I Thought I Was Moving Forward

I still remember the moment I decided not to learn Sanskrit.

I was in seventh grade in Bangalore, choosing between Sanskrit in the State Board and Hindi in ICSE. I asked my father what he thought. His answer was simple:

“Why do you want to learn Sanskrit? It serves no purpose.”

That was enough. I dropped it.

It felt like a smart decision. Hindi seemed more useful. I even convinced myself I was choosing the “national language”—not realizing India doesn’t have just one.

Looking back, the decision wasn’t about language.

It was about how I was thinking.

I chose utility.
Whatever moved me forward faster.

And for a long time, that worked.

I moved to the U.S.
Finished my Masters.
Found a job.
Built a life.

There was always something more urgent—visa timelines, work, responsibilities. Life ran on schedule, and I stayed inside it.

But something else was happening quietly.

Distance was doing its work.

When I visited the Kanchi Mutt in Malleswaram, I would see young boys—draped in simple dhotis—chanting the Vedas.

There was something unsettling about it.

They were younger than me.
But they carried something I didn’t.

A familiarity with Sanskrit.
A comfort with a world I had walked away from.

I didn’t have the words for it then. But I felt it—I had dismissed something I didn’t understand.

Years later, during COVID, I signed up for a Sanskrit class with Samskrita Bharati.

No plan. Just curiosity.

It stayed. I took another course. Kept going.

Then I encountered Dṛg-Dṛśya Viveka through talks by Swami Sarvapriyananda.

I couldn’t just listen. I had to read. To slow down.

So I picked up Swami Nikhilananda’s book.

The first verse stopped me.

It looked simple.

But it did something I hadn’t seen before.

What I thought was the seer became the seen in the very next step.

The eyes see form.
The mind sees the eyes.

The seer kept shifting.

And then it landed somewhere unexpected—on something that observes, but is never observed.

I couldn’t rush past it.

For the first time, I wasn’t reading to finish.
I was reading to see.

I thought I was moving forward.
I was just moving faster.

I had spent years learning how to move fast. I hadn’t learned how to stay.

That changed everything.

I used tools like ChatGPT and Claude to go deeper—breaking down verses, building notes, even putting together vedantalibrary.org.

But the real change wasn’t the tools.

It was the pace.

I sat with a verse.
Asked simple questions.
Allowed myself not to know.

That felt more meaningful than anything I had done before.

Sanskrit—the thing I once dismissed as useless—became a doorway.

Not into a language.
Into a different way of thinking.

Not faster.
Not more efficient.

Deeper.

I chose utility.
I missed depth.
Sanskrit made me see it.

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