By the time I was in my mid-fifties, my life looked, from the outside, like it was working. I had graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and worked across India, the Middle East, and Europe before settling in California in the mid-1990s. I had made partner at a global management consulting firm, then left to start my own practice. I had a marriage I valued, two children I adored, and a home in Silicon Valley.
Underneath all of that, I carried a restlessness I had known as long as I could remember. Each achievement brought a brief lift, then the old pattern returned. The next milestone, the next version of success, was always just out of reach.
* * *
Then a routine scan for back pain turned up a tumour, and the radiologist was very concerned that it could be serious. The follow-up tests took four weeks. I went to the office, met clients, gave recommendations. But inside, something had changed. For most of my adult life I had assumed time was abundant. Those four weeks made it clear that it was not.
When the results came back, they were much better than I had feared. The relief was real. But the four weeks had done their work, and I knew I could not return to life as usual.
* * *
The one thing I wanted to do, more than anything else, was study Vedanta.
I was born in India. My mother and aunts quoted the Bhagavad Gita all the time. I had grown up around the teaching and had always meant to look into it properly — someday, when there was time. There was no more someday.
My sister mentioned a teacher in Berkeley: a clinical psychologist who had spent two decades studying with Swami Dayananda Saraswati, one of India’s most respected Vedantic masters. I jumped at the opportunity.
What followed were three of the most absorbing years of my life. I took to the teaching the way a fish takes to water. It stretched my thinking to its limits and consumed me completely. I was awestruck by the depth and beauty of what Vedanta was saying. Things I had wrestled with for decades began to make sense. I felt, more than once, that this was what I had been waiting for all my life.
The formal study lasted three years. The exploration has not stopped.
* * *
I am writing this in 2026. My consulting practice is still active, and a considerable part of my time now goes to studying and teaching the Gita and Vedanta in small groups.
The restlessness is gone. That still feels like a small wonder to me. I am very much a work in progress, but my life has a clear direction, and most days I am at peace in a way I did not know was available to me.
I have written this app for the person I was at fifty-five — certain that something was off, certain that if I could just find the right answer, I could fix it. If that sounds like you, even a little, you are in the right place.
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Dhiraj Malik
Fremont, CA
May 2026