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The Distance They Built On Purpose — For the Silence in Our Minds…
An airport in Houston learned that waiting feels like loss, and the effort of walking feels like progress — even when nothing has changed. “The mind doesn’t measure what happened. It measures what it was busy doing while it happened. … Unless we learn to stand still, we won’t learn to move in Taichi. ……
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Being-Time and the Logged Second…
A news report said Wipro just deployed a tool called Time Scope to log every second of employee inactivity. Dogen, 800 years ago, wrote that each moment is already complete and doesn’t survive into the next. These two views of time cannot coexist—and one of them is a civilisational confusion we are all living inside.…
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Dharma Journey of the Ordinary Passage 7: Nale Kanam…
A bus in Alappuzha threads a needle of tarmac between two floods. It isn’t chasing a caption; it’s chasing a clock—a hospital shift, a school bell, a mother’s empty chair in Mannarkkad. This is Kerala’s monsoon: a story with two faces. One is a postcard; the other is a promise whispered across a swollen river—Nale…
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Passage 5: The Reclaimed Desk: Jinen or just Friday…
Three and a half years ago, I walked away from my writing desk and into a zendo. When I returned home, the desk was simply there again—given back in silence, without a word of explanation. No grand plan accompanied my return. Just an emptied bank account, a new microphone, and the realization that readiness has…
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Sunlight Through the Gate: Bringing Emptiness to a Metric-Obsessed World…
Twenty years ago, in a room full of people who measured everything, I said something unmeasurable. They laughed. I’ve been thinking about that room ever since. “As a connoisseur of good beer — and I say this with full sincerity —I am in the business of fermentation — which takes time, darkness, and stillness. Fermentation…
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The Voice and the Rising : The Cold ordinary dailiness of it.
The mind will tell you that not choosing keeps your options open. But not choosing is itself a choice — the choice to stay exactly where you are. This essay follows a single morning in a Zendo in Perumalmalai, from the first reluctant waking to the chant that rises anyway. It weaves together ACT therapy,…
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Speck of Sand, View from Above: The Overview Effect Doesn’t Need a Rocket Ship
You don’t have to leave Earth to feel the universe wake up inside you. A desert at sunset. A zazen mat. A Stoic meditation called “The View from Above.” The same shift happens: ego softens, anxiety shrinks, and you know—not believe, but know—that everything is connected. “As the horizon was bathed in the color of…
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Effortless effort…
A bus descending from Kodaikanal. A few WhatsApp exchanges. And an essay that arrives without strain — about exactly that: the paradox of effort. This personal piece moves from childhood asthma to deep depression, from 4 a.m. meditation streaks to Herrigel’s archer in the dark, and finally to a Zen master who laughs at a…
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Where Else…
Literature doesn’t live only in bookshelves. It rides vans, autos, kitchens, and waste carts. Where else?” A beach library. An auto named after a novel. A sanitation worker’s memoir in a syllabus. A child’s first book in a guest room. And a chef who decided to live because of a book. Literature lives where you…
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I Feel, Therefore I Am…
Knowledge we can pass on with words. Experience we carry in our bones. Wisdom is somewhere between the two — and harder to locate than either. This is an attempt to think through all three. With a little help from Aristotle, Zen, Descartes, Maradona, and twenty-year-old Tai Chi muscle memory. “Almost twenty years ago, I…
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The Inner Smile: Loving Yourself as the Gateway to Loving Others…
Compassion is renewable, not infinite. Before we can offer it to others, we must learn to direct it inward—not as narcissism, but as the simple recognition that the well must have water before it can quench anyone’s thirst. What if your baseline inner state was one of gentle affection rather than criticism or indifference? Not…
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The Hand That Knows Too Much: What Dan Brown Teaches Us About the Untaught Writers…
Dan Brown writes like a man who knows exactly what he is doing. The greatest writers never quite knew. And that unknowing was everything. A deeply personal reflection on craft, value, and why some books thrill while others transform. “The seams are visible. The hand is always there. This is the central limitation of the…
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Purrfect Presence: The Trikaya on a Balcony
They had known loss very early in their life. A sibling gone just in front of their eyes. They were wary of every moving thing, including clouds. What happened next—day after day, no agenda, not even stray thoughts—was not backstory. It was the teaching. And one morning, on a sunlit balcony, three kittens arranged themselves…
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Dilbar Coffee
Not all life lessons come from billionaires or gurus. Sometimes, they arrive in the steam of a filter coffee, brewed by a boy from Assam who failed his 10th standard—but mastered the art of filling hearts. “At Mota Bhai’s palace, Dilbar was asked to make just two cups of coffee a day. Offered double salary,…
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Kanzeon Zendo Chronicles: Eyes of Wuji … Light Seeking Eyes
What do a faded photograph from Pondicherry, a cat named Wuji, and my grandfather’s closed eyes have in common? We usually think of eyes as windows. But they are also mirrors. And sometimes, they are telescopes—aimed not at galaxies, but at grace. They are all part of a mandala of seeing—light seeking eyes, and eyes…
