A gathering. A compilation of what was scattered.
This is not a portfolio of formats. It is a record of a journey; of thinking that refused to stay in one form.
The pieces here were not written for this volume. They were written because there was no other way to think through what needed to be thought through.
Sankalan is what remained when the thinking was done.
For eight years I have been watching myself think. Not meditating on it, actually observing. From a young age I could sense something inside me I couldn't name. The only way was to write.
So I wrote. Slowly I stopped describing surfaces and went underneath. I didn't just experience my thoughts; I saw the system that produced them. The patterns. The architecture.
I learned to hold contradictions. I learned to compress, to find the single line that carries everything. I learned to know myself deeply, silently and by extension, someone else. Their identity, their contradictions, the structure underneath what they say. The same instrument. Different subject.
This is a part of that translation. The first time the instinct turns outward.
I was eighteen. Fresh from fifteen days on Kailash, before I knew what spirituality was or why I had gone. I came back somewhere between two worlds, sitting in the back of an engineering class in my first year.
Someone I had met on the Kailash trip sent a few lines on our WhatsApp group, trying to describe the experience. Something struck. I picked up a pen, not knowing what I wanted to say, and in the last minutes of that class, this came out.
Every time I read it, it means something different. It will probably keep doing that.
Dense. Raw. The most personally meaningful thing I have written. And the moment I discovered I could write.
This is where everything begins.
I have been chasing something since I was young. I didn't have a name for it. It was there in the backyard with a cricket ball, making up commentary for matches I was playing alone. It was there on the football field, just me, the ball, and the goalpost, when everything else disappeared and something took over that felt bigger than concentration.
Football taught me that this feeling could be the most powerful and addictive thing in the world. And then I became so obsessed with finding it that I lost it entirely. The chasing broke the flow.
After Kailash, the obsession became conscious. I could feel what I had been running after my whole life, and I could also feel how the running itself had been the problem.
This piece is my attempt to name it. I am still finding it back. But this is where I first found the words.
It was the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix. Clocking in at a little over 300 km/h, a second and a half ahead of the second-best, Ayrton Senna was pushing the extremes of human limits, and then he suddenly stopped and went into the pits. Nothing had broken, nothing had snapped, not in the car at least.
When asked why, he said: "Suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct only. I was in a different dimension. It frightened me because I realised I was well beyond my conscious understanding." One of the greatest racing drivers who ever lived, pulled back at his absolute peak, because he was frightened by it.
The Japanese call it Mushin, the Chinese call it Wu Wei, the ancient Hindus called it Turiya, the fourth state. Different traditions, same discovery.
Every tradition that named it also tried to picture it. The ancient Hindus came closest.
Nataraja's Tandava, Shiva's cosmic dance. The universe in perpetual motion, simultaneously creating, sustaining, evolving and dissolving, all in one gesture, without a pause. Perfectly still face, arms and legs in motion, a circle of fire burning around him. He is not the dancer; he is the dance. No separation between movement and mover, stillness and action. Merged into one.
That merging, that is what this is about. And it does not only happen at cosmic scale. It can happen in your backyard at home.
I first found it there.
I was an obese kid who wanted to be taken seriously. Football was the coolest thing in my school, the boys who played well had a different kind of respect, and I wanted it. Then I saw Messi on a screen. People called him an alien, a god, something more than just respect. I wanted that. That hunger latched onto something.
So I came home every day, watched Messi on YouTube, and mirrored everything he did. Alone in the backyard. The furniture broke. My nails came off. I got injured so many times I stopped counting. I did not stop.
Three, four months in, something shifted. I stopped imitating and started playing. In practice I had found a version of flow, just me, the ball, the goalpost. But competing was when it peaked. There were moments on that field, faints, fakes, moves I still cannot recreate, where I was not thinking. I was just doing. The boundary between me and the game disappeared.
People started noticing. They'd ask how I'd gotten better, how I played the way I did. The respect I had chased arrived. But by then I had already found something I wanted more.
That was the first time I felt real flow. And it was the most addictive thing I had ever experienced. I wanted it in every moment, every activity, not just on the field. I wanted to live at that frequency permanently.
Think of yourself as a sandpit next to a beach. Most waves wash over the surface and recede. But some, the ones that carry enough force, reshape the bed entirely. They widen what you can hold, shift the floor deeper, and leave a little more of themselves behind. When they recede, you feel the absence not as emptiness but as something the wave took with it when it left, like an imprint, like a frequency you once moved at but cannot find again.
Certain experiences do exactly this. Not all of them, only the ones that hit at the right intensity. They move through you, leave something behind, and permanently recalibrate what you can feel. We are not wired for comfort. We are wired for the wave that reshapes us.
Some waves just do that to you. You don't choose them. They choose you.
I wanted that frequency in everything, that flow.
I tried to sharpen the instrument itself. If I could increase my focus, deepen my energy, expand my presence, I could carry that frequency beyond the field, into every moment of living. That's why I went into spirituality. Sadhguru. Isha. Meditative practices.
But the watching became the practice. I had gone in to feel more and ended up feeling less. I started focusing on focus. Watching the breath instead of breathing. The thoughts became conversations. The conversations became an entire internal world. And slowly, without realising it, I had traded the external flow for an internal labyrinth.
The pursuit itself had killed the thing.
The football I had loved, the faints, the fakes, the moments I could not recreate, that was gone too. Something had broken at the source. At one point I could not focus for ten seconds. The frequency I had chased into every corner of my life had gone completely silent.
For almost two years I lived inside my own head, disconnected from everything outside it.
Writing was the first thread back. Not because it solved anything, but because it gave the internal world somewhere to go. Slowly, as the words moved outward, so did I. The disconnect didn't lift all at once. But something began to loosen.
I didn't decide to return. I just started doing.
Six years and counting. The approach had shifted without me deciding to shift it. I was focusing on the output, not the experience. The action, not the feeling. The discipline, not the frequency. I found my ball again and just kept going. Some days it flows, especially when the work is aligned with who I am. Some days it doesn't. I don't look for it in everything anymore. I am also turning outward consciously, into work, into people, into the world.
That is what trust actually looks like. Not certainty. Just showing up, long enough, until something takes shape.
We don't find flow. It finds us. And it finds us when we have stopped looking. Every experience that has truly shaped you, every moment you felt alive, was when you were in some resonance with it, consciously or not.
This is not a map. It is my account of what I found, chasing it, losing it, and slowly, without looking, finding it again. Written from inside that finding.
I had spent years watching my patterns repeat. The same dynamics, different faces. The same responses, different rooms. At some point the watching became precise enough to see the system underneath.
This is the analytical account of what I found. No framework borrowed in advance, just observation, pushed far enough, until the science said the same thing.
Before digital, photographs were fixed onto chemical reels. Light pressed into surface, and if the exposure was strong enough, the image held. Sometimes for decades. Sometimes forever.
Certain nuclear signatures last longer than civilisations. The original event is long gone. The imprint is not.
The nervous system works exactly like this. The earliest exposures are the most deeply fixed. The event passes. The impression stays. And long after the person who made it has left the room, the shape of what they left behind keeps firing, in different rooms, through different faces, on different days.
The emotional dynamics I had with my father, the way I navigated his approval, the way I contracted when criticism came, turned up almost intact in my first boss, in the men I found intimidating in new rooms, in authority figures I had never met. Same dance, different partner.
My mother and I disagreed on almost everything, yet I could never hold a firm stand. The attachment overrode the argument. That translated, in most close female relationships since, I've strongly disagreed but not strongly opposed. Left it there.
My first friend Amit and I never chose each other, circumstance put us in the same classroom three years running. On the last day we exchanged books, he took the one I loved, gave me one I never opened. He left, I never reached out. I never learned how to build or maintain a friendship intentionally. It was always circumstantial, quick attachment, and something almost transactional about how they end. Three or four have stayed. The rest followed the same arc.
I didn't have a psychological vocabulary for this when I first noticed it. I still don't, really, not a formal one. But I stayed with the question long enough to arrive at something.
The nervous system doesn't keep faces. It keeps conditions. This is not a metaphor.
In 2024, a team at NYU and Harvard published research in Nature Communications mapping exactly how the brain encodes threat. What they found was a distributed neural signature, a fingerprint, not triggered by a specific face or voice but by a pattern. The amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex work together not to recognise who is in front of you, but to assess whether what is in front of you matches a known shape of danger.
The face is interchangeable. The pattern isn't.
This is what Stephen Porges calls neuroception, the nervous system's continuous, below-conscious scanning for cues of safety or threat. It runs before you think, before you choose, before you decide how to respond. By the time you are consciously aware that a situation feels threatening, your nervous system has already been running the pattern for several seconds. You are catching up to a conclusion your body drew without you.
What the pattern is made of goes back further than you think.
John Bowlby proposed that our earliest relationships with caregivers create what he called internal working models, neural blueprints for how relationships work, what to expect from people who hold power over us, how safe or unsafe the world is likely to be. These models are built between birth and roughly age seven, before the prefrontal cortex is anywhere near developed enough to override them.
This is why we repeat what we never decided to repeat. The system isn't irrational. It is efficient. It built its library early, from whoever was in the room, and it kept using the same responses because the responses were never wrong enough to update.
Most of what we call growing up is building a bigger library.
Bessel van der Kolk put it plainly: the body keeps score. The experiences that shaped you earliest are held not in memory but in the nervous system itself, in posture, in breath, in the way the chest tightens when a particular kind of silence enters a room.
The update only comes from a particular kind of surprise. When the person you expected to disappoint you doesn't. When the authority figure you braced against treats you as an equal. When the pattern runs and the result is genuinely different from what the system predicted. Slowly, with enough data of that kind, the library rewrites itself.
This is what most therapeutic approaches, from cognitive behavioural therapy to somatic work to certain meditative practices, are fundamentally trying to do: create the conditions for a different result. Not to overwrite the pattern intellectually, but to run it enough times against safety that the body begins to believe the world has changed.
What psychology calls attachment theory, what neuroscience calls conditioned threat response, what Porges calls neuroception, these are the same observation from different altitudes. The mechanism underneath is older than any of those frameworks. The body learns what keeps it safe. It holds the pattern. It runs it on anyone who fits the shape.
I came into Ventii on the supply side. My job was to walk into venues and get them onto the platform. I had no manual. I was learning the vision from the inside.
In the early days the pitch was easy. Then I walked into a meeting that stopped me cold. I left deeply demotivated. I questioned whether I had made the right call joining at all.
I went to meet the founder. He listened. And then said something I did not forget.
That conversation changed how I read the brand. From that point I was not only in the field. I began to write and speak the language that took the product into the market.
What follows is not a case study. It is the inside account of how the brand got built, from the founder's instinct to the product's language to the platform's logic, rendered by me.
Manas does not move on feeling alone. There is a strong emotional current underneath everything he does, but it has to pass through logic before it becomes action. He needed proof that the model had worked somewhere.
He found Naboo, a French event procurement platform that had raised funding and was generating revenue. It showed him the model worked. That was enough.
Within twenty days of quitting, he had hired his first engineer. It did not go smoothly. Over several months he went through a dozen engineers. Nobody stayed long enough. The earliest version of Ventii was a simple aggregator, venues on a page, a placeholder for the real thing.
He knew it was not the vision. But he was patient in a way that is rare: actively learning from every failure while holding the larger picture intact.
Then came Rajas, a childhood friend, cloud architect, self-taught through hard work, not credentials. Two months with Rajas and the product began to take real shape.
I was working on the supply end. In the early days the pitch was easy, smaller players, limited resistance, a willingness to listen. Then I walked into a meeting with a player who had been in the industry for twenty years. He shut me down without hesitation. No way to generate revenue, he said. No way to stop consumers from going directly to venues once they had the information.
I left deeply demotivated. I questioned whether I had made the right call joining at all. I went to meet Manas. He listened. And then said something I did not forget — something that changed how I understood him, and the brand.
The name is not accidental. Ventii carries roots in French, meaning the large, the grand, the abundant. Paired with Intelligence it becomes a precise statement: grand clarity. Not the intelligence of cleverness, but of seeing a gap and moving toward it with patience and method.
I always thought I was searching for the right identity, the one that would finally fit. I tried on philosophies, disciplines, roles. Each one arrived with the feeling of almost. Close, but never quite mine.
What I discovered, slowly, then suddenly, is that identity cannot be chosen from a menu. It can only be uncovered. Like a photograph developing in a darkroom: the image was always there. The question is only whether you have the right instrument, and enough patience to wait for it to become visible.
This piece is about that process. About the gap between the dharma you perform and the one that is actually yours. About what it means to stop borrowing shapes and start inhabiting your own.
"I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me."
That's what Phil Knight said about the Nike Swoosh, one of the most recognised symbols in the world. Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 for it. By 1995, Nike had dropped its own name from all branding. Only the curve remained.
Why?
Nike is the Greek goddess of Victory. The inanimate curve, named after a deity, slowly started to resonate with one of the oldest human aspirations: to win. Nobody designed this resonance. It was recognised until it became undeniable.
We are wired to do this. Be it a corporation, a pet, or a piece of art, we personify everything we experience. We build a picture around it until it feels like something we know, or someone we know.
Because we are each created in a unique shape that has no name. We can only experience this world through that specific shape. Not every frame fits, not every form is ours to take. When something outside us fits into that shape, it clicks. Through a song, a philosophy, a person, a way of life, we don't discover something new. We recognise a part of ourselves in something larger. The pieces align, and for a moment, it all makes sense.
In 1970, a radiologist named Godfrey Hounsfield had an idea that made no sense to anyone around him. X-rays showed bones. Everyone knew that. Soft tissue, the brain, the organs, the interior landscape of a human being, was invisible to medicine. Hounsfield believed he could change that. Not by inventing a new principle, but by combining existing ones in a way nobody had tried. His colleagues thought it was a waste of time. He kept going.
The result was the CT scanner. A machine that could see what had always been there but never visible. The body had not changed. The capacity to see it had.
He did not invent the interior of the human body. He built the instrument that could finally read it.
Brands are an extension of this. Collective identities, rooted in what uniquely clicks for the people behind them. When a brand finds what is truly its own, not designed, but recognised, it doesn't just define itself. It makes others click at scale.
The ones that last, that become undeniable, are not designed from the outside in. They are recognised from the inside out. Someone finds what is genuinely theirs, and then builds everything around that click. Nike did not design victory. It recognised that victory was already what it was. The curve just made it visible.
My story of finding my identity is uncharted and ongoing.
For almost a decade I chased identities based on what intellectually appealed to me, what made someone great, influential, revered. I treated identity as an absolute choice, not a symbiotic discovery. Something you pick, not something you arrive at together with yourself.
I could never adopt anything that wasn't mine, no matter how much I wanted to. And I couldn't find mine either, because it scared me. What if my true identity would pull me apart from the greatness I so badly wanted?
I wandered like a lost traveller, going from village to village, from one borrowed shape into the next.
The scariest thing is to move through the world without a shape, in a world that keeps insisting it has found its.
But beneath all of it, the searching, the borrowed shapes, the decade of wrong turns, the identity was still breathing. It had never left. It was just waiting for me to stop trying to design it.
The same is true of every brand that has ever truly lost its way and found it again. Apple in 1997. Burberry in 2001. The identity was always there. The work was learning to stop covering it.
That is the only thing I know for certain, about identity, mine or anyone else's. You cannot construct what can only be uncovered. The instrument has to be honest before it can see clearly.
And when it finally is, it feels almost divine.
Svadharma — स्वधर्म — one's own duty, one's own nature.