The Life Between Hello and Goodbye

 Notes from an ordinary person on postponing less and enjoying more

The point, up front: Tomorrow isn't guaranteed, so I'm done saving the good things in life for the day when everything is finally sorted. Plan if you must, but give some of today to people, attention and small pleasures. They aren't a reward for getting life organised. They are the life.

Everything below is either why I believe that or what I'm doing about it.

The habit that gets in the way

I make plans. The week, the year, the next holiday, the next financial milestone. And I have a quiet habit that goes with them: I'll call him when things are less hectic. I'll take that walk when the weather's better. I'll enjoy all this properly once a few more things fall into place.

Every now and then I catch myself behaving as if the future has already confirmed its attendance.

It hasn't. That gap between what I assume and what I know is what this piece is about.

I'm not qualified to teach anyone how to live. I still get impatient in traffic, lose twenty minutes to my phone, put off things I know I should do, and treat a minor inconvenience as if it deserves a committee meeting. But one question has stuck with me lately: if so much of life is out of my hands, what happens if I pay more attention to the part that isn't?

Why "later" is a shaky promise

I go to sleep every night without a guarantee that morning will find me awake. I leave home for work, a walk, a drive, some shopping, and I don't know for certain that I'll come back the same evening.

I know that sounds heavy for an ordinary Thursday, and I'm not suggesting anyone lie awake over it. That would be a miserable way to spend a perfectly good night. It's just that the uncertainty is there whether I think about it or not, and I mostly behave as if tomorrow is a confirmed appointment. I plan meetings three months out. I worry about retirement ten years away. And I postpone a call to someone I love because I'm too busy today.

So, if "later" isn't guaranteed, putting off the people and moments that matter is the one bet I shouldn't keep making. This isn't a reason to be anxious. It's a reason to look at an ordinary day with more curiosity.

Where the good life is

Look at what I've enjoyed most, and almost none of it was on a plan. A long conversation that ran over time. A ridiculously good dosa. Rain I stopped to watch instead of converting into a traffic forecast. A walk in the hills where nobody needed anything from me.

That doesn't mean I should stop planning, stop working or spend recklessly. I like a sensible plan as much as anyone. I just don't want the plan to become the whole of life.

I can't negotiate an extension, submit a request for another decade, or appeal an unexpected ending. But I do have some say in what goes into the time in between. I'd rather fill more of it with people, curiosity, work that matters and small pleasures than with grudges, regrets and unread messages.

I know which sounds better. Remembering it in the middle of a frustrating day is another matter. Take traffic. I can be furious that it's crawling at five kilometers an hour, or I can accept that for the next twenty minutes I've been cast as a very expensive statue behind a steering wheel. The traffic moves no faster either way, but on the days, I manage the second, I reach home in a better mood.

Or growing older. I can resent it, or I can notice the stories I've collected, the mistakes I can finally laugh about, and the sense to avoid repeating at least some of them. Some. Let's not get carried away.

And I can wait for the perfect life before allowing myself to be happy, or I can enjoy a good coffee, an honest conversation and a quiet evening as they are. They're not consolation prizes. Most days they're the actual life.

Five small habits that put the point to work

These aren't rules and I haven't mastered any of them. Each one is a way of not saving today for later.

1. In the morning, before the world starts making demands.

My first instinct is to reach for the phone and see what went wrong overnight. Lately I try, when I remember, to wait a minute. Open the window. Notice the light. Take a breath. It isn't meditation, and I haven't bought any incense. I just notice that here I am, another morning. And if my very next thought is the 10 a.m. meeting, so be it. I'm not a monk.

Why it helps: the day starts with one minute that belongs to me, not to my inbox or phone.

2. When I meet someone, give them more of my attention.

The shopkeeper, the security guard, the colleague I've known for years, the person at home who has heard my stories a hundred times. I'm often composing my reply while the other person is still talking. When I put the phone down, remember a name, or ask "How are you, really?", the conversation changes. People rarely remember what I said, but they do remember whether I was listening. And it costs nothing. No GST, no subscription, no annual maintenance contract.

Why it helps: people are the part of life I'm most tempted to postpone.

3. When something goes wrong, leave a small gap before reacting.

Someone cuts across my lane. The laptop hangs just before I save. Someone says something irritating at exactly the wrong moment. My first reaction is automatic, and I'm usually certain I'm right and quick to produce the evidence. A pause helps, though: a breath, some humor, the thought that the other person may be having a worse day than I am. I don't get this right often. But when I do let one irritation pass, I'm glad I didn't let one bad minute spoil the next ten.

Why it helps: I only get so many minutes, and I don't want to hand them to the wrong things.

4. Enjoy one thing without making it a task.

Coffee without answering emails. A meal without the news. A song without skipping to the next one. I've become very efficient at doing several things at once, and I'm not sure I've become any good at enjoying even one of them. So now and then I do just one thing, not as a productivity technique but because the coffee is there. And if it goes cold while I'm busy talking, there's a microwave. Lukewarm coffee is not a philosophical crisis.

Why it helps: a small pleasure only counts if I'm actually there for it.

5. At night, take stock without putting myself on trial.

Three questions.

• Did I enjoy anything today?
• Did I make something a little easier for someone?
• Is there one thing I'd do differently tomorrow?

Some days the answers are encouraging.

On others, the main achievement is getting through the day without making it harder for myself or anyone else. That counts too. It's not a quarterly review of my soul.

Why it helps: it makes me notice the day before it's gone.

None of this guarantee’s happiness, and it won't make grief disappear. Life can be unfair in ways no coffee will fix. But there are small spaces where I can choose how to respond, who to call and what to let myself enjoy. I need reminding of that. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Planning is still allowed

I spend a lot of time getting ready to live. When the job is settled. When the money is enough. When the house is done. When the children are settled. Then another milestone turns up. Milestones, it seems, reproduce when nobody's looking.

There's nothing wrong with planning, earning or building a future. That's part of living too. I'm just trying to remember that the life I'm preparing for is also the one happening while I prepare.

Back to the point

A breath goes out and another comes in. A conversation ends. A day becomes a memory. I don't want to turn every breath into philosophy, because that would make breathing exhausting. But it does remind me that life keeps moving, that I can't hold on to every moment, and that I can't guarantee the next one.

Life doesn't always arrive as the gift I'd have chosen. Some days the wrapping is lovely. Some days it looks as though the delivery company dropped it down a flight of stairs. And some days I suspect I've been handed somebody else's parcel. I'm not trying to paste a cheerful slogan over a hard day. Where I can, I still change what I can, ask for help when something hurts, help someone else through a rough patch, and look for meaning even when it doesn't arrive ready-made.

So, the question I try to ask isn't whether I'll wake up tomorrow. It's what I'm doing with the fact that I'm awake today. Maybe that's what getting wiser looks like, at least for me: noticing a bit sooner, apologising a bit more readily, laughing at myself a bit more often, and trying again without announcing it.

I don't know whether I'll wake up tomorrow. Neither do you. That's not a reason to worry about tonight. It's a reason to stop saving every good thing for some imaginary day when life is finally organised.

So, while I'm here, I'd like to make time for the conversation, drink the coffee before it goes cold, laugh at a day that refuses to cooperate, and tell the people who matter that they matter.

While the Day Is Ours

I can't promise you tomorrow, and I can't promise me; But there's a cup of coffee and a friend I'll call at three. So, here's to getting started, and to getting it wrong too, and to saying "I'm glad you're here" before the day is through.

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A note from the author

This grew out of my own experiences and the questions I keep circling. I haven't figured it out completely. I get impatient, I get distracted, my plans go sideways, and I need reminding to enjoy the day I'm living.

These are a few thoughts I've been turning over, and I wanted to share them. Keep what's useful, ignore the rest, and please don't turn any of it into another item on your to-do list.

Atma Bodh 5/10

The question of action: What you do, why you do it, and what changes when you know

Atma Bodha by Adi Shankaracharya | Bhashya by Swami Nikhilananda

In Blog 4, we explored how the ordinary material of life — its difficulties, its patterns, its accumulated choices — is itself the preparation for self-knowledge. We looked at karma not as cosmic accounting but as the shaping of character through action. We met the four qualifications and found them operating in the very fabric of daily experience. Now we turn to the question of action itself: What is the difference between practice as performance and practice as genuine transformation? Between praying outward and invoking inward? And what does Vedanta actually ask of you amidst a busy, complicated, fully human life?

I want to start with an admission that took me a long time to make, which is that most of my spiritual practice for years was essentially a more sophisticated version of shopping. I was accumulating — experiences, techniques, traditions, teachers — with the same underlying logic I brought to every other area of acquisition: more is more, and the right combination will eventually produce the result I am looking for. What I was doing looked like a search for freedom. What it actually was, in significant measure, was a search for a better, more spiritually credentialed version of the same self I had always been.

The teaching I want to explore in this blog is the one that broke that pattern — or at least, began to. It is the Vedantic understanding of what genuine practice is, what the difference is between prayer directed outward and invocation directed inward, and what it means to act in the world from a position of genuine non-attachment rather than the performance of non-attachment. In fact, it is not a prayer. It is an invocation. Prayer tends to be outwardly and that is the principal failure of the prayer. Vedantic thoughts broke this shell or mask without breaking, by making me realise that it’s the inward invocation of one’s identity of who we are or who we are not, that made the transformation germinate.

Invocation and worship: The direction of attention

When I was younger, my understanding of prayer was essentially this: there is a God who is somewhere other than here, and prayer is the communication directed toward that God. Petitionary prayer asked for things. Devotional prayer expressed gratitude or love. Both were outward-directed — across a gap between me and the divine. This is a genuine and valuable form of spiritual life. The tradition acknowledges it and honours it. But Vedanta asks: what if the gap is an artefact of perspective?

What if the sacred is not elsewhere but is the very ground of this awareness that is reading these words? Not as a comforting metaphor but as a literal description of the structure of reality?

The shift from prayer-as-petition to what I am calling invocation is the shift from directing attention outward toward a “divine object” to turning attention inward toward the “divine subject” — the awareness that is doing the praying. It is not a rejection of devotion. In fact, the deepest devotion the tradition knows is precisely this: the recognition that the one I am loving, the one I am worshipping, is not separate from what I most fundamentally am. The river returning to the ocean does not stop being water. It simply recognises that it always was.

A friend of mine who has practised Sufi meditation for years described a moment in deep prayer when what he had always experienced as the presence of God suddenly shifted, it was no longer something he was reaching toward but something he was already inside of, that was already inside of him, that the reaching itself had been obscuring. He said it was not dramatic. It was more like remembering something he had always known and had kept forgetting. That moment — whatever tradition it occurs in — is what Vedanta calls Brahma-upasana: the recognition of Brahman as the Self.

The three methods: A practical architecture for genuine change

Vedanta offers a specific methodology — three interdependent practices that together constitute a complete approach to the work of self-knowledge. These are Shravana (listening), Manana (reflection), and Nididhyasana (sustained contemplation). I want to describe these not as spiritual techniques but as modes of engagement with reality that most of us have experienced in partial form, in contexts we might not immediately associate with spiritual practice.

Shravana is receptive, open listening — the quality of attention in which something can reach you, not just your surface understanding but the level where change actually happens. Think of a conversation in which someone said something that landed — really landed, not just as information but as a recognition. Perhaps a friend told you something about yourself that was uncomfortable and true. Perhaps a passage in a book suddenly illuminated something you had been circling around for years without being able to name. That quality of landing — where the words go past the surface and contact something deeper — is Shravana. Most of our information intake is not like this. Most of it skims the surface. Shravana requires a quality of openness and quiet that is increasingly rare in a world optimised for speed.

Manana is the honest, sustained engagement with what has been received. Not just thinking about it intellectually but allowing it to meet the places where you are still uncertain, still resistant, still confused. Think of the difference between reading a self-help book and agreeing with all of it, versus reading the same book and sitting with the chapters that make you uncomfortable — the ones that describe something you recognise in yourself that you would prefer not to recognise. The second is Manana. It requires a willingness to let the teaching disturb you. To bring your doubts not as reasons to dismiss the teaching but as the precise material that the teaching needs to work with.

Nididhyasana is the sustained practice of dwelling in the truth of what has been understood — not just thinking about it but resting in it, returning to it repeatedly until it becomes the default orientation rather than the exceptional moment. This is the practice closest to what we might call meditation, though it is more specific than that term usually implies. It is the deliberate, repeated return to the recognition: I am not this thought. I am not this emotion. I am the awareness in which thought and emotion arise. Not as an affirmation chanted at anxiety, but as a genuine resting of attention in what is most fundamental.

Karma yoga in the kitchen and the boardroom

One of the most immediately applicable teachings in this entire tradition is what the Bhagavad Gita calls Karma Yoga — action without attachment to its fruits. I want to make this utterly concrete, because in its abstract formulation it can sound like a recipe for indifference, and it is precisely the opposite.

Karma Yoga is not doing less or caring less. It is doing fully — bringing your complete skill, attention, and care to whatever is in front of you — while releasing your identification with the outcome. The distinction is this: when I work on something from ego-attachment, my sense of self-worth is tied to the result. If the project succeeds, I feel validated. If it fails, I feel diminished. The quality of my being becomes contingent on the outcome, and this contingency is what the tradition calls bondage. Not because success or failure are unimportant, but because when my sense of who I am depends on them, every action is corrupted by anxiety.

I had an experience of Karma Yoga — without knowing its name at the time — during a period when I was working on something that genuinely mattered to me and that failed, publicly and painfully. In the immediate aftermath, what I expected was the familiar collapse into self-criticism and diminishment. What happened instead — and I still don't entirely understand why — was something different. I found myself able to recognise. I brought my best to this. The outcome belongs to factors larger than my effort. The effort itself was complete. I did not succeed, but I did not lose something essential about myself in failing.

That quality of completeness in the doing, independent of the result, is Karma Yoga. It is not detachment. It is freedom — the specific freedom of acting from a place in yourself that the outcome cannot reach.

Relationships as practice: The most demanding karma yoga

If there is one domain in which all of these teachings — invocation, the three methods, non-attachment — are tested most severely, it is our close relationships. A marriage, a long friendship, a relationship with a parent or a child. These are the places where our deepest patterns of identification are most fully activated and where the gap between our philosophical understanding and our actual practice is most honestly revealed.

I have been in situations with people I love where everything I understand intellectually about non-attachment, about the Self, about the distinction between the permanent and the passing — all of it vanished entirely, replaced by something much more immediate and much messier. The specific pain of feeling unseen, or the specific anger of feeling wronged, or the specific fear of losing someone whose presence feels essential to who I am. In those moments, I am not practising Vedanta. I am having a human experience, which is exactly what I am supposed to be having.

But what the teaching offers is not the elimination of those experiences. It is the slow, gradual, practice-by-practice development of a wider container — a recognition that does not disappear entirely under the pressure of those experiences but that remains, even faintly, as an available perspective. Not 'I should not feel this' but 'I am feeling this and I am not entirely consumed by it. Something is still here that knows the feeling.' That 'something that knows' — that thread of awareness that persists through the intensity of relational experience — is what the whole of Vedanta is pointing toward.

 

Learning Aspect

The practice of Vedanta is not separate from daily life. It is the quality of attention you bring to daily life — the distinction between being in a conversation and being a witness to the conversation, between being your reactions and noticing your reactions, between working for an outcome and working with full investment from a place that the outcome cannot define. These distinctions are practised in ordinary moments, not reserved for formal sitting.

 Connecting Theme to Self

Choose one relationship — ideally one that contains some ongoing tension or pattern — and commit to a week of watching rather than reacting. Not suppressing your reactions but noticing them slightly before or alongside expressing them. Who is it that is irritated? Who is it that wants to be understood? Who is it that is afraid of rejection or judgment? Just notice. The noticing does not resolve the relationship's difficulties immediately. But it shifts you from being entirely inside the pattern to having a small measure of perspective on it. That small shift, sustained over time, is Shravana in the most intimate classroom available.

Atma Bodh 4/10

The process of self-knowledge: Why you are already on the path and do not know it

Atma Bodha by Adi Shankaracharya | Bhashya by Swami Nikhilananda 

In Blog 3, we explored the architecture of a human life — the four stages, the four purposes, the four vocational temperaments. We saw that the tradition does not ask us to abandon life but to understand it more deeply. Now the question becomes: How does self-knowledge actually unfold? What enables it? And why does so much of what looks like ordinary experience turn out to be preparation?

I used to think of spiritual growth as something separate from daily life. A compartment. The meditation practice in the morning, the inquiry in the evening, the retreat once a year — and in between, the ordinary life of meetings and meals and minor/major irritations. I imagined these two streams running parallel, occasionally touching but essentially distinct.

What the Vedantic teaching has gradually dismantled is that compartmentalization. Because the tradition insists, with remarkable precision, that the ordinary life — its specific difficulties, its relational friction, its repeated patterns of craving and aversion — is not an obstacle to the inquiry. It is the primary material of the inquiry. The conference room and the meditation cushion are not separate classrooms. They are the same classroom, with different teacher.

Karma: The Long Preparation You Did Not Know You Were Doing

The concept of karma is one of the most misused ideas in popular culture. It has become a kind of cosmic accounting system: do good, get good; do bad, get bad. But that is a crude reduction of something far holistic, subtler and far more interesting.

Karma, at its most fundamental, means action — and specifically, the principle that every action leaves an imprint, not just in the external world but in the structure of the mind and character of the one who acts. Every time I respond to a difficult situation with honesty rather than self-protection, something in me is shaped. Every time I choose the comfortable lie over the uncomfortable truth, something in me is shaped differently. Accumulated over years, over decades, these choices constitute the quality of the person who shows up — their capacity for clarity, their ability to sustain attention on what matters, their readiness to be genuinely transformed by a teaching.

The tradition extends this principle across lifetimes — not as a metaphysical indulgence but as an explanation for something we observe everywhere: the enormous variation in human readiness for this kind of inquiry. I have sat with people who, at thirty, carry a quality of understanding that others seem not to arrive at until seventy. And I have sat with people in their seventies who, despite decades of outward religious practice, seem no closer to genuine self-inquiry than they were at twenty. The tradition says: this variation is not random. It reflects the specific momentum of each individual's journey — the karma they carry, the work that has already been done even when it is not consciously remembered.

This is humbling for me personally. It means that wherever I am in my understanding right now is the precise result of everything I have done and chosen and experienced — not just in this lifetime but in the accumulated trajectory that preceded it. I cannot compare my starting point with anyone else's. I can only work honestly with where I actually am. And this moment — this reading, this inquiry — is itself karma being made.

The Guru: Why You Need a Mirror That Does Not Flatter

I resisted the concept of the Guru for a long time. The word conjured images of charismatic figures with devoted followers, of the kind of spiritual celebrity culture that has produced as many disasters as genuine awakenings. And that wariness is not unreasonable. But in the Vedantic tradition, the Guru is something very specific and, once properly understood, something that is neither exotic nor particularly threatening.

The word Guru means 'remover of darkness' — gu (darkness) and ru (that which removes). A Guru is someone who has themselves arrived at a genuine, stable recognition of the Self — not as a temporary experience but as the ground of their being — and who, from that position of clarity, can see the specific nature of the student's confusion and address it directly. The Guru does not add knowledge. The Guru removes the specific obstacle that is preventing the student's own recognition.

Think about the most important moments of genuine change in your own life. Were they primarily moments of receiving new information? Or were they moments when someone — a trusted friend, an honest teacher, a well-timed challenge — held up a mirror and showed you something about yourself that you had not been able to see on your own? Something that, once seen, could not be unseen? That is the Guru's function. The most important mirrors in my life have not always been people I would formally describe as spiritual teachers. They have sometimes been difficult relationships, experiences of failure, or a moment of confrontation that stripped away a comfortable self-narrative.

Swami Nikhilananda's Bhashya functions this way for me. To read it is to be in the presence of someone who has inhabited this territory — not as an armchair philosopher but as a practitioner, a person for whom these ideas are not concepts but landmarks of lived experience. The commentary holds up a mirror. And what it shows is not always comfortable.

The Four Qualifications: The Soil in Which Understanding Grows

Shankaracharya is very explicit that self-knowledge requires a specific quality of readiness — Sadhana Chatustaya, the four-fold preparation. I want to describe each of these not in the traditional Sanskrit terms alone but in the language of everyday experience, because I have found all four of them operating — or conspicuously absent — in my own life and in the lives of people around me.

The first is Viveka — discrimination. This is the capacity to distinguish between what is permanent and what is passing, between the Self and what the Self is not. In daily life, it shows up as the ability to hold experience without being entirely absorbed by it — to feel deeply without losing the thread of what is witnessing the feeling. A friend of mine who is a doctor described it this way: when she is with a patient who is suffering, she is genuinely moved. The suffering is real and she meets it fully. But she maintains, simultaneously, a quality of clarity that allows her to act skillfully rather than simply being overwhelmed. She does not distance herself from the suffering. She holds it without being consumed by it. That is Viveka in action.

The second is Vairagya — non-attachment, or dispassion. I want to be very careful about this one because it is widely misunderstood as emotional coldness or indifference to the world's beauty and pain. It is precisely not that. Vairagya is not the suppression of feeling. It is the natural consequence of Viveka: when you have genuinely begun to see — through experience, through loss, through honest inquiry — that no object of desire can ultimately deliver the completeness you are seeking, the compulsive quality of desire softens. Not because desire is bad, but because its game has been seen through. I experienced something like this after my father died. The grief was enormous. But in the middle of it, something shifted in my relationship to my own ambitions. Several things I had been working hard to achieve suddenly looked very different — not unimportant, but no longer carrying the weight I had been assigning them. I was not depressed. I was, in some strange way, more honest. That is the beginning of Vairagya.

The third is Shat Sampat — six disciplines of the inner life. These include Shama (the calming of the mind), Dama (the restraint of the senses — the ability to choose what you attend to rather than being dragged by every stimulus), Uparati (the capacity to remain where you are rather than constantly seeking elsewhere), Titiksha (the equanimity to endure the opposites — praise and blame, success and failure, heat and cold — without being destabilized), Shraddha (genuine trust in the teaching and the teacher), and Samadhana (the ability to focus, to bring full attention to what is actually in front of you). Together these constitute the kind of inner stability without which genuine inquiry is impossible. You cannot examine the contents of an agitated lake. You need, at minimum, a degree of stillness.

The fourth is Mumukshutva — the burning desire for liberation. This is the most important and the most difficult to manufacture. It is not an intellectual preference for freedom. It is the specific quality of longing that arises when you have genuinely exhausted the usual strategies for happiness and recognized their limits. Nachiketa had it. That refusal to be deflected by anything less than the real answer. Most of us have it in flashes — in moments of grief, or silence, or the particular kind of clarity that arrives at 3am when the usual distractions have stopped working. The work of practice is to let those flashes grow into a steadier flame.

Self-Control as an Act of Love, Not Punishment

I want to end this blog with something that genuinely surprised me: the relationship between self-control and self-knowledge. I had always experienced self-control as a form of self-discipline imposed from outside — the voice of 'should,' the mechanism of willpower grinding against desire. It felt like violence, or at best like an ongoing negotiation with an unruly internal population.

What the Vedantic teaching is offering is completely different. Self-control, in this framework, is not the suppression of the self. It is the deepening of attention — the capacity to choose where the mind rests, what it gives its energy to, what it allows to matter. And this is not punishment. It is care. When I choose to step away from a conversation that is feeding reactive anger rather than genuine understanding, I am not suppressing my feelings. I am choosing my attention wisely. When I choose to sit with discomfort rather than reach immediately for the nearest distraction, I am not practicing asceticism. I am developing the capacity to be present. That presence is what makes everything else in this teaching possible.

An acquaintance of mine, twenty-two-year-old, was confused after few years of corporate work, but has now found her own version of this viveka. She left the corporate path and spent two years in work that paid less but demanded more of her actual attention and care. She told me recently that she does not know if she is on the 'right' path. But she knows, for the first time, that she is on her own path. That knowing — modest, honest, without drama — is the beginning of Viveka. It is also the beginning of genuine readiness for self-knowledge.

 

Learning Aspect

The preparation for self-knowledge is not separate from the living of a life. Every honest confrontation with a difficult truth, every choice to stay present with discomfort rather than flee, every moment of recognizing that what you were seeking in an external outcome was something that no external outcome can actually provide — all of this is preparation. It is karma, working quietly on the clay of character. You are already on the path. The question is whether you know it.

Connecting Theme to Self

Pick one of the four qualifications and live with it honestly for a week. Not as a concept, but as a lens on your actual day. 

1. When your partner or colleague does something that irritates you — pause. Is what you're reacting to a permanent truth, or something that will look different by evening? When you feel proud of something you've done — look closely. What exactly is feeling proud? And how long does it last before the next thing arrives? This is Viveka in practice. Not on a cushion, not in a text — but in the friction and small satisfactions of an ordinary Tuesday or an easy Sunday. It asks nothing dramatic of you. It only asks you to notice what is solid and what is passing, again and again, in the material your life is already made of. That noticing — quiet, repeated, unglamorous — is the whole practice.
2. For one week, choose one area of your life where you feel a compulsive need for a specific outcome—perhaps a clean inbox, a perfectly tidy kitchen, or a specific level of recognition from a colleague. When you feel that familiar itch of "If I just get this done, I will finally be at peace," pause. Ask yourself: "What specific feeling am I hoping this outcome will give me?" Once you identify it—whether it is safety, worthiness, or relief—try to acknowledge that while the outcome might be useful, it is not the source of that feeling. Work toward the outcome as a matter of duty or necessity, but consciously release the expectation that the result will provide the "final completeness" you crave. Observe how the frantic energy behind the task shifts when you no longer ask the object to do the work of the soul.
3. Choose one "input" in your life that habitually triggers an automatic reaction—this could be your phone notifications, the evening news, or the first five minutes of your commute. Before you engage or react, create a deliberate "buffer zone." Take three conscious breaths. During these breaths, practice Shama (calming the mind) and Dama (restraining the impulse to react). Ask yourself: "Does this stimulus require my immediate participation, or can I choose how and when to attend to it?" This is not about asceticism; it is about reclaiming the sovereignty of your own attention from the autopilot of the world. Notice how the world changes when you stop being a responder to every stimulus and become a deliberate observer of your own focus.
4. At the end of your day, look back at the moments where you felt frustrated, anxious, or particularly stuck. Identify the "strategy" you used to try and resolve that discomfort. Did you vent to a friend? Did you distract yourself with scrolling? Did you try to control the behavior of someone else? Write these strategies down, not to judge them, but to look at them as a completed list. Then, ask yourself honestly: "How many times have I used this exact strategy to find lasting peace, and how many times has it actually worked?" This is not meant to be cynical. It is meant to be deeply, empirically honest. By recognizing the finite reach of your usual strategies, you allow the quiet, persistent question of Mumukshutva to surface: "If these things cannot provide the lasting foundation I am looking for, where else might it be found?"

When the Prime Minister asks you to stop buying gold — Here is what you should do instead

A practical guide for Indian households navigating the gap between national interest and personal financial security

The clarion call from Hyderabad

On the evening of May 10, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a massive gathering at the Secunderabad Parade Grounds in Hyderabad and did something no Indian Prime Minister had done in living memory. In the middle of a political rally, he issued seven economic appeals — not as policy announcements, not as budget provisions, but as a direct personal request to every Indian household.

Among them, one landed with the weight of a cultural provocation:
"For a year, be it any function — we shouldn't buy gold jewellery."

By the next morning, the Sensex had crashed over 1,300 points. The Nifty dropped 330 points. jewellery stocks — Titan, Kalyan Jewellers, Senco Gold, Sky Gold — fell up to 12% intraday. Markets read the appeal as a sign that the government was genuinely worried. And it had reason to be.

The backdrop was severe. Crude oil had spiked to a 52-week high of $126 per barrel as the West Asia crisis deepened and the Strait of Hormuz deadlock disrupted Persian Gulf supply lines. India, which imports nearly 88% of its crude oil requirement, was watching its import bill balloon. Simultaneously, India's forex reserves had slipped from $728 billion in February 2026 to around $691 billion by late April. The rupee was at record lows against the dollar. And gold — India's second largest import after crude oil — had cost the nation nearly $72 billion in FY26 alone.

The arithmetic behind the PM's appeal was not wrong. But for the 140 crore Indians who heard it, the question was immediate and personal: If not gold, then what?

This piece is an attempt to answer that question honestly — with context, with data, and with practical guidance that respects both the national concern and the household's legitimate need.

Why Indians buy gold: It is not what we generally attribute to

Before we discuss alternatives, we must understand what gold does for the Indian household. This is almost always missing from the policy debate, which views gold purchases primarily as a foreign exchange problem.

For the Indian family — particularly the middle-income and lower-middle-income household — gold performs at least four distinct economic functions simultaneously:

     -   It is savings:

For hundreds of millions of households with limited access to formal financial products, gold is the most accessible, liquid, and universally trusted savings instrument available. You do not need a demat account, a broker, or literacy in financial statements. You buy it at a jeweller you trust, you store it at home, and you know its value every morning when you check the price.

- It is insurance:

When a medical emergency strikes, when a crop fails, when a business hits a rough patch, gold is the first asset a family liquidates or pledges. It requires no paperwork, no credit history, no bank relationship. It is accepted as collateral everywhere — from the largest NBFC to the smallest co-operative lender in a district town. Gold loans have surged 128% to nearly ₹4 lakh crore precisely because this collateral function is deeply embedded in how Indian households manage financial shocks.

- It is inheritance:

Gold moves across generations as the most portable and universally valued form of family wealth. It travels with daughters into their new homes, it funds grandchildren's education, it marks every significant rite of passage. This is not sentiment alone — it is a rational response to a formal estate and inheritance system that remains complex and slow.

- It beats inflation:

Over 25 years, gold has delivered an annualised return of 11.1% in rupee terms (Morgan Stanley, 2024) — significantly ahead of fixed deposits (7.3%), real estate (7%), and comfortably ahead of inflation. More pointedly: at a 30% income tax slab, a 7% FD yields a real post-tax return of approximately -1.1% annually after factoring in 6% average inflation. Gold, for much of its holding life, has not just preserved purchasing power. It has grown it.

This is the foundation. Any alternative we consider must, at minimum, replicate these four functions — or clearly explain which ones it addresses and which ones it does not.

The scale of what the PM is asking

To appreciate the weight of the request, consider the numbers. Indian households collectively hold an estimated 25,000 tonnes of gold — surpassing the combined reserves of the world's top 10 central banks — valued at approximately $2.4 trillion, equivalent to 56% of India's projected nominal GDP in 2026.

Annual demand has averaged 750–850 tonnes over the past decade. In 2024, India consumed 802.8 tonnes, valued at ₹5.15 lakh crore — a 31% increase in value over the prior year. In Q1 2025 alone, investment demand for gold jumped 54% year-on-year to 82 tonnes. The share of bars and coins (pure investment gold, as opposed to jewellery) in India's total gold demand has risen from 24% in 2020 to 32% in 2025 — meaning Indians are increasingly buying gold not just for weddings but deliberately as a financial instrument.

Crucially, approximately 85% of this gold is imported. Every tonne purchased adds directly to India's import bill and exerts pressure on the current account deficit and the rupee. This is the macroeconomic reality the PM is responding to.

But here is what makes the appeal complicated: gold import demand is not monolithic. It has two very distinct components with very different policy implications.

Ceremonial and jewellery demand — roughly 65–68% of total consumption is driven by weddings, festivals, and gifting. It is largely inelastic to price and largely inelastic to government appeals. It is also, for most of the households involved, non-negotiable. A wedding is a once-in-a-generation event. The gold bought for it carries social, cultural, and financial significance that no government scheme can easily replace.

Investment demand — bars, coins, gold ETFs, and digital gold — is roughly 32% of total and rising. This is where household behaviour can be redirected. This is where the policy target genuinely lies. And this is where smarter instruments can make a real difference.

A blanket appeal to stop buying gold treats both segments identically. It should not. What follows is a framework for the investment component specifically, with honest guidance on the ceremonial component too.

The instrument the Government built — and then abandoned

Before we discuss what is available today, we must acknowledge the instrument that was the best answer to this problem — and which the government discontinued precisely when it was most needed.

The Sovereign Gold Bond (SGB) scheme, launched by PM Modi himself in November 2015, was a genuine policy innovation. It allowed households to invest in gold — receiving the full benefit of gold price appreciation — without triggering any physical gold import. The government issued a rupee-denominated bond whose value tracked gold prices exactly. Investors also earned 2.5% annual interest. On an 8-year hold, capital gains were entirely tax-free. The instrument could be used as loan collateral. It ticked every box.

If a family invested ₹2 lakh in an SGB instead of physical gold, the country saved the foreign exchange equivalent of that purchase entirely. No gold needed to be imported. The household's wealth moved with gold prices as if they owned the metal. The national interest and the household interest were perfectly aligned.

The scheme was discontinued in 2024. The reason was fiscal: as gold prices surged, the government's redemption liability — having to repay investors at market prices — became expensive to honour. In other words, the government cancelled the very protection it had promised households at the exact moment when gold was performing best. No new tranches have been issued since.

This matters for our discussion because it reveals something important: the policy instinct to redirect gold demand into paper instruments was correct. The execution failed not because households rejected the idea but because the government's own fiscal management of the scheme was inadequate. The solution is to redesign the instrument, not to abandon the concept.

What you should actually do: A practical household framework

Given where things stand today — no new SGBs, rising gold prices, a government appeal to reduce imports — here is an honest, instrument-by-instrument guide.

For your wedding and ceremonial gold: Buy smarter, not less

The PM's appeal to skip gold at weddings will not — and should not — result in families giving up one of the most deeply embedded financial and cultural traditions in Indian life. But there is a smarter way to buy ceremonial gold that reduces both your personal cost and the national import burden:

Buy only BIS 916 hallmarked jewellery. Mandatory hallmarking, now enforced across most of India, means you know exactly what purity you are getting. Unhallmarked gold is frequently sold at 22-carat prices but is closer to 18-carat quality. Hallmarked gold also commands better resale and pledge value.

Prefer exchange schemes over fresh purchases. Many jewellers now offer old-gold exchange programmes where existing family gold is melted and recast into new designs, with charges only for making. This generates zero new import demand while meeting the ceremonial need entirely.

Separate the making charge from the gold value mentally. Making charges on jewellery range from 8% to 25% of the gold value — this is pure cost, not investment. For gold you are buying as savings rather than to wear, avoid high making-charge items. Simple bars and coins carry making charges of 1–3%.


For your investment Gold: Paper is strictly better than physical

If your primary purpose in buying gold is wealth preservation, inflation hedging, or long-term savings — not wearing it or pledging it locally — then financial gold instruments are superior to physical on every measurable dimension. Here is a clear comparison:

Gold ETFs are exchange-traded funds backed 1:1 by physical gold held in bank vaults. They track gold prices in real time, can be bought and sold in a demat account in seconds, carry no storage risk, no purity uncertainty, and cost a fraction of what physical gold costs (no making charges, no wastage, annual expense ratio of 0.4–0.5%). For FY26, long-term capital gains on gold ETFs held over 24 months are taxed at 12.5% — broadly comparable to physical gold taxation.

The one honest limitation: gold ETFs still require physical gold to be imported to back the units. They reduce your transaction costs but do not eliminate India's import burden. They are the right choice for the investor; they are not the macroeconomic panacea.

Gold Mutual Funds invest in gold ETFs through the familiar SIP wrapper — no demat account needed, starting from ₹500 per month. For the large middle-class segment that has a SIP habit but not a trading account, gold mutual funds democratise access to financial gold entirely. This is the most accessible on-ramp for first-time investors and is available through every bank and mutual fund platform.

Digital Gold (available on Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, MMTC-PAMP) allows purchases from as little as ₹1, stored in insured vaults, with physical delivery available above a threshold. It is unregulated relative to ETFs and SGBs — vault custodian risk is real — but as an accumulation vehicle for small, frequent purchases, it works well. Use it to accumulate, then convert to ETF once you cross ₹10,000.

Secondary Market SGBs — existing SGBs can still be bought and sold on the NSE and BSE secondary market, often at a small discount to the prevailing gold price. For a patient investor with a 3–8 year horizon, this remains the single best gold instrument available: gold price appreciation plus 2.5% annual interest plus tax-free capital gains at maturity. No new tranches are being issued, but secondary market liquidity exists. Check with your broker.

The honest portfolio split every household should consider

Rather than replacing gold, the practical goal is to restructure how you hold it. Here is a suggested framework based on purpose:

Purpose	Best Instrument	Why
Wedding/gifting/ceremonial	Physical (BIS 916 hallmarked)	Unavoidable; but buy smart
Emergency liquidity reserve	Physical coins/small bars	Pledgeable anywhere, instantly
Systemic savings/ wealth building	Gold ETF or Gold MF via SIP	No making charges, liquid and regulated.
Long horizon (6-9 years)	Secondary market SGB’s	Best risk-return in the category
Small frequent accumulation	Digital gold – convert to ETF	Low entry barrier

The key principle: keep physical gold only where its physical nature is essential — for ceremonies and for local collateral. For everything else, financial gold instruments give you the same economic exposure with zero storage risk, lower cost, and in the case of SGBs, additional interest income.

What the Government should do — not just ask

An appeal, however well-intentioned, is not a policy. India has tried raising gold import duties (to 15% in 2022, cut back to 6% in 2024), restricting imports through nominated agencies, and launching the Gold Monetisation Scheme — which was discontinued — and the SGB scheme — also discontinued. In virtually every case, annual gold demand has reverted to the 700–900 tonne band regardless.

The reason is simple: you cannot appeal away a rational economic behaviour. As long as fixed deposits deliver negative real returns after tax and inflation, as long as equity markets are inaccessible to Tier 2/3 India, and as long as gold remains the most reliable collateral for the informal economy, households will buy gold. The architecture of alternatives must be made genuinely compelling — not just available.

Three specific things would make a measurable difference:

Revive the SGB with a redesigned liability structure. A market-linked redemption cap, or a partial inflation-indexed structure, could limit the government's upside liability while still giving households the gold-price exposure they seek. The forex saving from even 10% demand substitution — 70–80 tonnes annually — would be substantial.

Fix the UAE-CEPA arbitrage. The India-UAE trade agreement effectively allows gold to enter India at 5% duty after last year's Budget cut. This loophole is a policy design error that inflates the import bill structurally. Correcting it addresses forex drain without touching household behaviour at all.

Invest in the gold loan ecosystem. India's 25,000-tonne household gold stock is the world's largest distributed collateral base. The RBI's 2025 Lending Against Gold and Silver Collateral Directions, if implemented well, could expand financial inclusion by an estimated 55% through gold-backed credit by 2030 — turning what critics call "idle" savings into working capital for MSMEs, farmers, and small entrepreneurs. This transforms gold from an import problem into a development asset.

The bottom line

PM Modi's Hyderabad appeal deserves to be taken seriously — not dismissed as political rhetoric. The macroeconomic pressures he was responding to are real. A $72 billion gold import bill, a weakening rupee, and forex reserves under pressure from oil shocks and FII withdrawals are legitimate concerns that warrant a public conversation.

But the conversation needs to be more precise than "stop buying gold." Indians buy gold because it works. It has delivered 11% annualised returns over 25 years. It requires no intermediary. It is universally accepted as collateral. It has protected family wealth through every economic shock from 1991 to the COVID pandemic to the current West Asia crisis.

The right ask is not to stop buying gold. It is to buy it smarter. To hold the investment portion in financial instruments that give you identical economic exposure without the import cost. To use the government's own SGB scheme — when it is revived — rather than physical bars. To pledge rather than sell when you need liquidity. To separate the ceremonial from the financial in your thinking about gold.

India's households did not build a $2.4 trillion gold reserve by being irrational. They built it by being prudent in a system that gave them limited alternatives. The answer to that is better alternatives — not a clarion call to abandon the one that has always worked.


[Data sources: World Gold Council (Gold Demand Trends 2024, Q1 2025); Reserve Bank of India; Morgan Stanley India Research (October 2025); HSBC Global; 5paisa Research; Kotak Neo; Value Research; Business Standard; Ministry of Commerce & Industry; National Health Authority (PM-JAY)].

Economic slide - Middling the middle class

 The model code of Conduct is not just for election, but it is for execution.

As I sift through these certain reports/articles on the state of economics in mid April 2026, I’m struck by a profound sense of "economic vertigo." On one hand, our macroeconomic buffers look sturdy; on the other, the floor is dropping out for the Indian household. To understand why, we have to look past the headlines and pin down the exact numbers and periods where the math stops adding up for the common man.

Here is my first-person analysis of this unfolding crisis, with every metric anchored to its specific timeframe.

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1. The Material Truth: Data That Moves the Needle

When I read the articles on the state of economy in the columns, I focus on "material" points—those that actually change the trajectory of the economy. These aren't just numbers; they are the structural reality of India in 2026.

The Inflation Disconnect (February–March 2026)

The gap between the "official" and the "lived" experience is now a chasm.

• The Data: In March 2026, the RBI’s Household Survey revealed perceived inflation at 7.2%, while the official CPI-based reading for February 2026 was just 3.2%. Furthermore, as of March 2026, households expected prices to rise by 8.5% over the next three months and 8.8% over the next year.
• Why it’s material: This proves the CPI has a "structural blind spot," particularly in housing, where it fails to capture the double-digit rent hikes reported by brokers in early 2026. If the "thermometer" is broken, the policy treatment (interest rates) will be wrong.

The Double Oil Shock (March–April 2026)

We are being squeezed by both the fuel tank and the frying pan.

• The Data: Crude oil hit $115 per barrel in March 2026, blowing past the RBI’s baseline assumption of $85. Simultaneously, retail edible oil prices jumped by Re 1 to Rs 4 per kg in just the second week of April 2026.
• Why it’s material: India imports 90% of its edible oil. In March 2026, palm oil imports fell 19% as refiners grew price-wary. This isn't a luxury problem; it’s a direct hit to the nutrition and budgets of the 400 million internal migrants who are most sensitive to food and fuel costs.

The Currency Defense (FY2025–March 2026)

The Rupee is under siege from offshore forces.

• The Data: In the last fiscal year (ending March 2026), the Rupee fell 10% against the dollar, crossing the 95 mark. To combat this, the RBI spent $30.5 billion in foreign exchange reserves in March 2026 alone. Between FY25 and FY26, the RBI had to supply roughly $195 billion in foreign exchange to the market.
• Why it’s material: This massive intervention limits our ability to fund growth. It shows that the offshore NDF market ($149 billion-a-day as of early 2026) is dictating our domestic reality.

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2. The Great Wage-Profit Divergence: A Two-Decade Shift

The most damning piece of evidence I found is the "dual caste system" emerging on our factory floors. This isn't a recent glitch; it’s a twenty-year structural slide.

The Decadal Shift in Employment (2001–2022)

We have moved from a workforce of partners to a workforce of "contractors."

• The Metric: According to the Annual Survey of Industries, contract workers' share of organized factory employment surged from under 22% in 2001-02 to over 40% in 2021-22.
• The Impact: This shift has stripped millions of bargaining power. In some plants in 2026, the total labor cost differential between a permanent and contract worker is 78% to 85%.

The Stagnation Period (2019–2024)

While the "top" thrived, the "bottom" stood still.

• Corporate Profits: Profits before tax for 33,000 sampled companies nearly quadrupled between 2019-20 and 2022-23. In FY 2023-24 alone, Nifty 50 companies posted profit growth of 22.3%.
• Real Wages: Conversely, data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey shows that real wages for regular workers contracted by 0.07% annually between 2021-22 and 2023-24, even as GDP grew at 6.7% in the same period.
• The Material Reality: Wage costs in Indian manufacturing account for a measly 6% to 7% of total production costs. A 10% wage hike would only raise total costs by 0.7%—a "rounding error" for companies with 22% profit growth—yet wages remain suppressed.

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3. The Non-Material "Noise"

In my view, several points being quoted in the media are symptoms, not causes. They are not "material" to solving the problem, but rather the sound of the engine breaking down.

• Labor Violence as a "Dispute": The stone-pelting and arson in Haryana’s Manesar and Noida (reported in April 2026) are often quoted as "labor disputes." I disagree. These are not disputes; they are the "social manifestation" of inflation outpacing stagnant wages for a decade. Treating this as a law-and-order issue is a distraction from the economic root.
• RBI’s "Displeasure": The RBI expressing "deep displeasure" at banks in March 2026 for profiting from currency gaps is a rhetorical point. Banks will always arbitrage where gaps exist; the material issue is the $40 billion in NDF positions that the RBI cannot directly control.
• "Hope" for Peace: Projections relying on the "fragile ceasefire" between the US and Iran announced in early April 2026 are speculative. Banking on geopolitical calm isn't a policy; it’s a prayer.

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Final Assessment: The Middle-Class Trap

As we look toward FY27, where the Current Account Deficit (CAD) could rise to $50–60 billion, the window for the middle class to improve their standard of living is closing.

The policy initiated in April 2026—a 35% hike in minimum wages for unskilled workers in Haryana—is a reactive "crisis response," not a stable institutional design. Until we implement automatic inflation-linked wage revisions and move away from the "contractualization" that has doubled over the last 20 years, the middle class will continue to see their income gains swallowed by the "cooking oil tin and the gas cylinder bill."

The time bought by our foreign exchange buffers is running out. We are currently managing volatility, but we are not yet enabling growth.

 

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This piece owes its intellectual spark to the work of Ajit Ranade and Ananth Narayan, though the responsibility for the framing of this narrative and any technical shortcomings lies solely with me.