, so the whole thing came out to half room and half open sky, a single studio apartment with an entire rooftop stitched to its side. Step out, and almost all of Hyderabad opened up in front of you, a long reach of forest, green and untamed, and rising beyond it, far off, the great towers of the city catching the light. It did not look like a place a person rents. It looked like a shot out of a film. And here is the part that still makes me laugh, in hard money terms, the deal was not just good. It was absurd. Sixteen K a month. The neighbourhood, I should mention, is called Banjara Hills. So do me one small favour, find a local Hyderabadi, describe that terrace to them, name the area, name the price, and then watch their face come apart. Come back and tell me what they said.

I turned to the broker and told him, dude I love this. I have no better words for it than those. Standing on that rooftop, I could already see a future unfolding inside that room, as though it had already happened and I was only remembering it. It felt like the precise change I had been needing, out of my hometown, out of the noise, into solitude. Because back home, remember, I was someone who could not bring himself to step past his own front door, for every reason I have already laid in front of you. And here, this place, this city, felt like a clean page turning. I could feel it in my chest, physically. And that is exactly, to the letter, what it became.

The broker, for what it's worth, turned out to be a genuinely good man. He still is. I told him on the spot that the place was mine. We drove to the owner's house, I put down the token, and I gave my word I'd be back in fifteen days.

I could not have known it, standing up there on that terrace with the wind coming off the forest, but that room was where my whole life was going to turn. The unseen was at work. The unseen had picked up the injured stray dog lying at the corner of the road and was giving him a new life.

The Move

Some fifteen days later, I came back to Hyderabad for good. November 2024, as best I can place it.

The first day, the apartment was empty, of course, nothing in it at all. So I spread a bed sheet out over the floor and slept on that. I still remember that first night, lying flat on the ground of an empty room in a strange city, the lectures of Premanand Ji Maharaj playing low from the phone beside my head.

A few days passed. It took me time to settle, to find my footing, to feel something like comfortable. And then, four or five days in, a week perhaps, the memory blurs there, I went looking for a temple nearby. Back home, the one place I had ever really gone was the Hanuman temple, so here too, carrying the very same anxiety across a thousand kilometres, I thought, let me at least find out whether there is a temple somewhere close.

And here is the thing I need you to feel, because it mattered more than it sounds. For the first time in years, I was excited. Positive, even. I actually wanted to step out of that house and see the place, to wander, to go here and there, to take one clean shot at living like an ordinary man.

And it was good. God, it was good, just to walk a little. To sip a cup of tea somewhere. To sit in a small cafe and eat a plate of pasta with other people around me, alive and unbothered. I know exactly how ordinary that sounds. For most people it is nothing at all. For me it was a rebirth, and I do not use that word lightly. Just to sit somewhere, out in the open world, and not be afraid, that was everything. It was nice. It was too nice.

Anyway. This blog has run long enough already, so let me get back to the point.

As I said, on Google Maps I found a temple, just 0.8 kilometres away. I looked at it that night. And the next morning, I booked a Rapido and went.

The Temple

I reached the temple at around eight in the morning. The Hare Krishna Golden Temple. And the moment I stepped through the gate, something moved in me. I don't know how else to put it. A kind of quiet I had not felt in years, the kind you stop believing you will ever feel again.

Just inside stood a goshala, the cows, and something about them settled me instantly. Deeper in, a senior devotee sat teaching a portion of the Gita to a small circle gathered around him. And there, at the heart of that beautiful place, were the deities. Radha and Krishna. Sri Narasimha.

Now can you connect a few of the dots with me? A Krishna temple. Exactly 0.8 kilometres from a room I had stumbled into by accident. In a city I had been placed in by accident.

This is what I meant when I called it prabhu ki leela. His play. His doing.

That first day, I did very little. I prayed. I ate something on the way home. I went back. That was all.

But the place would not leave me. It was so beautiful, and I mean that plainly, if you are ever anywhere near it, go and see it for yourself.

I thought i should go here more often, and more often quietly became every single day.

Wake up. Work. Temple. Home. Sleep. That became the entire shape of my life. I did not understand what I was doing there, or what I was meant to do, or why I kept returning. I just went, for the evening aarti above all. There was a pull to it I could not explain, and did not try to. And remember, through every bit of this, the illness was still in me. I was still sick. The sanitizer bottles, the disinfectants, the fear of people conspiring, it was still running. But each day I walked into that temple, and each day something inside me loosened by a fraction so small I could barely measure it.

It went on like that for two, maybe three months.

The Lecture

Then one day, a devotee finally asked me the question I imagine he had been holding back for a while. You come here every single day, he said. What is going on with you? I didn't tell him. I couldn't have explained it if I'd tried. But he asked whether I would come to a lecture, something that might give me the concepts behind the Gita, behind Krishna. And I said, why not.

And I went in.

The lecture was, in essence, the Gita in depth, the philosophy of Krishna laid out properly, from the ground up. And one line landed harder than anything else I heard that day. You are not the body. You are the soul.

Now, here is the thing you have to understand about me. I am a deeply practical man. I do not accept things because they sound beautiful. I accept them when they check out. And what I began to notice, sitting there, was a pattern I could not ignore.

Everything that struck me in that lecture, I had already heard somewhere else. From Premanand Ji Maharaj, in the talks I had been listening to on my phone night after night. Two entirely separate sources. A saint on a screen, and a room full of devotees in a temple, people with no connection to one another, saying the very same things, traced back to a single origin. The Gita. When two independent witnesses, who have never met, hand you the identical truth, a practical man stops arguing and starts listening.

The clearest instance was Naam Japa, the chanting of the Name. Premanand Ji Maharaj had always called it the single most important thing a human being can do. But honestly, back then, it did nothing for me. I did not understand it. Why would a person simply sit and repeat a name? What could that possibly accomplish? So I never really practised it.

And then, in this lecture, they said precisely the same thing. Naam Japa, above all else, the most important practice there is. And that was what finally did it. Not because I had suddenly grasped the mechanism, but because now two completely separate sources, both rooted in the same Gita, were pointing at the exact same thing. For a practical man, that is enough. That was the push. That was the day I actually began to chant.

And here is what I came to see slowly, over a long stretch of time. Krishna had been in my life long before that lecture. Long before that temple. He was the one who had put it in my head to go to Hyderabad in the first place. He had seen me, he saw me suffering, and He had quietly lifted me, and carried me under His shelter. I simply hadn't noticed. That is the whole nature of His leela. You only ever see it looking back.

The Healing

What the devotees taught was simple. So simple that it almost feels wrong to say a thing like that saved my life. But it did.

There were two parts to it. First, avoid the four things that damage a person. Meat-eating. Intoxication. Gambling. Illicit sex. And second, chant. Chant the Holy Name.

Premanand Ji Maharaj had always spoken of chanting the Radha naam. Here, at the temple, they asked us to chant the Hare Krishna Mahamantra:

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare

This is what is called the Mahamantra. Now, I could sit here and lay out the logic behind it, but I won't, and I want to be honest about why. I am not the person to hand out knowledge as important as this. I am not learned enough, and I am not authorised to tell anyone what to do with something so sacred. The one thing I will say, and only because it comes straight from the Gita, is this. We are living in the age called Kali Yuga. And in this age, the single thing that can connect a person to God is the taking of His Holy Name. This is the way meant for our time. That much I can tell you. Nothing beyond it.

I could also give you a hundred analogies. I could dress it all up in scientific theories about what chanting does to the brain. I'll spare you every bit of that and tell you only the plain result. It purifies the mind. It genuinely does. I know, because I watched it happen to my own.

There was one more idea that came with the Gita's teachings, and it landed hard. Karma. Action and reaction. It works like planting seeds. Plant good ones, water them every day, and something good grows. Plant bad ones, water them just as faithfully, and then act surprised when the thing that finally breaks the soil is ugly. I had watered a great many bad seeds in my life. For the first time, I understood that arithmetic.

So I simply followed. I kept going to the temple, every single day. I kept chanting the Name. And this went on for months. And I will tell you exactly what happened.

Remember the OCD? It began to heal. Every single day, a little more.

The dustbin that once filled with empty sanitizer bottles came down to a single small one, used only now and then. I stopped needing the vacuum cleaners. I stopped keeping separate slippers and separate clothes for the terrace. What little remains of it today I don't even call OCD anymore. I still wipe my phone and my glasses each morning, but it is not fear driving it now. It is just a man who likes his things clean. That is all it is.

And with each passing day, life was quietly becoming normal. The fear itself began to loosen its grip on me. I could not believe it was happening, or how.

Now I want to stop here and be very careful, because this matters and I refuse to be reckless with it. Through those years, I had also seen psychiatrists, in more than one city, and I had been on heavy medication. I am not putting the details of that on this page, and I want to be completely clear about why. I am not, for one second, telling you that this is an alternative to medicine. I am not telling anyone to stop their treatment. I would never do that. All I am doing here is telling you, honestly, what happened to me. Nothing more. Please hear that clearly.

And here is what I actually learned, imperfect as I was through all of it. Because I was imperfect. My chanting was imperfect. My discipline was imperfect. And my life transformed anyway.

If your intentions are truly right, if your heart genuinely wants to change, to accept, to stop feeding the lies of Maya, then Krishna will help you. But do not mistake me. That does not mean you may take the discipline lightly. It means your intent has to be real: the honest willingness to be disciplined, to do good karma, to chant the Name, to harm no one, to hold your senses and your emotions in check. You try. Imperfectly, but truly. And when the intent behind the trying is pure, the help arrives. That is the one thing I know for certain, because I lived it.

Coming Back to Life

Slowly, my strength began to return. I was holding on to the chanting as best I could, trying to keep the principles, imperfectly, but trying. And somewhere in the middle of all that, an old current in me flickered back to life.

I had known how to build simple websites once, and I cannot tell you exactly where it began again this time, but I started building things. I took on a few freelance projects. Honestly, I had no idea where any of it was going. I assumed, quietly, that this was simply what my life would be now. A little work. Quiet days. Nothing grand. And I had made my peace with that. After the place I had come from, a small, ordinary working life felt like a fortune. It was better than the hell I had climbed out of.

But Krishna had other plans.

I went deep into the software of it all, not merely using the tools, but needing to understand the back end, how the machine actually worked beneath the surface. Even as a musician, I had always been pulled toward the technology as much as the art. I told you about Logic Pro. I told you about DaVinci Resolve, no easy thing to learn, but I got into it early, because for me the process was always its own kind of art. I never simply wanted to make the thing. I wanted to know how the thing was made. And so I went down the rabbit hole, and I kept going. VS Code. Android Studio. UI and UX. Servers. Databases. On and on. In almost no time, I had built the very same fire for tech that I once had for music.

I started small. An image compressor. A subtitle editor. Little tools, just to find my feet. But I wanted to build something that actually mattered. Something that would leave a mark.

And then I took a leap that still makes me smile to remember. I decided to build an application of my own.

The first real one was called It's Okay.

It's Okay was a mental health application, something along the lines of 7 Cups. I had designed it so that anyone in need of immediate help could reach a volunteer, online, at any hour, day or night. That was the whole heart of It's Okay. And as I built it, I felt something come back to me. My real self. Building an app, building a startup, it felt exactly the way making a music video once had. I want you to notice what is happening here. I want you to feel the wind changing.

Soon after, the work carried me to Bangalore.

I went to understand the whole machinery of it, startups, VCs, funding, companies. I rented a seat at a co-working space called Beehive. And watch Krishna's hand at work again here, because I expected none of it. I had more or less made my peace with solitude, with a life lived alone. And then, in Bangalore, in that co-working space, I made friends. There was a pool table, and I played there with the others every day. I sat with them, I drank my coffee, as though all of it were the most normal thing in the world. And I had forgotten almost everything. The OCD was gone. The fear was gone. Not merely gone, it was as though it had never existed at all. I felt like a normal man. A normal person. A happy one.

I had never asked God for this thing or that thing in particular. But I used to beg Him for a life. I used to beg Krishna to lift me out of that loneliness, because I could not survive another day inside it. And look, look at what I was given.

In all of this, there is exactly one piece of credit I will keep for myself. Everything else belongs to Krishna. My work, my company, my skills, all of it is His. But this one thing I will take: through thick and through thin, I have been honest with Krishna about everything. About my failings. And about my love for Him.

Anyway. Back to the work.

A few months into It's Okay, deep in the building of it, a single question stopped me cold. What was it that had actually pulled me out of the darkness? Not what should have. What actually did. And the honest answer was Krishna, and His teachings. That was the truth of it, for me. So I asked myself the obvious next question. My entire intention is to pull people out of misery, so why am I not building the thing that actually worked? Why not build the truth itself?

So I stopped It's Okay. And in its place, I began to build Krishnaskode.

I would love to tell you everything about what Krishnaskode is, but it is better, for now, that I don't. It is still being built, and it is nearing the end. If all goes well, it will be out before long. There is a whole other side to this, too, the technical side, and I know that some of you reading this are developers who would genuinely enjoy it. I promise I will share all of it. Just later. Not today.

And along the way, together with a very good friend I met in Bangalore, Bhavesh, I built and launched a fitness application called Kcaldo. A real, finished, working product. If you have an Android phone, you will find it on the Play Store. I also, at long last, registered a company of my own: Forkr Technologies. If you have a moment, you can visit it at forkr.in.

And do you remember the old fire? The one I once poured into music, the one that wanted to grow big enough that the world could never touch me again? It came back. But it came back changed. It was no longer about proving anything to anyone. This time, only one thing burned underneath it. Service. Krishna. And I will be honest with you: this fire is larger than any fire I ever felt for making art. The same flame. A completely different fuel.

So sit with the whole of it for a moment, the way I still have to.

That injured stray dog, lying in the corner of the road, waiting quietly for its end to come, Krishna reached down and picked it up. And that same dog is now building startups. Building websites. Building applications. Running a company of his own.

To a lot of you, this may sound like a small thing. People build startups every day, I know that. But for me, after everything I have set down on this page, it is nothing short of a miracle.

How Life Is Now

So where does all of that leave me, today?

Consumed. Completely consumed in the work, building the company, building the apps, the thousand small fires of it. That is the honest shape of my days now.

And I will not pretend I have become a saint. I am still at four rounds of chanting a day. Four. I wish I could tell you it was ten, or sixteen, I ache to get there, but the kind of work I have taken on does not leave the room for it, not yet, and not any time soon. I have said as much to Krishna, plainly, the way I have learned to say everything to Him. He knows exactly where I am. He knows that I am trying.

And here is the part I most want to be honest about, because honesty is the only real currency I have left with Him. I think constantly about the decisions I make, whether this one cuts against dharma, whether that one would disappoint Him. And still I do things, plenty of things, that I know would make Him unhappy. My one hope is that they are innocent mistakes. Human ones. The ordinary stumbling of a man who is trying, and still falling short in a hundred small ways.

Because the whole truth is this: I am not brave enough to walk away from the world the way the devotees at that temple have. I still carry desires. I still want to build things out here, in the material world. But I have made my peace with how I will do it, under His shelter, and for Him.

And I know, even as I write "for Him," that it is not the purest thing I could say. Because part of me still wants to prove what I can do, to show what I am capable of, to rise to the height I believe I can reach. I will not hide that from you, or from Him. But when I say I am doing it for Him, this is what I mean: that in every decision, the smallest ones and the largest ones alike, I am choosing Him. Always. Again and again and again. That much, I can promise.

I hope this story helps you. I hope it serves the purpose I wrote it for.

Hare Krishna.