Over the last three years, thanks to WhatsApp University, have been exposed to the sermons of 3 corporate monks. The most famous one is Gaur Gopal Das of ISKCON, who is my junior from COEP, 95 batch. Another is Swami Mukandananda from my alma mater, IIM Calcutta, and before that IITD. Mukundananda runs his own ashrams teaching JK Yog in Dallas and Cuttack. And the third monk is Nithya Shanti, a Boston born XLRI MBA – who has given up his monkhood and is now a full time householder and corporate trainer. Incidentally, Nithya lives at Magarpatta in Pune, not very far from the ashram of Pune’s most famous guru, Osho. Nithya worked in the corporate world for a few years before he discovered his spiritual calling. When I meet him, I should ask if there is a XAT equivalent test for monkhood. Do you have to convince the abbey about why you want to leave materialism for spiritualism? Or is there such an undersupply of monk aspirants that trespassers are recruited? If there was an entrance exam, Nithya aced it. He was admitted to a monastery in Thailand, where he spent 6 years in monk training.

Nithya is the name that our friend adopted after taking up monkhood. And sometimes I wonder, does a name really matter? Does a change in name really mean so much to life? What would happen if instead of relying on the ones that your parent chose for you, societies allow you to choose your own name, later on? I wonder what new name should I adopt? Suggestions welcome. One of the problems of my being a bhakt of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, is that God does not creep in too often into my thoughts and conversations. I sit on the boundary between agnosticism and atheism, but the closest that I get to religion is in Nithya’s Buddhism. Listened in to Nithya’s training session with Future Generali, an insurance company – courtesy my friend, Rohan Singal. I liked how Nithya included God in an interesting happiness framework. As we go through life, we keep on making a lot of To Do lists. The first To Do list is the one that I make for myself. (That’s what I normally do first thing in the morning.) The second is a To Do list for people around you. And the third is our To Do list for God. The secret of unhappiness is to concentrate on the last two lists; the secret of happiness is to focus on the first one. As a wise one said, sometime I am amazed by the quality of advice that I give to others. My struggle is to follow the same advice for myself!

Another thing that the agnostics do not spend too much time on is gratitude. I am sure all of us use a ‘Thank You’ at least a dozen times a day. Do we really have that gratitude inside us when we say our thanks? When monks go around with begging bowls, they have gratitude, but without the thank yous. Look around you, there is so much to be grateful about. Why is it that instead of gratitude, we reset our minds to treat all the good in our environment as our birthright. The best way to be grateful is to detach. A fast reminds you to be grateful for your food. A long spell of meditation makes you grateful for the relationships that you have. A day spent without your mobile phone, will make you grateful for the miracles of technology. A WhatsApp detox will make you grateful for the connectedness. 

Monk training makes you really conscious of thought and speech. To the common man, monks are repository of wisdoms. And in most cases observed behavior is spoken speech. Like in any bureaucracy, monks also are quagmired by a rule book. Nithya says that his monastery had 227 rules. And all of them were related to speech. Will cite the rule of 3 gates that he spoke of. Before you open your mouth to convert your thoughts to speech, they should pass through three gates. The first gatekeeper asks you, is what you are about to say the truth? If it is, then you cross over and come to the second gate, where the gatekeeper asks you, is what you are about to say, kind? If it is, then you come to the third gate, where the keeper asks you: Is it necessary? I look back at an incident yesterday where I had an argument with someone I met for the first time. I realised that my speech passed only the first gate. I was lucky that I had a monk-like companion, who ensured that I made it to the second gate. But in hindsight, the third gate is the one that still flummoxes. I am not too sure how much of my talk will pass the test of necessity. Frugality of speech sounds like an interesting idea. I experienced it very recently, on a 210 km single day solo ride from Nasik to Pune. How many hours a day do we talk? How many hours of a day do we listen? I have discovered a Digital Wellbeing setting on my Android phone recently, which gives you an app-wise pie chart of phone time in the last 24 hours. (I realise that I spend between 3 to 5 hours on the phone everyday.) Is there an equivalent app for speech?

During the hour long talk, Nithya narrated more than 5 stories. And in that sense, he reminded me of Prof Rajagopalan, my sensei from Auroville, who would intersperse a Mullah Nasruddin story every half an hour into his talk. A hallmark of a good story, is that you should not have heard it before. And Nithya’s stories passed that test with flying colors. Zen literature is sprinkled with a lot of stories – and there are two characteristics to these stories: they are short – and they make you think. Let me narrate to you Nithya’s first story. There were two monks who were climbing down a hill, when they came across a woman with a load of firewood on her head – and a pot held by her side. The path was narrow, and as the monks made way to let her pass, she fell and her pot broke. The monks apologised, and helped her back on to the path. As she got back to her feet, she asked the monks a question: ‘My son left home 10 years ago. I have tried my best to trace him. But there has been no communication from his side. Will I ever see him again?’ The first monk replied – ‘Please give up on him. He has possibly passed away to another world.’ The second monk said: ‘Go back home. Your son is waiting for you.’ She went back – and indeed, the son had reached home. So what made the two monks think differently? Both of them saw the same pot break. One considered it as an omen of death. In any cremation, the explosion of the skull in the fire is what is symbolised in the breaking of the pot in Hindu rituals. But to the other monk, the breaking of the pot signified the escape of its contents – and their reunification with the mother earth. We all see the same things, but we all perceive differently.

Another thing that I liked about his Zoom talk was his eye management. In one-on-one conversations, the-looking-into-the-eye is a very natural process. If you don’t do that, you end up giving an impression of being shifty. In public speaking, the trick is to have 4 conversations, with people who are situated at 4 corners of the room. A zoom conversation is like a one-on-one, but you have to realise that the other person is sitting inside the camera on your laptop or mobile. It takes conscious effort to talk to the camera. My favourite Zoom hack is to move the video window of one of the audience members on the screen to locate it near the camera. That makes it easier to focus on the camera. With Nithya, he had a very spiritual look away pose, which I found wonderful, even on Zoom. His blink rate also seemed to be quite low – and I wonder if that is part of the monastery training program? 

My one grudge about the talk was its expansiveness. Nithya tried to cover too many things in the hour that he spent. He was ostensibly talking about the journey from self consciousness to awakening – but doing that in the space of an hour was asking for too much. He did have an interesting take on take-aways. He said that there are too many speakers who talk of take-aways. And too few who talk of letting go‘s. We see this problem in any system. Over the years, rule books become thicker, as new rules keep on getting added. The Indian penal code still has rules which govern the behavior of horse carts on urban roads. It is rare to delete rules. And in the same way, both in our material and spiritual worlds, we rarely let go. Our houses get cluttered with trinkets purchased over the years. Our mind keeps on adding new stereotypes, based on an accumulation of experiences over the years. 

I am reminded of a TED talk where a speaker who called in the packers and movers – and put all his belongings in cardboard boxes. And he would open up the box only if there was something that was required. At the end of a year, he donated all the unopened boxes. You would have guessed by now, that 90 % of the boxes were unopened. In the non materialistic world, how does one dump the equivalent of these unopened boxes? How does one let go? Is it by the resetting of expectations? Or like one of the Mindtree school students mentioned in a Philosophy for Children program that I conducted a few years ago, is it knowing when to forgive and when to forget?

In the end, Nithya talked about the Hotel California like ashram in Varanasi where people come to die. You can check in, but you don’t check out. So you have to be pretty sure you are going to die soon, before they let you check in. The rumour is that staying in this ashram, on the banks of the Ganges, is a sureshot way to swaarg. There was one wise scholar who decided many years ago that he would be dying here. He had even decided on which room he wanted to die in. When the time came, he checked in. As he awaited his death, his thoughts were not so much on the relationships he made, but surprisingly on the ones that he broke. Many years ago, when his own father had died, he broke his relationship with his brother – on an inheritance dispute. At the time he was dying, his only priority was to mend that relationship. He sent out a message, and fortunately the brother was around. He came; they had a long conversation. And the wise man died the next day. Do we really need death to remind us about mending broken relationships? 

Nithya started with a story. He ended with one. A samurai fell in love with a lovely maiden who lived in a village across the lake. Wooing done, time came for the marriage. A boatload of friends and relatives landed up at the village. After the festivities got over, the wedding troop started off in their boat, along with the maiden, to return to their village. In the middle of the journey, the weather suddenly changed – and the boat was caught in the midst of a raging storm. Whilst the maiden was worried to death, the samurai was unaffected. The bride suspected her new husband to have a heart of stone. She asked her new husband about his lack of emotions. 

The samurai’s answer was to clasp the maiden close to him, unsheathed his sword – and hold it against her throat. He asked her: ‘Are you afraid?’. She said: ‘No. You are my husband. Why should I be afraid of you?’ ‘A samurai lives by his sword. Any day can be the last day of my life. If it is my destiny, the boat will drown – and it will be my last day. And what an auspicious day to end my life – with you next to me. If it is not, the boat will not sink, and we will reach home.’ Why worry about God’s list?

Here is a link to the video.