u/Desperate_Web_7639

Last year i spent a couple of days somewhere I could just walk barefoot on soil the whole time. not some beach or the sand, the actual dirt. And something happens to your body after the first day of that, you feel sturdier, somehow more grounded, literally! not in the yoga-instagram way, in the actual physical way - like your legs remember they're supposed to be connected to something.

I've never felt that from a gym or a walk while wearing shoes. I don't know if anyone can relate, anyway, it's a very specific, very quiet kind of strength and i think most of us have just never had the chance to feel it because we live our whole lives one inch above the ground, but in shoes, on tiles, and in cars.

I bring this up because i was reading through Isha's annual report (Anukampa 2025, if anyone wants to look), and there's a whole section on the global Soil crisis and the language they use isn't soft. They call it Soil Extinction and say it's already causing hunger, violence, poverty and death in parts of the world, and that we're a few decades from a point where topsoil isn't just a renewable resource anymore at the rate we're degrading it. Sadhguru's line in there is "when we destroy the soil, we are destroying future life." which sure sounds dramatic until you remember every single calorie every human has ever eaten came from about six inches of that dirt that took thousands of years to form and that we're currently burning through like it's an inexhaustible resource that we invented!

But whats most interesting to me is that the same report, describing this campaign to save the most basic non-negotiable physical thing underneath all of human civilization, reads exactly like a startup pitch deck! 4.1 billion people reached. 132 million trees planted. An app that got a million downloads in 15 hours and "beat ChatGPT's record." 6.1 billion video views. Trillions of liters of rainfall interception "potential created"...... every single initiative, no matter how sacred or slow or rooted it's supposed to be, gets run through the same machine and comes out the other side as a growth metric and i don't actually think that's a criticism of this specific organisation, because from what i can tell the on-ground work is real, farmers are actually getting their land back, kids are actually going to school.

The point I'm trying to make is - this is the only playbook left! even the people trying to undo the damage from a civilization that optimized everything into a number; have no other language available to them to describe success. You cannot pitch a slow humble decades-long relationship with dirt to donors and governments and media cycles, you have to turn it into a stat that beats another stat. The cure has to borrow the grammar of the disease just to get funded.

So my question for this sub is actually this - is that just how it has to be? is quantifying compassion the unavoidable price of doing anything at scale in a world this size now, and we should just let it happen because at least the soil gets saved either way? or is the fact that we can't even talk about saving soil without a leaderboard the actual proof of how deep the sickness goes, that we've lost the ability to value anything that can't be measured, including the thing measuring is slowly killing?
Don't know where I land on this one..... curious what you all think

I watched an interview with a major Indian billionaire recently. The interviewer asked him a simple question: when you already have everything - money, fame, power, status - what is your aspiration of still keep going?

His answer was basically this - success is like a drug. Once you get the high, you want more of it. Everyone treated it like wisdom.

A man with more wealth and influence than most people can even imagine openly described his ambition like an addiction, and nobody seemed disturbed Should someone who admits that “enough” does not exist for him be allowed to shape the lives of millions of people?

Because this is not just some personal motivational line. When an ordinary person is addicted to something, the damage usually stays around them. When a billionaire is addicted to growth, expansion, valuation, dominance, and the next high of success, entire markets feel it. Employees feel it. Consumers feel it. Cities feel it. Families feel it. The culture itself starts bending around that addiction.

If a poor man says he cannot stop chasing the next high, we call it a problem. If a billionaire says the same thing in a boardroom or interview, we call it a drive. We put him on magazine covers. We ask young people to learn from him. We turn his compulsion into a leadership lesson.

But addiction does not become noble just because it is profitable.

At some point, we need to ask what kind of people we have handed the future to. These are not calm, fulfilled, wise people who reached the top and then asked, “How can I reduce harm?” Many of them are people who have more than any human being needs and are still restless, hungry, chasing....still unable to stop!

And the rest of us are expected to admire that?!

We are told this is ambition, that this is entrepreneurship. But look closely and it often looks like a very old human sickness: not having enough.

That sickness becomes dangerous when it gets power. Because a person who cannot feel enough will never build a world where others can feel enough either. He will build systems that keep everyone chasing. More work. More consumption. More screens. More loans. More upgrades. More output. More anxiety. More comparison. More of everything except peace.

And then they call it progress.

This is why I no longer buy the myth that the world is run by “visionaries.” A lot of the world is run by addicts. Growth is the drug. Valuation is the scoreboard. Human life is the raw material.

The most dangerous person is not always the person who wants too little.

Sometimes it is the person who has everything, admits that nothing will ever be enough, and is still celebrated as the kind of person who should decide what happens next.

About some Fifteen odd days ago, my grandmother passed away.

She was technically my mother’s aunt, but she helped raise my mother. She was like a mother to her. And in the long, slow days of mourning rituals since, I've watched my own certainties about life quietly come apart. Death does one thing that modern life works very hard to prevent - it makes the fake parts of life visible.

For a few days, the phone, the work, the money, the deadlines, the notifications, the performance of being productive - all of it starts looking like what it actually is - scaffolding. Not the building. Pretending to be the real thing.

The people running the world have built entire empires on making sure we never get enough silence to see this.

Social media did not connect us. It gave us a machine that simulates connection while making people more alone and anxious and more measurable, more addicted, and more profitable. A teenager today can reach a thousand people instantly and still have nobody to call at 3 am; that is not connection! That is a system failure being sold as progress.

And the worst part is that the people who built this were certain it was the right thing to do.

Certain that more engagement meant more meaning. More screen time meant more value. They thought if a number went up, the world got better. They never accounted for the damage. They never had to live inside the loneliness they manufactured.

That is the cruelty of scale.

The people making these decisions are protected from the consequences of their own certainty. They do not feel the mental health collapse, the isolation and what it does to ordinary people when every human experience is turned into content, data, output, branding, or consumption.

They call it innovation.

It is just extraction with better vocabulary.

We keep pretending that intelligence is enough. It is not. Intelligence without humility is one of the most dangerous things on Earth. A very smart person who is completely sure of themselves can do more damage than a stupid person ever could.

After my grandmother’s death, I think of this quite often. Standing near death, you understand how little we actually know. You understand that life is fragile, brief, mysterious, and not something to be optimised like an app. But the most powerful people alive seem to have lost that basic humility. They look at human beings and see users. They look at attention and see inventory. They look at loneliness and see a market.

Collapse does not always look like fire, floods, or war.

Sometimes collapse looks like billions of people connected to everyone and known by no one, children growing up with metrics instead of meaning! Adults unable to sit alone with themselves for five minutes. It looks like a civilisation so impressed by its own technology that it forgets to ask whether any of this is making us more human.

My grandmother’s death reminded me that the most real things in life are still the oldest things -- love, grief, presence, care, humility, silence. Somehow, many "users" in the world think all of them as interruptions.

Scary to think of this!

Not that the world is being destroyed by evil people. That would be easier to understand.

Whats scary is that it is being destroyed by people who are absolutely certain they are helping!

I recently heard Jeff Bezos say something to the effect that this is the best time to start a company because of AI and technological advancement, and in the narrowest possible sense, he may be right.

For capital, for scale, for people who know how to convert every new disruption into leverage, this may genuinely be the best time. But the disturbing thing is: best time for what, and for whom? Every serious technology arrives with the promise of making life better, but most of the time it does not arrive in a life-oriented way. It arrives as acceleration. It arrives as productivity. It arrives as “efficiency.” It arrives as another way to make fewer people do more work, faster, under more pressure, while calling that progress.

Business was created for the well-being of human beings. Human beings were not created for the well-being of Business ~ SG

What feels insane to me is that we still talk about business as if it is some sacred thing that human beings must adapt themselves around. We behave as if human life exists for the well-being of companies, markets, platforms, and investors, when it was supposed to be the other way around. Business was created for the well-being of human beings. Technology was supposed to serve life. But somewhere along the way, the servant became the master, and now every new invention is judged by whether it can scale, monetize, replace, optimize, or dominate.

And still we call this winning. Better founder, better worker, better machine, better than the person next to us. But what exactly are we winning? If life is a race, then the finish line has always been death. That has never been hidden from us. Death has been the one honest fact in the room from the beginning. And somehow, even with that fact staring at us every day, we have built a civilization that still does not seem to understand what life is for.

I have a cousin sister doing her bachelor's in psychology. She is genuinely worried. She thinks people are already replacing therapy with AI chatbots, and AI doesn't actually fix your mental health. It validates you, it gives you nice words and makes you feel heard without making you well.

And if we assume that AI just tells you what you want to hear, it could keep you comfortable inside patterns that are slowly destroying you.

But here's my counterpoint - I say this from personal experience:

Talking to an AI helped me see certain things differently. Not because it validated me - but because it gave me a perspective I wasn't able to get to on my own. Sometimes what you need isn't a clinical diagnosis. Sometimes you just need something to shift your angle of view. And AI can do that at 2am for free without a long waiting list, its not expensive on your pocket.

But it is trained on data and it has no real and lived pain as a human would have. If we assume that at the end of the day it is not adding any real value to you as a psychologist but only just playing it smart to seem like one, then it is even delaying you getting a real professional opinion and biggest of all there is a lack of accountability, but its available 24/7 at no cost, makes zero judgement about you and offers you privacy and it can shift you perspective about something quite powerfully. It would reach people who'd never see a psychologist.

After all mental health is something that is a real concern for many and in today's world addressing human being's mental health and issues regarding their well-being is the most important work that needs to happen. People address this through spirituality, through Yoga, meditation, exercise, basically everyone wants to be healthy.

"True health fundamentally means to be in tune with nature, both inner and outer." ~ Sadhguru

I have a cousin sister doing her bachelor's in psychology. She is genuinely worried. She thinks people are already replacing therapy with AI chatbots, and AI doesn't actually fix your mental health. It validates you, it gives you nice words and makes you feel heard without making you well.

And if we assume that AI just tells you what you want to hear, it could keep you comfortable inside patterns that are slowly destroying you.

But here's my counterpoint - I say this from personal experience:

Talking to an AI helped me see certain things differently. Not because it validated me - but because it gave me a perspective I wasn't able to get to on my own. Sometimes what you need isn't a clinical diagnosis. Sometimes you just need something to shift your angle of view. And AI can do that at 2am for free without a long waiting list, its not expensive on your pocket.

But it is trained on data and it has no real and lived pain as a human would have. If we assume that at the end of the day it is not adding any real value to you as a psychologist but only just playing it smart to seem like one, then it is even delaying you getting a real professional opinion and biggest of all there is a lack of accountability, but its available 24/7 at no cost, makes zero judgement about you and offers you privacy and it can shift you perspective about something quite powerfully. It would reach people who'd never see a psychologist.

After all mental health is something that is a real concern for many and in today's world addressing human being's mental health and issues regarding their well-being is the most important work that needs to happen. People address this through spirituality, through Yoga, meditation, exercise, basically everyone wants to be healthy.

"True health fundamentally means to be in tune with nature, both inner and outer." ~ Sadhguru

When I was younger, falling sick meant good food and home remedies and the body would find its way back, and I remember being able to eat pears or guavas for most of a day and feel genuinely nourished by them, the kind of nourishment that actually reached somewhere deep and the body knew it and responded to it, but now when I buy the same fruit from anywhere other than a very specific place I have learned to trust, there is a real chance that what I am eating has so many pesticides and insecticides in it that instead of recovering I will feel worse, and I think about that sometimes - that the most basic thing a human body has always been able to do, which is eat simple food and heal, is becoming something that requires research and caution and the right vendor and even then you are not entirely sure.

That is not nostalgia. That is a biological warning dressed as a personal inconvenience.

Nearly 95% of our food comes from soil, yet up to 40% of the world's land is already degraded, and 673 million people faced hunger in 2024 while acute food insecurity hit more than 295 million people across 53 countries, and none of that is a future crisis waiting to happen, it is collapse happening in slow motion right in front of us while we put green filters on our profile pictures once a year and feel like we have participated in something.

The IPCC is explicit - warming and higher CO₂ are hollowing out the nutritional value of what little food we still grow.

The issue is that dead, depleted, chemically abused soil cannot keep underwriting human life indefinitely and we are finding that out not in a laboratory but in our own kitchens and our own bodies.

Save Soil that has been trying to bring this conversation to the scale it actually deserves, because soil conservation is not an environmental hobby, it is food policy, it is health policy, it is the most fundamental survival policy a civilisation can have, and anyone treating soil as disposable dirt in the name of development is not pro-growth, they are anti-future, and the difference between those two things is going to become very difficult to ignore very soon.

World Environment Day comes once a year and the internet lights up briefly and then goes quiet again, but the soil does not get that luxury, it just keeps depleting underneath everything while the world above it continues as normal, and one day the fruit you loved as a child will not just taste different, it will be gone entirely, and we will have watched it happen in real time and called it progress.

TL;DR - 15 year friendship with someone who was like a brother to me, helped him repeatedly through his worst moments, got lied to in my own moment of need. Chose not to spiral, not to project, not to give him the privilege of making me miserable. Harder than it sounds. But its worth it.

There is a particular kind of betrayal that is different from the ordinary kind - it is the betrayal that comes from someone you have shown up for repeatedly, someone you gave your time and energy and resources to when they had nothing and needed everything, and who in your own moment of dire need looked you in the eye and lied to you without hesitation.

That kind of betrayal has a specific weight to it because it doesn't just hurt you, it makes you question the general goodness of people, it makes you wonder whether any relationship is worth the investment, whether the whole thing is just a transaction dressed up as something more meaningful.

I felt all of that. I want to be honest about that - I felt it completely.

But somewhere in feeling it I made a distinction that I think is worth sharing - I saw it for what it was, I took it for what it was, and I did not allow myself to make it into something more than what it was in my own mind, because that is where most of the real damage happens, not in the betrayal itself but in what we do with it afterward in the privacy of our own heads, the spiral, the projection, the anger that starts as one thing and becomes everything.

Most people get hurt by one thing and end up destroying ten other things with it.

I did not want to give this person or this situation that kind of power over my life.

"I have not given anyone the privilege to make me happy or unhappy, angry or miserable." ~ Sadhguru

I have been sitting quote for a day and I think it is one of the most radical things a human being can decide about their own life, where no one realises what you did within yourself but you know the power of it if you have done it right.

Whatever happened, happened. But I did not let it make me into something I am not.

Have you ever paid attention to Sadhguru’s hands when he is planting a sapling?

The way his fingers move with the soil, the way he mixes the soil with water, the way he presses it around the root - there is something very intimate happening there. It does not feel like he is doing an activity. It feels like his hands are in conversation with the soil.

Most of us would plant like this:

This is soil.
This is plant.
Put plant into soil.
Add water.
Done!

But when Sadhguru plants a sapling, something else is happening. His fingers don’t dominate the soil. They sort of negotiate with it. They don’t randomly press it down. They seem to understand how much pressure the root can take. The water is not just poured into the ground. It is almost invited into the soil, so that the soil becomes soft enough, firm enough and alive enough for the roots to settle into it.

When Sadhguru plants a sapling, he is revealing a certain intimacy.

Because planting a sapling is not only about placing a plant into the ground. There is a whole dynamic to it. The root has its own delicacy. The soil has its own texture. Water has to enter in the right way. The pressure has to be exact. If it becomes too loose the sapling does not feel held. If it becomes too tight - the root is suffocated. If there is too much water - it drowns. And if there's too little water it is abandoned.

So the hand has to know -- by touch!

It starts feeling like painting.

Hands themselves are the brush and soil itself is the colour, the ground is the canvas.
And the sapling is a stroke of life being drawn into the earth.

When a great painter paints, the brush is not separate from the hand and the hand is not separate from the eye and the eye is not separate from the feeling. The whole body becomes one movement. In the same way, when Sadhguru plants, his fingers, the soil, the water, the root and the ground seem to become one movement.

That is why it feels like brushwork.

Where someone has become so intimate with the material that the movement becomes simple, exact and alive.

Watching him plant a sapling can feel so strangely powerful.

We are watching a human being that is no longer separate from the earth he is touching.

If God were a farmer, he would not come with thunder or miracles or some grand announcement.

If God were a farmer, he would paint with soil, water, pressure and silence - and somewhere inside that simple act, life would begin!

This month is considered Adhik Maas in the Hindu tradition - an extra month that appears roughly once every three years.

In the Indian way of looking at time, the calendar was never only a mechanical system for counting days. It was a way of understanding the relationship between the human being, the planet, the moon, the sun, the seasons, and the inner life.

Scientifically, Adhik Maas exists because the lunar and solar cycles do not perfectly match. The moon takes about 29.5 days to complete one cycle of phases, from one new moon to the next. Twelve lunar months therefore make about 354 days, while the solar year is about 365 days. This creates a gap of around 11 days every year. Over roughly three years, that gap becomes close to one full lunar month. To realign the lunar calendar with the solar year and the seasons, an extra month is added.

The Earth, moon and sun are not moving randomly. Their movements create rhythms. The human body is not separate from these rhythms. Our sleep, hormones, emotions, digestion, menstrual cycles, mental states, and the way we experience time are connected in subtle ways to planetary and lunar movements. Our culture observed this very deeply, and the Hindu calendar emerged from that kind of observation.

Adhik Maas is therefore not treated as an ordinary month. It is seen as a kind of spiritual pause - a correction in time. A month that does not belong fully to the usual flow of worldly activity. Traditionally, people avoid major material beginnings during this period and give more importance to sadhana, fasting, charity, pilgrimage, self-restraint, and selfless action. Many traditions especially recommend daan, seva, japa, reading sacred texts, and doing good for others without expectation.

The idea that past karma can be dissolved through selfless deeds in this month comes from the spiritual understanding that karma is not only some cosmic punishment system. Karma is the residue of action, memory, tendency and identification.

When a person acts compulsively, selfishly or unconsciously, they strengthen certain patterns within themselves. But when they act consciously, selflessly and with devotion, those patterns can loosen.

In that sense, Adhik Maas becomes powerful because it reminds us that time itself can be used for inner correction.

The real significance of this month is not that the universe suddenly forgives us for everything we have done. It is that this period invites us to step out of ordinary accumulation and participate in life differently.

To do something without profit.

To help someone without announcement.

To reduce compulsiveness.

To look inward.

To dissolve a little bit of the person or personality we have been carrying.

Traditionally, Adhik Maas is also called Mal Maas (shitty month) because it was considered “extra,” irregular, and unsuitable for many auspicious worldly activities. In the Purushottam Maas katha tradition, the month is personified as a neglected being. It has no presiding deity, no special honour, and no one wants to claim it. The other months have their place, their rituals, their festivals, their identities. But this extra month is seen as unwanted, impure, useless - a burden in the calendar. Modern summaries of the katha usually trace this tradition to Purushottam Maas Mahatmya, associated with texts like the Skanda Purana and Padma Purana.

The story says that this rejected month, wounded by insult and loneliness, goes to Lord Vishnu / Narayana and expresses its pain. It says, in essence: Everyone calls me Mal Maas. Nobody respects me. No deity has accepted me. No auspicious work is done in me. I am treated as lower than all other months. Vishnu listens with compassion. Vishnu grants a blessing to the essence: the Divine does not reject what the world has rejected. The Lord accepts this abandoned month and gives it His own name - Purushottam, meaning the Supreme Being, the highest among beings. From then on, Mal Maas becomes Purushottam Maas, a month especially dedicated to Vishnu / Krishna, and a time considered powerful for devotion, charity, self-restraint, prayer, japa, seva, and inner purification.

That is the heart of Purushottam Maas. It is not only about an extra month in the calendar. It is about what the Divine does with what the world calls extra, useless, impure or unwanted. The world measures value through function. What can this be used for? What can this produce? What status does this carry? What visible result does this give?

But the sacred seems to operate differently. It takes what has been pushed aside and reveals that the rejected space may actually be the most available space for grace.

Maybe this is why selfless action, charity, devotion and inner work are given such importance in this month. Because the month itself carries the memory of rejection being transformed into sanctity. So when we help someone without benefit, when we feed someone, forgive someone, serve someone, or dissolve a little bit of our own compulsiveness, we are participating in the same movement - turning what was neglected into something sacred.

In that sense, Purushottam Maas is not only a story about time. It is a story about the human being. The parts of us that we call useless, broken, impure, delayed, failed or unworthy may not be outside the possibility of transformation. They are exactly the parts that need to be taken to Narayana. Because what the world calls Mal (human waste), the Divine may still be able to turn it into Purushottam.

Has anyone noticed that genuine people are becoming so rare!

Genuine should not be understood as people who always say the right thing or behave in some idealistic way. I mean people whose words come from somewhere real inside them. Someone who is not constantly performing. People who do not need every emotion, every opinion, every reaction, every relationship and every moment of life to be shaped according to how it will appear from the outside.

One major reason for this is the times we live in are almost entirely focused on the external.

External comfort. External beauty. External success. External validation. External morality. External identity. External image. Our behaviour is often judged less by where it came from inside us and more by how it appeared in a given situation.

Everything is about how something looks.

How you handled it externally. How you spoke. How you presented yourself. How it came across. How others perceived it. How clean, impressive, polished, successful, attractive, progressive, spiritual, intelligent or harmless you appeared to be.

Very rarely do we ask what is actually happening inside a human being!

What was the inner condition from which that action came? What kind of fear, longing, insecurity, confusion, pain, ego, love, clarity or emptiness was operating beneath the surface?

We have become very good at managing appearances, but very poor at understanding inner life.

One of the most dangerous collapses we are living through without even noticing it - the belief that the external exists independently. The external does not appear out of nowhere. Every action, every reaction, every word, every cruelty, every act of love, every manipulation and every kindness comes from something happening within. External action or external reaction is not separate from the internal stimulus, no matter how well we try to ask it or gaslight ourselves into thinking that it doesn't exist.

Today, the internal processes of the human condition are ignored to such an extent that sometimes it almost feels like we have stopped believing they exist.

People have become externally functional and internally fragmented.

They know how to dress well, speak well, network well, post well, argue well, present themselves well. But they do not know how to simply be with themselves. When a person loses contact with their own inner life for too long, they slowly stop being true to themselves.

You begin adjusting yourself to what works. You say what gets approval. You hide what feels inconvenient. You perform what is acceptable. You suppress what is uncomfortable. You learn the language of the world but forget the language of your own being.

And after some time, even you do not know where the performance ends and where you begin. I think this is why genuine people feel rare now. Because genuineness requires contact with oneself, it requires some kind of inner honesty and willingness to look at your own thoughts, fears, desires, contradictions and compulsions without immediately decorating them, denying them or outsourcing them to the world.

But we are living in a time where accumulation has become more important than inner growth.

Accumulation of money, comfort, opinions, followers, lifestyle, experiences and above all accumulation of identity.

"What you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you" ~ Sadhguru

It is just what we gather around life.

And when what we gather becomes more important than what we are, something very essential starts collapsing.

A society without genuine people may still look successful for some time. It may have better technology, better buildings, better markets, better entertainment, better branding, better lifestyles.

But beneath all that, trust begins to disappear.

Because without genuineness, every relationship becomes negotiation. Every conversation becomes positioning. Every kindness becomes strategy. Every disagreement becomes performance. Every human interaction becomes slightly suspicious because nobody knows who is actually real anymore.

It is a form of collapse.

The collapse of trust. The collapse of sincerity. The collapse of inner clarity. The collapse of being able to look at another person and feel that something real is present there.

I do not think the answer is to become cynical and say everyone is fake. The real question is whether we are willing to look inward again.

Whether we are ready to see that human life is not just external comfort and external success, but also an inner possibility!

Because once you start looking inward, even a little, you begin to notice how much of your life is compulsive. How much of our behaviour is borrowed. How much of our own personality that we think it is who we are is defensive. How much of what we call “me” is just accumulated impressions, fears, memories and reactions.

Genuineness begins there! Not by trying to appear authentic. But slowly removing the need to appear at all! Genuine people are becoming rare because very few people are being taught to live from the inside out.

And if we continue building a world where the external is everything and the internal is ignored, then maybe the disappearance of genuine people is not just a social problem.

Genuine people are becoming rare because so many human beings are slowly collapsing under masks they once created only to survive.

This is the quiet tragedy of our time.

So many people are not breaking because they failed. They are breaking because the mask succeeded.

My mother and I were going on our bike to enquire about making a new mandir for our home.

It is an ordinary Indian middle-class household task where something that is technically furniture is also not just furniture. It has to hold a certain feeling. It has to look a certain way. It has to fit into the space of the house, but also somehow fit into the emotion of the house.

We went to different wood and furniture shops, asked around about designs, sizes, polish, carving, drawers, shelves, what kind of wood would last, what would look decent, what would not become too expensive, and by the time we were done with a few places, both of us were a little tired.

I belong to a middle-class religious family, and like many Indian families, daily ritualistic worship is a part of our lives. It is part of the house. A lamp, a corner, framed images of deities, flowers, a bell, a small daily ritual. We grow up worshipping different forms of the divine, sometimes without even fully understanding the depth of what we are doing, but still doing it because in our culture it has always been done for millennia, my mother has always done it, the grandmother has always done it, and that just carries itself.

After all that asking around, we stopped at a vada pav centre.

While we were eating, another man came to the food joint next to us. He parked his bike outside and went in to pick up his food. There was no organised parking or anything like that. Just usual roadside arrangement where everyone somehow parks outside the shop and somehow everyone manages.

By the time his order was ready, more people had come, more bikes and mopeds had gathered outside, and his bike had been blocked from behind.

He came out, saw that he could not remove his bike, shouted for people to move their vehicles, and people came out and started making space for him.

Now while he was reversing his bike, a food-delivery rider was passing on the main road and the two bikes lightly collided. There was no real damage.

No one fell. No one was injured. Nothing had actually happened in any meaningful sense.

But the man reversing his bike immediately started abusing the delivery guy’s family.

And the thing with these abuses is that for some people they are not even words anymore. They are not even chosen. They have become like an involuntary mantra. They begin a sentence with it, end a sentence with it, put it in the middle also for structural support, because otherwise maybe the grammar of the sentence will feel incomplete to them.

But the delivery guy did not take it like grammar. His was a different grammar - he derived his grammar from South Indian Action films.

He stopped his bike right there, in the middle of the road. He did not even bother taking it to the side. He got down exactly where the abuse had reached him, came charging towards the other man, and started slapping him continuously.

An argument turned into a fight in no time. People gathered. Some tried to hold him back. Some tried to separate them. Some tried to calm the situation. And while he was being held by seven or eight people, the delivery guy kept saying one thing again and again:

“I am not afraid to die.”

He was a food-delivery guy, not a gangster or a cinematic villain. This was not a man in some battlefield. He was an ordinary working man, probably delivering food order after food order, moving through traffic, heat, dust, pressure, noise, humiliation, deadlines, commissions, and whatever else life throws at people who have to earn every day on the road.

And one abuse, or maybe even the idea of that abuse, touched something in him so deeply that in that moment he was not afraid to die.

Think about that.

Nothing had really happened physically. There was no injury. No major accident. No real damage. But a verbal abuse, a word, an insult thrown casually by another man, carried enough force to make him ready for death in the middle of a public road.

Now when I think of this, another story comes to my mind.

This story is of a man who was once a convict. By the age of 23, he had several criminal offences registered against him and was leading a gang of more than 60 people. This was not an ordinary angry man. This was someone who had actually lived a life of violence, dominance, crime and consequence.

Later he served a long prison sentence. His life changed. He came out. He got married. He became a family man.

One day, this same man was going on his two-wheeler with his wife and child when another two-wheeler rider came from the opposite direction and hit him by mistake.

He fell.

His wife fell.

His child fell.

This was not the idea of abuse. This was actual physical harm. The kind of moment where any man could easily justify rage to himself. The kind of moment where the old self could return immediately and say, “Now I have a reason!!”

He got up, looked at the other rider, and recognised him.

The other man was someone he had met during an Isha Yoga program offered by Sadhguru.

They looked at each other, they laughed and they left the place.

No drama. No domination. No need to prove manhood. No need to show power. No need to punish. No need to turn a mistake into a crime.

He later said that if this same incident had happened during the time when he was running his gang, a crime would have been committed that day.

I find myself thinking about this contrast here.

On one side, an ordinary man hears an abuse and reaches a point where he is saying he is not afraid to die.

On the other side, a man with an actual violent criminal past sees his wife and child fall because of another rider’s mistake, and he is able to laugh because something in him has changed.

That is not a small thing. Its not just “anger management.”

That is transformation at the level where the same outside situation no longer produces the same inside reaction.

And this is where the mandir (temple) came back into my mind.

My mother and I had gone out looking for a mandir (temple) for our home. An outer space of worship. A place where a lamp can be lit, flowers can be offered, and the divine can be remembered every day.

But what is the fundamental point of worship if not to change the inner atmosphere of a human being?

What is the point of bowing down outside if the inside remains ready to explode at the smallest provocation?

What is the point of worshipping so many gods and goddesses if one word on the road can make us ready to destroy another person or ourselves?

I am saying this because I saw both possibilities so clearly.

One man was hurt by the idea of verbal abuse and became violent.

Another man experienced actual physical impact involving his wife and child, and still responded with maturity, recognition and laughter.

The difference was not the road, traffic or Indian Chaos.

The difference was the inner state of the human being meeting the situation.

We often think spirituality means belief, rituals, temples, scriptures, clothes, identity, culture, festivals and belonging. All of that has its place. But if it does not somehow enter the way a person breathes, reacts, speaks, forgives, receives insult, handles injury, and responds to provocation, then maybe it has remained outside.

Maybe the mandir (temple) has been built in the house, but not yet inside the human being.

Transformation is not an idea when a person is sitting quietly in a hall. Transformation is tested when someone abuses you on the road. When someone hits your bike. When your family falls. When your old self has every excuse to return. When you'd be fully right to bring the grammar of South Indian Action Films into your real life. (We have an actual South Indian Action Film star running the state-that's a different matter)

If even in that moment a man who once lived violently can laugh and walk away, then something real has happened.

And maybe that is not only what worship was always supposed to do but also worship-worthy!

The real mandir (temple) is not the one we were trying to buy that day.

The real mandir (temple) is the one where a human being can remain pleasant within himself, even when the world outside gives him every reason not to.

I light an oil lamp every day in front of my deity.

A simple setup - cotton wick, a vegetable oil - very easily available in India as Lamp Oil.

It burns in front of a deity, creating a certain atmosphere, making the home feel a more alive.

Since the past few weeks I noticed the tip of the lamp keeps forming this black residue. Maybe it is carbon, or soot, maybe something else. I use the same lamp oil for almost 8 months now. This black residue did not use to form ever since I have been buying this oil.

Now, because the oil has also become more expensive in the past couple of months - lighting a lamp inside an Indian home - now feels connected to a world that is burning in a thousand places.

There are wars everywhere. The Middle East is unstable. Iran is in conflict. Shipping routes are under pressure. Oil prices keep reacting to fear, speculation, disruption, sanctions, supply chains, and whatever powerful people decide in rooms ordinary people will never enter.

And that entire madness travels quietly into our homes. It arrives as a higher price, as thinner quality, as adulteration, as “same bottle, worse product.”

It arrives as a black mark on the tip of a small burning lamp. The butterfly effect is frightening.

War is not just missiles and borders and military maps. War slowly enters cooking oil, transport cost, groceries, electricity bills, plastic, cosmetics, medicine, farming, packaging, school fees, rent, and eventually even the tiny lamp burning in front of God.

A manufacturer somewhere may not even want to reduce quality. But his input cost has gone up. Transport has gone up. Packaging has gone up, margins are squeezed and of course, customers cannot pay endlessly. So something gives.

Usually quality!

The poor get less. The middle class pays more. The product becomes worse. The label remains the same.

And everyone adjusts.

That is the most dangerous word of our time: adjust.

We adjust to bad air, bad food, bad roads, bad products, rising prices. We adjust to living in permanent anxiety. Adjust to a world where everything is connected, but nobody feels responsible.

The conversation around human consciousness should not be dismissed as a luxury spiritual topic anymore.

At a certain scale, unconsciousness stops being personal. It becomes geopolitical. It becomes economic. It becomes environmental. It becomes logistical.

A fearful mind is no longer just a fearful mind when it controls armies, markets, oil routes, media systems, food systems, and supply chains.

The problem is not that human beings lack intelligence. The problem is that our intelligence has become powerful enough to affect the whole planet and every little thing it touches, while our inner maturity has not kept pace with it.

This is something people like Sadhguru have been warning about for years: without a deeper sense of responsibility, awareness, and inner balance, human intelligence does not automatically become progress. It can become destruction with better tools.

Because what is war, really???

Human intelligence without inner balance.
Technology without consciousness.
Economics without compassion.
A leadership without stillness.

And the result is that even a common person lighting a lamp in a small home somewhere has to pay the price.

Maybe the black residue on my lamp is just soot or a symbol.

A symbol of a world where the flame is still trying to burn clean, but everything feeding it has become polluted by greed, conflict, instability and unconsciousness.

So my question is simple:

How much more of ordinary life has to get quietly corrupted before we admit that the real crisis is not just political, economic or environmental -------- but human?

I got sick recently in this peak Indian summer.

I was not running. I was not working at a construction site. I was not climbing a mountain or doing anything extreme. I just went outside and existed in the heat for some time, and my body started asking for water again and again and again, as if some internal alarm had gone off.

And I genuinely want to ask is this still normal summer or are we slowly being trained to accept an unlivable condition as “weather”?

Because this is not just about one person feeling dehydrated. Everywhere you look, people are tired, irritated and drained.

In Mumbai, even when the temperature number does not look as terrifying as North India, the humidity and trapped heat make the body feel punished. You step out, travel, come back, and somehow even ordinary movement feels like a negotiation with your own biology.

Mumbai used to be livable in a very different way. Juhu and Bandra were once outskirts. When Amitabh Bachchan built his bungalow in Juhu, that area still had some sense of distance from the crushing centre of the city. Now the city has stretched and swallowed everything till Mira Road and beyond, and we call it growth, development, opportunity, progress.

And this is not just Mumbai.

Across India, people are talking about heat like it is some unavoidable cultural inheritance. “India hai, garmi toh hogi.” But was it always like this? Were cities always this airless? Did stepping outside always feel like your skin and lungs were being punished?

At what point does a city stop being a place to live and become a machine that processes human beings?

We keep talking about development as if taller buildings, longer roads, bigger markets, more towers, more malls, more concrete automatically mean a better life. But if people are getting sick just from just stepping outside, if children cannot play comfortably, elderly people are trapped in rooms that don’t cool down, workers are expected to stand in heat that should honestly be illegal, then what exactly are we developing?

A country is not developed just because its skylines are changing. A country is developed when the body can live there without constantly fighting the environment.

This is where I think we have made a huge mistake. We treat nature like scenery. Trees are scenery. Soil is scenery. Rivers are scenery. Open land is scenery. Breeze is scenery. Shade is scenery. These are not decorative things.

They are infrastructure.

Soil is infrastructure. Water is infrastructure. Trees are infrastructure. Shade is infrastructure. Breeze is infrastructure. A body that can step outside without being punished by the air is also a piece of infrastructure.

This is why I think Sadhguru’s Save Soil movement deserves more attention than it gets. He brought attention to something brutally basic - Soil. The living foundation of food, agriculture, water retention, temperature balance and human nourishment.

Because if soil dies, heat rises. If trees disappear, cities cook. If water disappears, the body panics. If food comes from depleted soil, health suffers immensely!

If everything natural becomes weak, then human life becomes more artificial, more expensive, more dependent, more fragile.

And then we will still call it development because the buildings are taller and the roads are wider.

But is a city really developed if people cannot walk outside without getting sick?

True progress is not stopping development, but learning how to develop without exhausting the land, the city, and the human body. So the question is not whether India should develop, but can we develop in a way that keeps our cities livable, our soil alive, our water secure, and our bodies capable of simply existing outside?

I got sick recently during this peak summer in India - it felt like my own body asking for water again and again and again.

I reached this condition not after running or after working construction or after climbing a mountain. Just after going outside and existing in this heat for some time in a city that has become so hot and airless that even basic movement feels like a negotiation with the body.

That disturbed me more than I expected.

This heat feels like.... A WARNING..!!

Mumbai used to be livable in a way people who came later may not even understand. Juhu and Bandra were once considered outskirts. When Mr. Amitabh Bachchan built his bungalow in Juhu, that area still carried a sense of distance from the crushing centre of the city. Now Mumbai has stretched and swallowed everything till Mira Road and beyond, and we call this expansion, development, opportunity, growth.

CLOAKED IN SUFFOCATION!!

A city expanding five times is not automatically a sign of success, but a sign that we have built a concrete organism that keeps eating land, trapping heat, killing breeze, exhausting people, and then asking them to adapt.

Modern cities are beginning to feel like. Not places to live but machines that process human beings.

You wake up tired. You step outside tired. You travel tired. You come back tired. Even the night does not fully cool the body anymore. The air feels used. The roads radiate heat. The buildings trap it. The body keeps asking for water and you wonder how your own biology has started sending emergency notifications.

Unfortunately this how collapse arrives these days -- as dehydration, dizziness, people getting a little more irritable, workers standing in heat that should be illegal, as elderly people trapped in rooms that don’t cool down, as children unable to play outside. As cities where even doing ordinary things starts feeling like survival training.

Collapse doesn't look dramatic. It first enters through the body through thirst and fatigue and heat that does not leave even after sunset and slow disappearance of comfort from everyday life.

Mumbai has already recorded brutal early heat this year, with suburbs touching 40°C in March and temperatures more than 7°C above normal in some areas. Reports also noted “feels-like” temperatures surging around 45-50°C during the recent heat spell before temporary relief from stronger sea breezes.

And this is why I cannot look at environmental collapse as some separate “nature issue” anymore.

The Earth is not scenery.

It is infrastructure.

Soil is infrastructure. Water is infrastructure. Trees are infrastructure. Breeze is infrastructure. Shade is infrastructure. A body that can step outside without being punished by the air is also infrastructure.

That's why I think Sadhguru’s Save Soil movement deserves more serious attention than it gets. Because while everyone is busy talking about development, GDP, elections, carbon, technology, and growth, he brought attention back to something brutally basic: soil. The living ground from which food, agriculture, and human nourishment actually come..

Right now, both the planet and the body are saying the same thing.

There are limits.The Earth has limits. Soil has limits. Water has limits. Forests have limits. Cities have limits. The human body has limits.

But our idea of growth behaves as if it has none. A real horror. A finite planet being consumed by an infinite appetite. A finite body being pushed through infinite heat.

And a civilization still calling this progress because the buildings are taller, the roads are longer, the markets are bigger, and the language is more polished.

But if stepping outside starts making people sick, if food depends on dying soil, if water becomes something the body keeps begging for, if cities grow by destroying the very conditions that made them livable, then maybe what we are calling development is just collapse with better branding.

I have not been suffering the way I used to. This is not because my life has become easy. Difficult situations still come. The body still goes through discomfort. The world outside is still what it is - unstable, overheated, anxious, and becoming more uncertain every year.

But through meditation and certain yogic practices, I have slowly started seeing that there is a difference between going through something and suffering it.

Pain may happen. Discomfort may happen. Exhaustion may happen. Fear may happen. But suffering seems to require a certain identification with all of it. It needs me to become completely tangled with the body, the emotion, the thought and the situation.

When there is even a little distance, the whole experience changes.

Yesterday was Buddha Purnima and it reminds me of something people often misunderstand about the Buddha. People say Buddha taught that life is suffering, and then they interpret that as some depressing, defeated philosophy.

But if Buddha truly believed suffering was all there is, why would he spend his whole life teaching people a way out of it? If he truly believed suffering was the endgame for life, he would have advised us end this life for good!

He did not point to suffering because he wanted people to drown in it. He pointed to suffering because he saw that human beings were creating it compulsively - and that it could be transcended.

Dukkha or suffereing was not the conclusion. It was the diagnosis. And Ananda, a state of inner bliss, was a real possibility.

There is also a quote often attributed to Sadhguru: pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

I used to understand this intellectually. Recently, I am beginning to understand it in a more lived way.

I have been unwell since yesterday. Just the very human comedy-horror of 7-8 rounds of loose motions, dehydration, body ache, exhaustion, no appetite, and the severe Indian summer sitting on the body like a punishment.

Usually when the body starts failing even slightly, the mind joins the festival immediately. Panic, irritation, self-pity, fear, frustration. Normally the mind immediately starts building a whole drama around it. “Why is this happening? How long will this last? I hate this. I cannot take this.” The body suffers, and then the mind adds a subscription plan on top. Premium suffering, billed monthly! lol...

Because of the meditative practices I have been doing for some time, I noticed that the body was clearly going through discomfort, but “I” was not suffering it in the same way. There was pain, weakness, heat, dehydration, and fatigue - but there was also a small space inside that remained untouched by all of it.

Not detached in a dead way or denial. Not “positive thinking.” Just a little distance.

And in that distance, the whole experience changed. In that space, there was even a quiet kind of joy.

That sounds strange to say, because we usually think joy depends on good conditions. Good health, good weather, good news, good people, good future.

But what if joy is not something created by perfect conditions? What if joy is what remains when we stop becoming completely entangled with every passing condition?

This feels especially relevant now. As climate instability worsens, as social and economic pressures rise, as people become more anxious and reactive, the question may not only be how we survive externally.

But there is also another question:

How do we remain inwardly stable when the outer world becomes unstable?

Because if every crisis outside immediately becomes a psychological collapse inside, then we are finished long before the systems are. Meditation is often dismissed as escapism. But to me, it feels like the opposite. It is the act of finally turning toward the root of suffering instead of only rearranging the furniture of our external lives.

The world may become hotter, harsher, stranger, more uncertain. Pain may come. But must we suffer everything that happens?

Must the collapse outside automatically become a collapse within?

I am not saying meditation solves the world’s problems. It does not replace action, responsibility, preparation, or compassion. But without some inner distance, even our action comes from panic, rage, despair, or compulsion.

The deepest preparation for a collapsing world is not only storing food or reading climate reports or predicting timelines.

It is perhaps also learning how not to collapse within ourselves.