The Bhagavad Gītā describes this world as duḥkhālayam aśāśvatam — a place of suffering and impermanence. The Buddha placed duḥkha first among the four noble truths: suffering is not an accident of circumstance but the basic condition of existence. I did not need to be persuaded of these propositions when I first encountered them. I was already living them. What the traditions offered was not a new discovery but a vocabulary — a way of naming what experience had already made clear.
I was born in 1984 in Dibrugarh, Assam. My grandparents and parents had not received higher education, but they had learned from their own experience what the absence of it costs. They believed — from what they had seen and lived, not from any abstract principle — that education leads to better prospects, and they acted on that belief seriously. I was sent to one of the best schools in the region and received a good education.
Through school I was a good student, then a very good one. By the senior years I was competing seriously for first rank. Then, around 2000, something happened, triggered by the death of my grandmother. I was a teenager, and what happened was the kind of thing that visits teenagers who think seriously before they are equipped to manage what they find. Questions about meaning and conduct that a small town in Assam did not have ready answers for. I turned inward. I began following the regulative disciplines of Vaiṣṇava practice, seeking a framework that could hold what I was carrying. The academic performance suffered in those years.
A journey to Siliguri and Gangtok in 2003, taken initially to put some distance between myself and the weight of those years, turned out to be a clearing. I returned with a different mind. I switched from PCM to Political Science — and discovered, perhaps for the first time, a subject that suited me. From 2004 to 2007, I flourished — first class with distinction. During these college years, the devotional practice deepened further, and became a serious organising principle of my life.
In 2007, I was admitted to the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I arrived at JNU already residing partly within a devotional community in New Delhi, already managing obligations that had nothing to do with the research degree I was about to begin. In 2009, nevertheless, I stood first in the MA examination — both the high point of the official record and, in ways I did not then understand, a kind of rupture. Standing first placed me at a distance from the world I had come from, without giving me a map for what came next. I did not know what I was doing or where I was going. The devotional community provided structure and direction, and I followed it, because it was there and because nothing else was as clear.
I entered the MPhil-PhD programme in Chinese Studies, with a Junior Research Fellowship, while simultaneously deepening my life within the devotional community — managing its affairs, preaching, and attending to the spiritual needs of others, with a thoroughness that left limited room for the research I was also supposed to be producing. My supervisor recommended I develop my Chinese language skills, engage with the policy world, and build on the dissertation. However, I heard these recommendations through the understanding of someone whose sense of direction came from elsewhere.
Then came what I can only describe as a lost year. I left the devotional community under the weight of a darkness — quiet and persistent. By late 2011, I had partially found my way back in a different spirit. In 2012, I married and received formal initiation. My daughter was born in 2013. The MPhil dissertation was submitted in 2012. However, the PhD chapters were not written in 2013, not in 2014, not in 2015, not in 2016. Each year arrived as a possibility and departed as a recorded fact. It was only in 2016, after years of spiritual disorientation and the gradual exhaustion of certainties that had slowly stopped being certain, that I finally broke with the devotional framework. By then, the fellowship years were over. The PhD remained unfinished. The reasons were real — a persistent darkness, family pressures, and a spiritual crisis that remained unresolved.
In February 2017, I began teaching at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab. I was thirty-two years old. The classroom felt like the right place — the thing I was suited for, the work that came naturally. I was good at it. Those who encountered me seemed to think so, too.
At RGNUL, I worked hard and with genuine engagement. I taught across multiple programmes, coordinated a student research centre, organised events, invited scholars, and wrote and spoke — a great deal, across many platforms and formats. I was not, however, a natural participant in the social life of the institution. I am an introvert. I do not enjoy the gatherings where conversation is a form of positioning. I did my work and trusted that the work would be recognised for what it was. The people above me had their own ways of seeing, shaped by considerations they did not share and did not feel obliged to explain. I was not the kind of person who made himself easy to see. They were not, it turned out, the kind of people who looked carefully.
In June 2022, I joined Chanakya University, Bengaluru, as an Assistant Professor. The grammar of institutional life continued in its essential form, with new particulars. I teach, I research, I coordinate academic programmes, I bring visiting scholars and international academics to my institution, I run events that place the university in intellectual conversations it would not otherwise be part of, and I continue to write — with the energy of someone who has a great deal to say, but has not always found the right platforms on which to say it. The quiet person is still quiet. The trusting person is still trusting. The Bībā Muṇḍā is still being the Bībā Muṇḍā, with all the predictable consequences.
The PhD was completed in 2024, the long arc from MPhil to doctorate, finally closed across the devotional years, the directionless years, the dark years, the family years, and the teaching years. The shape of those years is not flattering.
I am about to be forty-two years old. I stood first at one of the finest universities in the country and spent years without a clear direction, which is one of the more expensive ways to follow a distinction. I have spent my professional life being exactly the person I was warned not to be — the Bībā Muṇḍā, well-behaved, earnest, and altogether too trusting — in institutions that are not organised around the recognition of such people. I am a sceptical realist who knows how the world works. And yet I have carried, through all of it, a belief in Īśvara within — the persistent conviction that meekness will eventually be rewarded, that the work will be seen, that the Bībā Muṇḍā will get his due. This belief has not yet been vindicated. It has also not yet been abandoned. Whether that is faith or stubbornness, I have not been able to determine.
The suffering has been real. So has the meekness, for whatever it is worth. I was warned. I believed the warning. I find, approaching forty-two, that believing a warning and being adequately prepared for it are not, after all, the same thing.
This essay was written with the assistance of Claude, an AI system developed by Anthropic, in conversation with the author.
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