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The Ketchup and the Idli: On a pizza in Ludwigsburg, a plate at T2, and the glue that holds a people together

The Ketchup and the Idli: On a pizza in Ludwigsburg, a plate at T2, and the glue that holds a people together

by | Oct 25, 2026 | Joy, Life, Meaning, Zen

Most important cultural glue is food. Then comes language. Music, arts, dress, all that comes later. I say this as a Horanadu Kannadiga who was born and brought up in the very heart of Malabar, in Kerala, and who has travelled a bit inside India and around the world. Nothing I saw on the road changed this view. Food is where a culture is practised every single day, three times a day, without anyone calling it culture. In Zen the cook of the monastery, the tenzo, is held as one of the most important persons in the whole place.

My first foreign trip was in 1996, for work, to the then newly unified Germany. Our base was a small town called Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart. Our hosts, who were also our clients, took us around Germany and Austria to introduce us to their ways. In those days there were not many Indian IT workers in Germany, not like in the USA or the UK. We were curiosities, I guess, and well looked after.

Two places I still remember. One was a Besenwirtschaft, the broomstick bar, where they serve wine made the traditional way and open only in season. A broom hung outside tells you it is open. The other was a small pizzeria run by an old Italian couple from Naples. The husband and wife were chef, server and owner, all in one.

When the pizza came, I asked for some tomato ketchup.

They did not understand. Our client from Weyerhauser translated it into German for them. And then the old man went into a rage. Something like.. nobody eats pizza with tomato ketchup. It is already made with real tomato puree. You Americans will kill the pizza. I was not even American, but that was beside the point. I sat there with my face going red, and a plate of pizza I was now afraid to touch.

I thought he was rude then. I do not think so now. A man had spent his whole life getting one thing right, and a stranger from the other side of the world wanted to cover it with a bottle of red sugar. He was not defending pizza. He was defending Naples, his mother's kitchen, everything he came from. On a plate.

Now to the other plate.

This was at T2, the Kempegowda airport in Bengaluru, a few days back. On our way to Dehradun. It is a really fancy airport. Maybe among the best designed in the world. Gardens inside the terminal, bamboo, light coming through everywhere. I have no complaint about the building.

We sat down at the Tiffin Centre and ordered what any Bengaluru person would order. One plate of idli, 3 nos. One plate of vada, again 3 nos. The bill came. Idli ₹469. Vada ₹509. With the GST, ₹1026.90. We added seventy on top by hand, since the lady who served did her job well, and made it ₹1096.

I am not going to talk about the price. An airport is an airport. I have paid worse.

When we were small, my parents moved to a small village named Thenkara. Though it was just 5 km away from the small town of Mannarkkad.. Modern times was at least 20-25 years ago. Even electricity came to our village a few years after we moved there. We had a traditional stone grinder to make idli and dosa batter. And my mother would tell us, me, my brother Sasi and sister Sandhya, it is our job to grind the batter, or she will make something else for our breakfast. That was one of the chores we had to do at home.. She would keep the rice and urad dal soaked in water.. And every 3-4 days after school hours we used to grind. Our friends out there used to urge us to come and join our evening time play.. and we were kind of torn between the need to play vs a good breakfast. Often breakfast won. No idea where the need to play is there in Maslow's hierarchy.

Vada may be a recent addition to it.. mostly to satiate the palates who are used to fried taste.. and then sambar.. it has a more colourful history.. created by a Maratha cook in Madurai for a king.. To me it remains a royal dish.. in fact my first blog was named sundaysambar.blogspot.com.. and what to say about chutneys.. South India has a million varieties of it.. It makes a neutral tasting Idli to any taste one palate craves..

But it is not just this.. the way it is served.. Idli and vadas are always served in combination.. if you walk into one of the darshinis in Blr, the question you hear is dip or separate.. what it means is whether you want your idlis and vadas in a swimming pool of sambar or you want it in a separate cup..

And much later, I landed up in Chennai after my graduation for a job. And I ended up staying quite close to Ratna Cafe at Triplicane. Which was the cafe famous for their idli and sambar. Those were the pre Murugan Idli days.. So a good idli and accompaniment is a real work of art.

One of my favourite places for idli vada sambar was and still remains Ratna Cafe in Triplicane.. Recently when I visited Chennai to attend a wedding with Thara, I sneaked out of a wedding breakfast feast and went there again.. after some 20 years.. they pour sambar into our plate from a big tumbler !

A couple of years back.. Thara and I drove all the way to Murugan Idli near Krishnagiri on the Bangalore Salem road for a plate of idli.. But at the end of it, I was left wondering whether it was worth it.. It was not really worth the hype, drive, time, petrol and money.

I will talk about the plate. The vada came on a steel plate with a piece of banana leaf on it, which was a nice thought. A steel bowl of sambar, with a lone piece of tomato floating in it like it had lost its way. The vada was crisp outside but dry and tight inside, as if the batter had been rushed. The sambar was thin and sweetish, more masala than tamarind or dal. The coconut chutney was icy cold. Not fresh enough.. I suspect it was outsourced to some eatery outside the airport and kept in their freezer, and to add to that no curry leaf, no kick, no reason to ask for a second spoon. And a fork. Yes, a fork, for idli and vada. I looked at the fork for a while. I used my fingers, of course.

A plate of idli vada with good sambar and proper chutneys is one of the cores of Bangalore in particular and Karnataka in general. It is not a snack. It is how this city says good morning. Whoever lands in this city, whether from Delhi or from Düsseldorf, should be handed that first. And if the main airport of Bengaluru cannot do justice to that plate, then for all its glass and bamboo, on that one account I rate the airport a minus.

But in this ornate airport, we were told, there is no idli vada combination.. one plate of idli : 3 nos and one plate of vada again has 3 in numbers.. It is almost to say in a Delhi food outlet, either you got to buy 3 - 4 aloo parathas or none.. ! That really touches the sensitivity of a culture.

The innocent and neutral tasting Idli has a longer history than many other dishes from anywhere in the world.. It is said to be of Indonesian origin. It is reported that WHO even termed it as one of the most perfect and healthy food combinations of carbs and proteins. (though I could not get any citations!) No idea how did our ancestors arrive at that ratio.. and ingredients.. A long time back, the words carbs and proteins were part of the language... The right ratio of rice and urad dal.. grinding it to a certain perfection.. and then let it ferment overnight. Then steam it..

After I moved to Zendo, my younger son brought to my notice an Alan Watts quote on instant coffee, from The Way of Zen. It went like this, "Instant coffee, for example, is a well-deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.".. Soon, we started using an old brass South Indian coffee filter and started experimenting with different estate coffee. We have found out that coffee grown in upper Chikmagalur has the best taste. What is the relevance is, the idli served at the T2 airport cafe was made of rava. That kind of short circuits the whole process of adding goodness to a piece of idli.

And then, sitting there with the fork in my hand, I heard the old man from Naples.

Thirty years later, here I was, the one in the rage. Quietly, because I am a Zen teacher now and we are trained to rage quietly, but a rage all the same. Nobody eats idli with a fork. It is already made with fermented rice and urad. You airports will kill the idli.

So it turns out I was not far from that old Neapolitan after all. Everyone has a plate they will defend. Mine happens to have a hole in the middle of the vada.

Dogen wrote a whole text about the tenzo. The way he looks at it, how you wash the rice is not different from how you sit. I did not understand that when I was young. I understand it a little better now, thanks to a pizza and a plate at T2. Food is the place where care is visible. Or where its absence is.

I do not think the people at T2 mean any harm. Perhaps nobody there has ever eaten that plate at six in the morning in a small Bengaluru darshini, standing, with a hot steel tumbler of filter coffee. If you have not eaten it that way, you cannot serve it that way. That is how culture gets lost. Not by anybody killing it. Just by people serving what they have never tasted.

I hope the old couple in Ludwigsburg did not leave that day thinking Indians were barbarians. And I hope somebody, someday, stands in the kitchen of T2 and says to the cook, just once, with some love and some rage.. no. Not like this.

Still Water and Ice: On Memory

Still Water and Ice: On Memory

by | Oct 8, 2026 | Life, Peace, Zen

Uncommon understanding

Feynman is supposed to have said, imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.. Well, that is memory. The thing being remembered has feelings, and so does the one remembering.

Unlike common understanding, human memory is not like memory stored in silicon chips in computers.. To start with, our memory is not created completely from the outside in.  Our past memories and mindset molds and filters  are already at work, actively shaping how we perceive the present, and so they shape the very memory that is being created .And then, every single time we think about something, it gets overwritten.. a new version takes its place. The oldest memories are often the most edited ones, simply because we have revisited them the most.

Memory is not a chip

A chip returns the same bytes every time, faithful but lifeless. Human memory is alive, and that is exactly why it is unreliable. The past is not a file but living tissue, constantly re-stitched with present mood, need, and the shape of who I think I am. That is why two people who stood in the same room can carry such different memories of it.. they are not remembering the same room, they are inhabiting different rooms.

What this means for those who help

One of the biggest mistakes coaches and counselors make is to buy into the content of what a client recalls as their past traumas.. not doubting the pain, which is real, but treating the story as a faithful record when it has been re-stitched many times over. That is where the third wave therapy systems like ACT work better.. They work on the relationship we have with those memories and feelings, and are not so worried about the actual content of it.

It is really a travesty that Adler, who stood with Freud and Jung as one of the three founders of depth psychology, did not get the prominence he deserved.. He held that we are shaped not by what happened to us but by the meaning we give it, and to my mind his theories just blow away the other two.

Which brings me to Frankl, who began in Adler's circle in Vienna before going his own way.. He saw the three great Viennese schools as the will to pleasure, the will to power, and the will to meaning, and he placed his own logotherapy at the end of that line. The distinction is valid, I think, though Adler was subtler than the label suggests. In his mature work the striving for significance was tied to social interest, to contributing to others, and that is already very close to meaning. So can we consider meaning as power? I would say yes, but power to rather than power over. Meaning is what lets us respond to what has happened instead of being merely shaped by it. It gives back agency where circumstances give none, and that was Frankl's whole witness from the camps.. in the words of Nietzsche that he loved to quote, he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. But Frankl would resist calling it power in the usual sense. Meaning has to be found in something beyond oneself, and the moment we chase it as a way to feel stronger, it slips away, the way happiness does when we chase it. Used as a tool for self-enhancement, it slides right back into the will to power.

Still water and ice

This post began with a question from an HR professional, who asked how I would coach someone who is very difficult, but carries a high level of composure. The answer that came to mind at once was the Zen difference between still water and ice. This is what I shared : "In Zen we say a still mind is like still water: it reflects the moon exactly as it is. Ice is still too, but it distorts the moon, and it cannot flow. Some composure is presence; some is ice, a frozen stance that can show up as stubbornness or quiet resistance. And only genuine warmth melts ice."

 Remembering is moving water, but then it is poured through the mould of a frozen view.. who I am, who wronged me, what that moment meant. The water comes out in the shape of the mould, and then we call the shape "what happened". The mould is selfing: I am the one wronged, the one who succeeded, the one who failed.

The molds and filters in our mind, which convert the reality of the flowing water out there into experience, are our memory.. our nurture. And this is a different concept, at a higher level. When we are born, tabula rasa, we do not have these molds and templates to crystallize the reality that pours in. It is nurture that creates them, the molds, the filters and the templates. and we never meet the water as it is, only as it has been shaped on its way in.

Zen's contribution here is not to make memory more accurate. It is to notice the freezing. Zazen does not stop memories from arising. It stops the immediate freezing.. the instant story, verdict, identity.

Even meaning can freeze, and this is where Zen has a caution to offer.. A story like "this suffering was for a reason" or "it all happened to make me who I am" can become one more mould that we pour experience through, and then we mistake the shape for the truth. Meaning held like that is ice, a verdict arrived at in advance. The meaning worth having is closer to still water.. a responsiveness in the moment, a willingness to ask again, each time, what this situation is calling for from me, and to let the answer be different tomorrow. Held lightly, meaning gives us the power to respond. Held tightly, it becomes one more way of being fixed.

Letting go is not forgetting

This is not only theory for me. I am currently reading The Courage to Be Disliked, the very first book I have read on Adler's way of psychology, and around the same time Fr. AMA wrote to me that unless I let go of my past, with its bitterness, resentment and anger, I would not be able to teach. According to him, letting go does not mean forgetting. It means having a better relationship with it.. much the way ACT puts it.

I find that I can now read his words differently. The book argues that we are not caused by our past but live by the purposes we choose now, and it goes so far as to say that trauma does not exist. I would not go that far. The hurt was real, and pretending otherwise would only freeze it harder. What can change is the mould I pour it through. Bitterness held as a verdict about who I am and who wronged me is ice. The same feeling met with awareness, allowed to arise and pass, is still water. A teacher does not need an unmarked past. The task is not to teach from the wound, and not to push it away either.. just to stop letting it decide how the present gets shaped.

In fact, a teacher who has suffered, lost, and rebuilt is often more useful than one who has never been touched by fire. One's healed wound is the most sacred credential. A wound is raw and bleeding. It demands attention. It says: 'Look at what happened to me. Look at what they did.' A scar is healed. It remembers. It even tells the story. But it no longer bleeds. It no longer runs the present. It is simply part of the landscape of the body — a mark of survival.

The book has another idea that has stayed with me, the separation of tasks. How others see me, judge me or remember me is their task. What I do with my own practice and my teaching is mine. That, perhaps, is the courage to be disliked. to let others hold their memories of me as they will, and to keep my own water still.

A dew drop and the moon

Still water, even a dew drop of it, reflects the moon as it is. Dōgen says in the Genjōkōan that the whole moon and the entire sky are held in a single drop on a blade of grass. Reflection needs no storage, and leaves nothing behind to be edited. Ice distorts.

Perhaps this is what zazen trains us in.. to see without instantly freezing what is seen into a story to be filed away.

So when a two-liner arrives from the one who pointed to the way.. “Go and teach with what you have and what I gave you. Blessings”.. that is the true dew drop on the tip of the grass. Nothing stored in it, nothing to edit, and the whole moon is there.

And I can see the full moon hovering over the Perumalmalai hills.

In Gasshō,

 Vishy Sankara (Shizenkara)

Zen Followership Program…

Zen Followership Program…

by | Sep 30, 2026 | Leadershipwithintegrity, Life, Livingwithawareness, Management, Peace, Uncategorized, Wisdom, Zen

There is no leadership program in Zen. There is only a followership one: following one's true self. Again that following stops the moment, when we realise there is nothing to follow. Following and being followed is not one or not two.

That sounds weird until you see where it actually begins. It doesn't begin with vision, strategy, or mindset. It begins with the body and the breath. The old teachers called these the sanchō, the three adjustments of zazen. First comes chōshin, settling the body: a stable seat, a straight spine, grounded and at ease. Then comes chōsoku, letting the breath find its own natural rhythm. Only then does chōshin, the settling of the mind, arrive. It sounds the same as the first, but it is written with a different character. And it doesn't arrive because we worked on the mind directly. It arrives because the body and the breath have made room for it. Stillness and space open up by themselves.

The sanchō are not three techniques to master. They are a sequence of allowing. Body first. Breath second. Mind third. That order is the whole teaching. Try to settle the mind first and you usually just add tension to tension: more effort, more analysis, more self-monitoring. Most leadership development does exactly that. It starts at step three, trying to fix thinking with more thinking, more frameworks, more content, and then wonders why clarity feels manufactured. It is a little like rearranging furniture in a house with no foundation.

Last year, after the Zen in Action online program, I wanted to organise a 10 day Zen leadership program at the Zendo. I showed the marketing flier to Fr. AMA. He took the pencil, crossed it out, and said, "Just say a Zen meditation program for 10 days. Nothing else." He told me that in Zen schools in Japan, for the first six months, the teacher makes the student focus only on breathing. Only breathing. Nothing else. At the Zendo too, he made me sit in zazen and focus on breathing, and he made me do samu, before asking me to give introductory teishos for sesshins. I was in a hurry. He always slowed me down.

A knowledge dump, however sacred or ancient, doesn't help with the three adjustments. "Ettile pasu pullu thinnilla" is a popular Malayalam saying: the cow on a printed page does not eat grass. Zen has its own version. In the Gabyō (Painted Rice Cake) fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō, written in 1242, Dōgen starts from an old saying attributed to Xiangyan Zhixian: "A painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger." Xiangyan reached for it when his book learning failed him. Then Dōgen turns the saying around: "There is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake." The words do feed you, but only when they are lived in the body rather than recited.

You can quote Dōgen perfectly and still be bracing your shoulders, holding your breath, performing calm. Borrowed insight easily becomes one more thing to perform or defend. In front of a teacher, and in front of a team, it shows at once. Here is a practical test: in a high stakes meeting, can you feel your feet, let the exhale finish, and not speak from the first reactive impulse? If not, no framework will save the moment. If yes, strategy has a foundation. This doesn't dismiss vision or strategy. It puts them second to embodiment. A settled mind can use frameworks. A scattered mind is used by them.

So following your true self isn't a vague ideal. It can be trained, and it is concrete. It is not following the ego's story, preferences, or brand. It is following what remains when body, breath, and mind are no longer at war. That self doesn't need to be promoted. It is already present. From it come the clarity, presence, and steadiness that everyone hopes leadership programs will produce. Leadership then becomes less a role and more an effect: steadiness, non-reactivity, the ability to be in a room without immediately needing to fill it.

Perhaps that is the real leadership lesson from the zafu and zabuton. Learn to follow first. Follow the body. Follow the breath. Follow the stillness that opens when you stop abandoning yourself. People don't follow titles, not in the deepest sense. They follow that steadiness, or they don't need to.

Too Cool for Nine to Five : Dharma Journey of the Ordinary 10

Too Cool for Nine to Five : Dharma Journey of the Ordinary 10

by | Sep 19, 2026 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Meditation, Peace, STRESS, Wisdom, Zen

The very first metro of the day is a different creature from the ones that come after it.

I was on it that Thursday, on my way to meet KC and George for the Virajpet trip. Almost empty coach. The kind of quiet Namma Metro never has once the city wakes up. A young man got in a few stations later and sat across from me, laptop bag between his feet, and his T-shirt said, in a careful embroidered hand — Too cool for nine to five.

I read it twice. Then I did the thing I do, which is to sit with it instead of reaching for my phone to type in my random non thoughts.

I have never been cool. But I have been a long way from nine to five, and I found myself, somewhere between Majestic and the Kengeri Metro station, in Kanzeon again.

The day there started at 3:45. Not 3:45 as an idea — 3:45 as a bell, in the dark, with the waterfall already going. On most days there would be a mail from Fr. AMA timed at around 3:10 am. Then it was time to get ready for Zazen. Bhim slept inside the room only when it was too cold, or when Perumalmalai came under a blanket of mist for two or three days after a storm. He never understood why humans would get up before the birds do. After the early morning Zazen, whatever the day had decided for me, which was never something I had decided for myself. Book editing, writing, answering email queries from visitors and sangha members, cleaning, cooking, sitting, the small endless jobs of keeping a Zendo alive, sitting again, Bhim watching all of it with his usual lack of interest. The day ended when I was dead tired, which was the only clock that mattered by then. And many a time a coaching client of mine would call in late. I could not say no to that, because that was pocket money for Manu and Rishi. Three and a half years of that. Full time student, and assistant to a master who did not consult my preferences.

Nobody would put that on a T-shirt.

And yet, sitting across from that boy, I wasn't feeling superior. I was feeling wistful. Which surprised me, because by any honest count Kanzeon was a much worse deal than nine to five. Longer hours. No pay. No weekend. And here I was, missing it.

There is a Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, who wrote a small book called The Burnout Society. His argument is simple and it has stayed with me. Older societies ran on "you must." The boss, the church, the rules, the clock. Ours runs on "you can, you could." Anything is possible, your best life is still out there, unlived, so get on with it. Nobody is standing over you anymore. You are standing over yourself. Han calls it self-exploitation, and says it is more efficient than any master could ever be, because there is no one left to rebel against. The whip and the back it lands on belong to the same person.

That boy on the metro was free. Free of the boss, free of the clock, on the first train of the day with his work on his shoulder. He will be at it long after five, I suspect. Not because anyone told him to. Because he can. And because he is not free from himself.

Here is what I didn't understand when I was in Kanzeon and only understood on that train.

The 3:45 bell was a "you must." The schedule was a "you must." The master was, most definitely, a "you must." And somehow that rested me. When the han sounds you don't decide anything. You get up. When the bell rings you sit. When the food comes you eat it. There is nothing to optimise, nobody to impress, no better version of the morning you could have had if only you had tried harder. The form holds you, so you don't have to hold yourself. For three and a half years the boss inside me — the one that has run my life since school, the one that never once said well done — had nothing to do. He came along, of course. He sat behind me in the zendo for the first few months, telling me my posture was poor and my breath was wrong and everyone else was getting it faster. And then one day, I couldn't tell you which, he went quiet. Not defeated. Just — unemployed.

Baizhang, the old Chinese master, had a rule for his monastery. A day without work is a day without food. People read that as harshness. I read it now as kindness. He was handing his monks a "you must" so that the "you can" could finally shut up.

I was tired at Kanzeon in a way I have not been tired since. It was the tiredness of a body that has done what the day asked and is now done. Han has a phrase for the other kind — the tiredness of the achievement society, which he says is a lonely tiredness, one that separates. And he has a phrase for the first kind too. A tiredness that trusts the world.

That is what I was missing on the metro. Not the Zendo. The trust.

The boy got off at the same station I did. Laptop bag, long stride, already somewhere else in his head. I hope he finds a bell one day. Something outside himself that says, this and not that, now and not later, enough and not more. It doesn't have to be a Zendo. It can be a dog who needs walking at seven, when the sun starts smiling at the birds. It can be a stream that has no name and no opinion about your quarterly targets.

Even Bhim, my Zendog master, had a bell. He never heard it as one. He got up when the birds did, ate when the bowl came, slept when the mist rolled in. He didn't need a bell. He was the bell. The highest form of spirituality is when one is the act itself. Bhim never knew that. That is how I know he had it.

I used to think form was the opposite of freedom. Three and a half years of a schedule I didn't write taught me the other way round. The boss inside treats everything as a means. Sit so you'll be calmer, work so you'll be free, and the end is always one more effort away. The bell doesn't work like that. It asks for the sitting, and the sitting is the whole of it. There is a difference between means and ends. When the means and the end are one, that is when the must starts working for you, instead of you working for it.

I still get up early. Old habits. But nobody rings a bell anymore, and I notice the difference.

Here is the thing under the thing. Most of us live with some end in mind. A better job, a calmer mind, a version of ourselves that hasn't arrived yet. Then we put our striving to work as the means of getting there. It doesn't matter much whether the striving says "you must" or "you can." Once it is a means to somewhere else, it has a boss, and the boss is us. That is how the oppressor and the oppressed end up being one person. Zen has only one thing to say about this, and it says it flatly. The means is the end. You do zazen for the sake of doing zazen. Not to become calm, not to become wise, not to become anything. Becoming always lives in the future. Keep your eyes on who you are becoming and you will never once be here, in any of the nows you actually get. The bell at Kanzeon never once asked what my sitting was for. That is why it rested me. There was nowhere the morning was trying to get to.

On those mornings I sit anyway. Not because I can.

Because I must. And that, it turns out, is the freer of the two.

The Distance They Built On Purpose — For the Silence in Our Minds…

The Distance They Built On Purpose — For the Silence in Our Minds…

by | Sep 12, 2026 | Change, Experience, Harmony, Life, Meditation, Peace, Wisdom, Zen

One of my coaching clients is a high-flyer in the corporate world. He often calls me on his way to the airport, or while waiting for take-off, when there's something important he wants to discuss between our scheduled sessions. I've often sensed he doesn't want to let a single waking moment go unproductive. In many of our calls, we end up discussing strategies for doing less—so that he can carve out some stillness in his workday. But for him, it has been genuinely difficult to let go of his old ways of working.

That struggle came to mind recently when somebody shared the reason why arrival gates were moved so far from baggage claim in airports. It was based on research done at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Passengers only took a minute to walk from the gate to baggage claim, then waited seven more minutes for their bags — and complaints kept pouring in even after wait times were reduced. So the airport moved the gates farther away and routed bags to the outermost carousel. The total time to get your bags stayed the same, but now most of it was spent walking instead of standing still. Complaints dropped to near zero. Now several airports design around that insight.

The essence: human beings attribute silence and waiting to being unproductive, of no value — and any action, any time-filler, to being productive, even when nothing has actually changed. The mind doesn't measure what happened. It measures what it was busy doing while it happened. That is the business of busy-ness. Especially in this attention economy.

This is, in some ways, exactly what Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action bets against. KZD is a year-long online circle of twelve — a small mandala of practice, not a retreat weekend — built around the Enso, the single unbroken brushstroke Zen uses to picture wholeness. Twelve people, twelve months, twelve Petals, each carrying its own Mirror Text and Practice Gate, moving through three Arcs: rooting the self, embodying the heart, and finally glimpsing what Zen calls the liberating view. Nothing about it is designed to feel like a workshop. It is designed to feel like a year — which is precisely where it runs headlong into the Houston problem.

I feel this reflects in the cohort members' responses to this long-drawn course as well. Everyone looks forward to jam-packed, wisdom-per-minute, high-energy sessions over a weekend or three-four days. But when the learning is spread over a year, with enough time in between for silence and reflection, people feel it isn't productive for them. Even if the whole journey is designed to unearth their own wisdom within themselves. Nothing is technically missing in those quiet stretches — the walk is happening either way — but because it isn't dressed up as motion, it doesn't register as progress. That's an indicator of how modern capitalism has conditioned human beings — we've learned to trust the walk and distrust the wait, even when the wait is where the actual work is being done. Most people don't realise this until they're inside a year long practice — the discomfort isn't from lack of progress, but from lack of visible motion.

When François, a French martial artist, who had spent some 2 decades in China and Japan to perfect his Taichi, took 3-4 weeks to teach us Wuji, the empty stance before our Taichi steps began. Whenever he noticed a frustrated face in our small Taichi class at the Zendo, he used to tell us, unless we learn to stand still, we won't learn to move in Taichi. And for those who are used to the busy-ness of life's business, it gets very tough to still body and mind. Once when I asked him, if this suited a slow motion exercise system like Taichi, he spoke about Taiki-Ken, which is similarly foundational for Kung fu practitioners. That entire system is built on the foundation of Ritsu-zen (立禅, "standing Zen"). And it is not a warm-up before the "real" training.

And it is not about standing still. Serious Zen practitioners move from active breath practices in Zazen, to Shikantaza (just sitting) to sit without doing anything particular. Not even with an intent to meditate within a Zendo. In fact, in Zen traditions, there's a word for this: boketto—the practice of gazing at nothing in particular, unfocused, with no goal attached to the looking. It cannot be optimised or performed for anyone watching. Which is precisely why it's so hard to sell to a mind trained to only trust what looks like effort. Boketto is what a yearlong mandala quietly trains — the ability to stay with the space where nothing seems to be happening.

Alan Watts made a similar point in Still the Mind — a mind that never stops thinking has nothing left to think about except itself. There is no room left for anything else to land, not even the world as it actually is. François was training the body to make that room. Boketto trains the eyes to do the same. The mind has always been the last student in that class.

Lao Tzu saw this before airports existed. Thirty spokes meet at a hub, he wrote in the Tao Te Ching's eleventh verse, but it's the hollow center — the part with nothing in it — that lets the wheel actually turn. A vessel is shaped from clay, yet its usefulness lives in the emptiness it holds. A room is cut out of walls with doors and windows, and the room becomes liveable only because of the space that isn't wall. Being gives us the form, he says, but non-being is what we use.

It's the same grammar as silence between notes making the music, the space between bars holding up the song, the window being nothing but a hole that lets the house breathe. We keep admiring the spokes, the clay, the wall — the visible, countable, fundable parts — and forget that none of it works without the hollow at the centre.

Most transformation programs are like 2-minute instant noodles — a packaged, guided tour for those who want instant nirvana. But does it work like that? There are no quick fixes to integrate our shadow and steady the inner life thru stilling the mind. It takes a consistent practice in building our awareness and presence. In fact, after the great success of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one habit that got conditioned, is to have a number of steps/processes for anything and everything in life. Life does not work that way. While there are great similarities and commonalities across all human lives, there is a uniqueness too. The first step in our own transformational journey is to be aware of that uniqueness within ourselves. Where Buddha differentiated himself from others is his realisation about this. Appo Deepo Bhava seems to be his greatest teaching. His own way of saluting his students, Kalyana Mitra has modern resonance in the Irish word of Anamcara pal.

A year-long practice runs on exactly that natural principle. The Petals are the spokes. The time of unscheduled quiet between them is the hub. You cannot wipe blood clean with more blood. And there's no way to find that inner silence and stillness in our minds by adding more thoughts — however sacred they sound, however ancient they are.

Cohort 2 of Kokoro-Zen-Do in Action opens later this year, beginning late November — for anyone ready to walk a year built around the hub instead of the spokes. Write to me at vishy.sankara@kokorozendo.life — start with one thing you're trying to slow down.

Being-Time and the Logged Second…

Being-Time and the Logged Second…

by | Sep 4, 2026 | Career, Life, Public Policy, STRESS, Technology, Transformation, Trust

Spirituality isn't about the afterlife.

It's about learning to live — and live right — here, while we're here. Fr. AMA used to say it comes down to having a healthy, balanced relationship with Power, Money, and Sex. Often he'd add: it starts from Sex, Power, Money, in that order. I've started adding Time to the list now. The first three, at least conceptually, are easy enough to get a handle on. Time is not.

Just 2 days ago, a friend and erstwhile colleague, in a WhatsApp group posted about binge-watching OTT to kill time, and not remembering any of it the next day — so he said he wasn't the right person to give suggestions.

 I replied: You don't have to kill time. It dies by itself. Time doesn't need our help — it's the ultimate self-destructing entity. Every second we try to "kill" is already a corpse by the time we take aim. 🙂

And thinking about it more — if time is already dead by the time we aim at it, there was no marksman either. Just the aiming-thought arising and passing, like everything else. That's the trick nobody tells you about time. You can hoard money, misuse power, indulge or repress desire — all of these hold still enough to be gripped, negotiated with, renounced. Time was never there to be gripped. It's gone in the reaching.

The great Zen Master Dogen never wrote a book on money or power. He wrote one on time — Uji, being-time — because this is the subtlest of the four. Firewood doesn't become ash, he said. Firewood has its own before and after; ash has its own before and after. The moment doesn't survive into the next moment to be spent or saved or killed. Each moment is already complete, disclosing the whole of being-time in itself.

Which is what made my friend's reply the more interesting koan, more than the binge-watching itself. Not remembering any of it the next day — that's not a confession of failed willpower. It's a fairly precise report of time passing with no witness built around it. No thread laid down. Could be dissociation — going out the back door. Or, minus the noticing, it could be close to what Dogen is pointing at — time occurring with nothing accumulating. Same shape from outside. Not the same from inside. Worth asking him — not as correction, but as a real question — was he absent, or just unaccumulating? Those look identical the next morning. They are not the same door.

And then this morning, a colleague from twenty years ago — we were on the same team once — shares this: Wipro deploys real-time productivity monitoring tool for employees. Wipro. A place I “worked” quite a number of time years, across three separate stints.

TimeScope, they're calling it. Rolled out to 5,000 employees in May, now expanding — fixed-price teams, billable roles, support functions, even people on the bench. It watches login duration, periods of inactivity, time spent inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Chrome. If there's no evidence of login on a working day, leave gets deducted. You can contest it, they say. They also say it isn't tracking keystrokes or screen content — just presence. Just whether you were, provably, there.

I read that and thought: this is the exact inversion of what I wrote to my friend two days ago.

I told him time doesn't need killing — it dies by itself, it's already a corpse by the time you take aim. TimeScope needs the opposite to be true. It needs time to be a substance that can be caught being wasted. It needs the murder weapon and the body, because without evidence of the kill, they dock your leave. It is institutionalising the very delusion my one-liner was trying to dissolve — that time is something you can hoard, spend, or be caught not spending, rather than something already gone in the reaching.

And of course it isn't really about time. It never is. This is Power and Money borrowing Time's clothes — a dashboard is Power, a xxx-basis-point margin drop is Money — dressed up as neutral, technical measurement so it doesn't have to announce itself as what it actually is: surveillance wearing a lab coat. With Sex, Power, Money, you can at least see the greed plainly when someone's caught in it. With Time, the greed gets to disguise itself as efficiency, as data, as fairness — "we're not accusing you, the dashboard is just telling us the truth."

A dashboard on every login gap. Different scale, same species of attention — the gaze that can only trust what it can measure, turned on something that was never suited to being measured that way. Thirty years, three stints — and this is where the place has arrived. Not because anyone there is evil. Because margin pressure, like every hungry ghost, eventually runs out of everything else to extract, and starts extracting your presence itself, second by logged second. By the way the  hungry ghost is a Buddhist legend — beings with tiny mouths and enormous stomachs, never satisfied. That's not demonisation. That's diagnosis.

And that is diagnosing a civilisational confusion.  In my view, we have mistaken the measurable for the real. We have mistaken logged presence for lived presence.

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