This story was featured in the two books, You Know the Glory, Not the Story and its Indian version, Engineering to Ikigai by Singapore Airlines-Neptune Orient Lines or SIA-NOL scholars Rahul Singh and Naresh Agarwal. Get the book on Amazon or directly at the Publisher’s store World Scientific, and its Indian version on Amazon.
The new millennium dawned into my life with a bang; the Y2K bug had some effect after all! At the wee hours of 30 December 1999, I left my country India for newer territories. Still a minor in my mid-teens, I had just passed out of Class X CBSE Board exams and begun Class XI in a new city in India, when the magic happened. I had won an all-expense-paid-6-year-trip to a small island country located on the India Ocean called Singapore!
“Hey are you applying for the SIA scholarship?”
“What’s that?”
“Check out yesterday’s newspaper for the ad,” my best friend chirped.
Curious, I got home that day and fished through the Hindu newspaper of ‘yesterday’ for this mysterious ad and found it. There it was, Singapore Airlines Youth Scholarship for Indian students. I skimmed through it quickly and called my dad. At the time he was in New Delhi, looking for a house for all of us as he just got transferred to the capital, while we were waiting in Chennai until he could bring us all over to the north.
“When is the deadline?” he asked.
“It’s in a couple of months from now.”
“Okay then we will apply for it once you get here so all correspondences can have our Delhi address.”
I carefully cut out the ad, folded it and kept it in my secret place where I would not forget it. Soon I bade goodbye to Chennai; with teary eyes I took leave of my best friend and other classmates who I shared close bonds with and was on my way to begin a new life in New Delhi. My brother and I got admission into Apeejay School, where I started Class XI while my sister joined Gargi College to pursue Microbiology.
Rolling the clock backwards, I was a morbid kid. Once I killed four butterflies. My little brother and I had captured them as an experiment and put them inside a soap case with holes as “windows” for them to breathe. I poured some honey in the case so they wouldn’t have to go looking for food. I had read in a school book about keeping butterflies in soap cases as pets; or perhaps it talked about caterpillars not butterflies, I can’t really remember. But the ones I had captured were full grown butterflies and their wings got stuck in the honey I had put in the case. A couple of days later, I opened the case carefully so the butterflies wouldn’t fly away. They lay still inside and I told my brother that they liked the food we had given them. I was satisfied we had managed to pet them only to realize a few hours later that they weren’t flying not because they had become loyal pets, but because they were dead! I never forgave myself for killing those four little innocent creatures and wept for days wondering where they went. While I was supposed to focus on school like all other kids and bring home good grades to make my parents happy, I pondered all day, all night, about existential questions like what happens after death, where do we go, do we reincarnate, what happens to us beyond the physical life, why do people get diseases, how could there ever be a time when I wouldn’t exist…? I remember once we were watching the news on TV, and my dad pointed out at someone who had AIDS.
“What’s that?” I asked curiously.
“AIDS has no cure. If you get it then you die”.
I could not take that thought out of my head. That night as I went to bed I prayed to God, to eliminate all diseases from the face of earth so that no one would ever have to die. I was a born empath. Right from childhood, I could feel the pain and suffering of others as if they were mine. In my little heart there was space for everybody. I loved everyone. Little did I know then that those innocent musings, those midnight meanderings would go on to pave way for the larger work I was supposed to do here on earth, a breeding ground for my true destiny to unfold several years later.
As a child I wanted to be an astronomical scientist when I grew up. I had read in encyclopedias about worm holes and time tunnels in the fabric of time-space continuum that fascinated me. Once I had written an imaginary poem about visiting the 10th planet and finding life there for a class assignment. Born and brought up in Kolkata, I completed my primary education in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan school. My father was a respectable officer at UNICEF and my mother was a high school teacher at Sri Ramakrishna Sarada Sanga Balika Vidyalaya, where she taught Mathematics, Physical Science and Physical Education to secondary school students. I was the sandwich kid, with an elder sister and a younger brother. Like typical Bengali parents, besides school we had been put under a variety of tuitions; dance classes, music lessons, art & craft courses, swimming training etc. Only we did not have tuition for sports. We naturally excelled in it, as we went every evening to our society park and played with other kids; even during exam times when others stayed at home to study, we three played with ourselves. In our community whenever there were any games or competitions held, my sister, brother and I almost always took away all the prizes which sometimes we felt the other parents in the cluster did not like us so much because of that.
My father being at the UN had a transferable job. While we were in primary school, he got transferred to Patna in the neighboring state. He decided not to move the entire family as education was supposedly better in Bengal than Bihar. So every school vacation, we went to visit him in Patna and attended many UN get-togethers, events and trips through the rural areas of Bihar during our holidays. A few years later he got transferred to Chennai and decided to take all of us with him. I had just completed Class 6, when we all moved to South India.
In our last year in Kolkata, one day my father saw an ad in the Newspaper about an All India contest for children. At the time I could compare it with something like a Miss India contest for kids, not based on looks but on talent. I was about 12 at the time when he sent out an application for me. Out of millions of kids in the country, a handful was selected to compete in “The Most Promising Child of the Year Contest” held in Bangalore. I had not won that contest but I was in the top 20 and received my Scroll of Honor from Vinod Kambli, the then famous cricketer of India. That contest opened me up to larger vistas of life that my little brain was only beginning to comprehend.
Soon after returning to Kolkata post the contest, we moved to Chennai. South India seemed like another world. Everything was different: the culture, creed, cuisine, costumes, customs, courtesies… It was nothing we could have even imagined sitting in Kolkata. Those days they had rank systems in schools. I believed I was not a “good student” because in Kolkata I was hardly ever in the top ten in my class and that almost always upset my parents, especially mom. But in Chennai all that changed. Perhaps it was the effect of the Bangalore contest? Suddenly I was the smart kid in class. From 7th to 10th standard, I stood first in class almost every year and was one of the school toppers in my Class X board exams. During my 4 years in Chennai, our school principal always chose me to go to inter-school competitions, debates, extempores, oratoricals, recitation competitions, and almost always I brought back accolades for my school. At times, our principal honored me in front of the whole school. Equally good was I at sports and always brought home medals at the annual sports meet, and so did my siblings.
My sister and I gave our board exams together; while she appeared for Class XII CBSE exams, I was preparing for Class X. I was never fond of the rigorous school routine and spent most of my studying days secretly reading adventure books, romance novels, which my parents did not approve of at all. So I hid the story books inside my school books and lived the grandest adventures of life, all in my mind. Being an empath I identified with every character in those stories. When the villain died I cried. When the hero solved a mystery, I applauded. I was fascinated by this big big world and all the possibilities in it. I longed to be the protagonist in those books, living those adventures, solving those puzzles, being the heroine of those stories: Famous five, Secret Seven, Five Find-outers, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sweet valley High, Sweet valley Twins, Gone with the wind, Scarlett, and more books that stirred my fertile mind, sparked my imagination, ignited my creativity even at that age. I liked spending my time imagining, dreaming, daydreaming, wishing, pondering, wandering, meandering through the myriad mazes in my mind. Crazy as I was, I had formed a “Thoughtful Three” group with my best friend and another friend in school and even designed creative badges for us to wear in class pinned to our school blouse! My best friend and I talked a lot in class, so much that all teachers were fed up with us. Hence they separated our seats far apart and put us next to boys hoping we couldn’t talk. That’s when we created a sign language; we had a hand sign for every alphabet and we used to communicate with each other from two corners of the class while everyone watched us in fascination, sometimes including our frustrated teachers. We were incorrigible!
One day, I came home from school and casually picked up the newspaper. I dreaded reading the paper but liked learning up new vocabulary just so I could top the quiz contests and vocabulary games in class. I remember I had memorized all the words starting with ‘Q’ in the Oxford dictionary. I liked learning strange words. I knew words like quixotic, quail, quagga, quarantine, and spelt every word perfectly! I fascinated my classmates with those words during our free time in class when we played vocabulary games. But that day I found something else in the paper. As I glanced through the pages quickly, I chanced upon an article about reincarnation, a lady who could remember her past lives and validate many details from it. That’s it! In that moment I knew it. My childhood imaginations were right. All my conjectures were correct. Life did not end at death. We did not die at all. We lived forever. Reading that little piece of news in that moment was like a validation of a long held secret in my heart that nobody could really understand the gravity of the matter! But soon I forgot all about it and moved on with life.
I passed out of Class X with 92% average and I was in the top 0.1 percentile in the whole country in English, having scored 98% in CBSE national exams. Although I never scored that high in English in class, my teacher told me I was on the cards and that she was counting on me. Still I had disappointed my mother. Being a mathematics teacher, her dream was to see me score 100/100 in Math in CBSE. I fell short by 3 points and she was mad at me. I never understood why 3 points were so important, but she scolded me saying I spent too much time with friends, chatting on phone, hanging out, hence did not have enough time to study. That was not at all true because even during the time that I did have for my studies, I read story books instead of those monster textbooks. However, my sister pleased her immensely having scored 100/100 in Biology in Class XII CBSE exams.
Clock reversed. We had just finished school that year when dad got posted to New Delhi. We were all excited to move to the capital city. When the whole family had settled down, one day I took out that newspaper cutting I had carefully saved while in Chennai and showed it to my father. He helped me with the application process and soon after I was selected for the first round of exams. I never thought much of myself, because I knew there were many smarter kids than I was. I had just applied for the sake of it because my best friend had told me about it and I missed her. After the first round of exams that included IQ test, critical thinking, science/math tests that at least 200 students took along with me, when I was shortlisted for the interviews there were only about one-third of us present. At the interview they asked me why I was not preparing for IIT, as if it were a pre-requisite. I was not interested in IIT, I had responded. When I got back from the interview I was sure I wouldn’t be selected because I wasn’t preparing for IIT like every other smart student should be doing. My dad was hopeful though. He kept reiterating that I would be selected but I made fun of him saying, the Jackfruit was still in the tree and he was already oiling his moustache! It’s a Bengali proverb that means the destination is still far away. But he was right! As fate would have it, I was the chosen one. Smiling from ear to ear, I started preparing for my departure unaware of where I was heading…
It was 29 December 1999, my sister’s birthday! So my parents decided to throw a double party at home, her birthday + my farewell, where my school friends had come over to bid me goodbye. In the 3 months that I studied Class XI in Apeejay School, I was already the star. I had almost single-handedly won an inter-school girls’ Throwball tournament for my school, and my PT sir, school principal, classmates including some seniors had all become very fond of me. I helped my mother with the cooking and a few hours later all guests left. I was in my room packing my bags when suddenly it hit me! I was going away, from my family, my dear siblings, my beloved parents, for who knows how long? I knelt in front of the altar as the tears rolled down my cheeks uncontrollably. Suddenly I heard my mother howling in the other room. She asked me why I had to go, why I couldn’t stay at home with them; that I was too young to go abroad alone, but those were daft questions now, because the decision had already been made and it was too late to reconsider. My father had given me the choice to stay back and reject the scholarship offer if I wanted, but it was totally my decision to take it up. Looking back I knew it was destiny!
Singapore was tough life. When you have to live alone you grow up fast. In my very first month, I had already learned how to manage my finances, do my own laundry, go out on my own, take care of my belongings; things I took for granted at home, here I had to manage all by myself. I went to Victoria Junior College for 2-years of pre-university education. I was one of those kids who always studied last minute, a day, a few hours before the exam then went ahead and aced it. I remember during my board exam preparations as well, I was doing poorly in the pre-board tests to the extent that my teachers were worried about me, but when boards happened I did fairly well. So the Singaporean mode of education where you were coached and trained throughout the year for the A-level exam at the end of 2 years, I was finding it hard to keep up. Because my mode of learning was different! I always felt those long hours of studying were unnecessary when our imaginative faculties could be engaged in more creative pursuits. While in India I was the most intelligent student in class, here I was the dumbest! Rather I was excelling at NAFA; it was mandatory physical training at college and I had gold in all six areas of test for girls that I was honored with a gold badge in front of the whole college, which I always wore on my collar with pride. Also I was elected as the VP of CIC – Community Involvement Committee and I organized charity events for my college. My teachers at JC thought I wouldn’t make it, but I aced my A-levels which bagged me the next SIA-NOL scholarship for 4 years at University in Singapore!
I studied at NUS – National University of Singapore and chose Computing because it was the in-thing at the time. Everybody was doing it or talking about it. It was the popular choice hence must be the best choice, I had reasoned with myself. I might have had the aptitude but lack of interest in the subject soon made me realize I was in the wrong career and it was too late to change without having dire consequences like losing my scholarship or worse still going back to India! So I stuck with it for four years and suffered.
Through my University years, I was elected as the vice president of my faculty, the School of Computing – SOC club, the vice president NUS Students’ Union International Relations Committee – NUSSU IRC and the Vice President of the Society of Indian Scholars – SOIS. Besides Computing, I had bid for a language course and got selected to study German as a cross faculty module. In my first year at German class we were over 200 students learning the language at the Beginner’s level. By the time we went to third year, Advanced Level, there were only four of us who completed the entire course! My German classes were fun, as our teacher often invited the German exchange students at NUS to our classes for informal interactions with them. During vacations, the Germans always went traveling. They would just get a map of an unknown country and set off to explore. That intrigued me. As Indians we are brought up in such protective environments and that gets stricter, more conservative, when you are a girl. But these Germans fascinated me. We often gathered together for fun activities, film screenings, Stamm Tisch (meeting at a table over food), German cake baking contests where I had baked a yogurt cake that had won the most creative cake prize! For the first time, I was captivated by a culture outside of my own. I used to go to the foreign film festivals in Singapore recommended by our German teacher and watch local films from other countries which were artistic and beautiful, nothing commercial or Hollywoodish. Goodbye Lenin, Der Tunnel, Der Blaue Engel, Faust, Die Edukators -die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, Love in Thoughts, Crossing the Bridge: Sound of Istanbul, Solino, were some films I watched then that are still etched in my memory. We also had the opportunity to go to Germany for a semester or two to do part of our University education in German language and most of my Singaporean classmates learning German had already gone on such immersion programs to the country. But it was too expensive for me to take up a program like that because I was already a foreign student in Singapore and the cost of living in Europe was way higher than what my scholarship money could cover. Still I yearned to go to Germany. I was so mad that during my exam times, I used to take my books and go to the Changi airport to sit at the viewing mall and study there; while all the planes bound Europe took off I waved at them saying things like, “say hi, to Germany for me” or “tell Europe I’m coming soon”. I had created strong bonds with the German exchange students at NUS and when they left Singapore I accompanied each of them to the airport to say goodbye. They all invited me to visit Germany and I told them that I would see them again very soon. I was joking, but little did I know then that my crazy predictions were going to come true in the most magnificent way!
At my final semester in NUS, one day I got an email from a University in Switzerland that invited students from all over the world to write an essay on the topic “Inspiring Europe” and if selected would win an all-expense-paid trip to Switzerland. The moment I saw that email, I knew it was God’s way of making my dreams come true, because I was destined to go to Europe! I wrote my essay and submitted it. Exactly three months later I had won an all-expense-paid trip to Switzerland to attend the renowned St. Gallen Symposium and dialogue with top world leaders, businessmen, CEO’s about the most pressing problems plaguing Europe at the time. I was on cloud nine! I remember it was my birthday, 8 May, when we attended luncheon with the Swiss Ambassador in Singapore and the following week I flew to Europe, my first time outside of Asia! I stayed back in Europe for a whole month after the symposium and visited all those German friends who had invited me to their house, showed me around their city, fed me delicious food and we made merry together. Coincidentally, just when I was in Germany, the soccer 2006 FIFA world cup was being hosted by Germany! I got to watch some of the beginning matches sitting in open-air biergartens along with my German friends, when Germany was winning all the games and the proud citizens honking on the road, loudly cheering, basically going bonkers! Germany had played really well that year, finishing in third place, rendering my first voyage outside of Asia truly memorable. I had thought one month in Europe would cost me a lot of money; however, I spent almost nothing as everywhere my German friends hosted me. That’s how I traveled from city to city visiting each of them and instead of taking the euro rail I took the Mitfahrgelegenheit, a platform where people who travel from one city to another for work on a daily basis offer to take other passengers in their cars for a meagre 8 euros instead of paying 80 euros on the euro rail. Only thing is that you travel with absolute strangers. I did not mind. I made the whole of Germany my friend as I chirped away to glory in those voyages!
Before I move on with this story there is something else that happened to me at University that is worth mentioning here. It was my first year at University and I had flown to India during vacations to see my family. I was exhausted from the journey and went to bed right after getting home. When my eyes opened I could not get up from bed; the pain in my back was so excruciating that I could not even turn in bed. The MRI reports weren’t promising. I had injured my back badly with two Prolapsed Intervertebral Discs in my lower spine. Doctors barred me from doing anything that I loved, like athletics, sports, running on hard ground, dancing, climbing stairs, walking uphill, wearing heels, eating good food, exercising, not for a few months but for the rest of my life! Each day I spent a lot of money on physiotherapy at the University hospital in Singapore, alone in a foreign country. I had become increasingly dependent on painkillers; stronger doses could not alleviate my pain. At times I felt as if a butcher’s knife was tearing me apart as the pain trickled down my legs making them numb. My life was miserable. Those days I found a new hobby: sleep! I slept for hours in my hostel room, bunking most of my classes and sometimes even exams, anything to escape reality. I even had a devil of a batchmate who called me a sloth, but I did not mind. I only attended the classes I liked, like German, or my brief stint with Abnormal psychology where I learned about mental disorders like Schizophrenia, MPD, Bipolar, Bulemia, Anorexia, OCD, etc. I had a special seat at the exam venues, where I was allotted extra time because I had to get up every 15 minutes or so to stretch. I wasn’t allowed to sit for longer than that at a stretch. And so I suffered like that for nearly three years until I had had enough. What use was my life like this anyways? I was ready to call it quits. Many nights, I toyed with the idea of taking my own life. Then one night as I lay in bed contemplating, I had a flash of thought I could not resist. I got up, gathered all my medicines, the painkillers, the big thick belt I had to wear around my waist, the ugly pair of Dr. Scholl shoes, the prescriptions, etc. and threw them in the trash can outside my room. I put on my running shoes and walked outside of my hostel where the racing tracks were. I missed running. I did not care if I became a vegetable that night, but I refused to continue to live like that any longer. I stepped onto the tracks and started sprinting! I ran for almost 2 hours in the middle of the night, alone with the stars. When I stopped I thought my back would have been permanently damaged, but to my surprise it wasn’t hurting at all. Rather it felt really good. Soon I realized that my back had completely healed as I continued running every night like that, in the dark! At the time, I did not understand what had caused my spontaneous healing, so I called it a miracle. I will explain this more later.
Being an avid reader all my life, my taste in books had changed as I grew up. Whenever I spent a vacation visiting home in India, I always bought new books to feed my soul. One day I picked up a book at a local store because it talked about love and soulmates reuniting. But when I started reading it, I realized it was a book about reincarnation and past lives. Once again this topic was revisiting my life perhaps because now I was a grown up and could understand it better. It was written by the renowned psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss, the pioneer in past life regression and also future life progression therapy. I devoured all the information in the book then went and bought all of his other books. As one thing led to another, I also found books by Dr. Raymond Moody and Dr. Elizabeth Kübler Ross who had done in-depth research on death and dying patients. Dr. Ross, a Swiss Physician during World War II compared the process of death as the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. When she visited the concentration camps post WWII, she found butterflies drawn on the walls by dying people. She also worked with terminally ill children who often recounted their out-of-body or near-death-experiences to her. She had one message in her books: death does not exist! These were respectable doctors with medical degrees whose patients led them to extraordinary revelations of life and death and eternity. Ask, and you shall receive! Seek, and you shall find! My childhood ponderings were not daft. My own life lived led me to these answers. In fact, the answers came to me. The first book I picked up was sheer coincidence! Suddenly I felt safe and protected in this big big world of crime and danger. I never feared death again. I knew I would die when it was my time. So now I could live my life freely and fully, free of fear. I also read books by Neale Donald Walsch who wrote the “Conversations with God” trilogy. I had become an instant fan. And who would have known that when I went on my dream trip to Switzerland, I’d actually meet him there? Call it coincidence, luck, synchronicity, or destiny; I found out that he was going to Switzerland to conduct a workshop exactly the same week I would be there! I found an email ID in his website and wrote him asking if I could attend his workshop for free as I was a student with no money. A bestselling celebrity author, a millionaire whose books have been translated into 30+ languages and sold all over the world, couldn’t be bothered with silly requests like that, right? Of course I did not receive an answer. But I did not give up. A few days later I wrote again! This time I got a reply from his secretary who connected me with the event organizer in Switzerland, who then allowed me to attend his 3-day workshop in Zurich for free! What more could I have asked for from the Universe? I was literally on a dream trip manifesting magic in my life; you know the abracadabra kind of magic!
Picking up the thread where I left it, when I got back from Europe, I had caught the travel bug. I wanted more, to explore, to see this big big world with all the magic and the adventure in it. I joined AIESEC, a student organization that offered foreign internships to University students and started traveling. Before I went on my first exchange, I spent a few months in India volunteering for a local NGO, Save the Childhood foundation as a German interpreter and attended the Global March against Child Labor from Delhi to Kolkata in a bus with rescued kids, under the leadership of Kailash Satyarthi who later won the Nobel Prize for his work. A couple of months afterwards, I had my first match with AIESEC and went on a foreign internship to Africa. I was going to work at the Nigeria Model United Nations (NigMUN) along with another foreign intern from Germany. It was strange that I was going to work in Africa with a German again! However, we had a violent, horrible boss at work and in our second month there, one day he picked up a physical fight with the German guy over an argument. It was so bad that the German guy started bleeding in his hand. That’s when we both decided to quit. While the German guy went back to Germany after two months in Naija land, I decided to stay back longer to see what else I could do there. You see, in my very first month I was robbed of all the American dollars I was carrying with me to the country, leaving me with zero money in a very difficult to survive country like Nigeria, where inflation, corruption & crime were a reality I had to navigate on a daily basis. Yes my parents had tried to stop me before going to Africa. My mom scolded my father for not intervening with my decision. He too tried to warn me of the crime in the country. But I told him human beings lived in that country hence I would be fine. Since this was an MUN assignment, in the end he had conceded thinking it would be good for my career. But the management at NigMUN was terrible, with no rules or professionalism, a boss who only cared about his own pocket, never paid us on time, some of the local employees weren’t paid for months at a stretch, and he once even entered the intern house and tried to hurt me. Thankfully the German guy was there to mediate the situation. He refused to pay us for our work when we quit. In the end, the local AIESEC President intervened and got us our salary. We left Abuja the capital city of Nigeria. The German guy didn’t want any more of it. But I was broke and had to find another internship before I could buy my tickets out of the country. So I traveled to Lagos, one of the dirtiest cities in the world and started working with Goge Africa, a TV show that showcased African Culture and tourism to TV channels all over Africa and the diaspora. My boss and her husband were a celebrity couple in Africa and I lived in a room in their house. It was a hard life there and I often had to step out in the scorching heat to bring sponsorship for the company. But during that time I got a real taste of African life. I also started learning Cuban salsa at a local bar near my workplace and it was great to be able to dance at the end of my demanding workdays. I even performed salsa at a local event and made many friends during my work there. I stayed in Africa for a year and a half and when it was time for me to leave the continent I hadn’t even saved half the money needed for the plane ticket back home. Every travel agent I called quoted me a ticket price more than double of what I had. It seemed like it’d be impossible for me to leave the continent without slogging there for another year or so. But I had to leave by a certain date because a very good friend of mine was getting married in Germany and I had to attend her wedding. One day as I was taking my bucket bath something inside told me, “Have faith, you will go”, only a few hours later to chance encounter a strange girl whose name was “Faith” who gave me my flight ticket to leave the Africa, at a price I could just pay! It was a miracle that I managed to leave the continent in one piece.
When I got back home after the African assignment, my sister was getting married in India. I had invited all my German friends, some Singaporean friends, my African boss at Goge Africa and her family at the wedding, so we had a truly international guest list. A few days after her wedding, one day my father told me to wear a nice saree and come out in the evening as he had asked a photographer to take my pictures. I knew what that meant. No way was I ready for marriage. I wanted to find myself, figure out my passions, discover what I really came here to do, what I wanted from life and not what my parents wanted for me, and I was still far away from those answers. I knew I had to leave again. I needed to buy time. I looked through the AIESEC system again and this time matched with a country in South America, Venezuela. As a child, I was always fascinated by that exotic name. So I took it up! It was the longest I had ever traveled. Four flights, four continents, several latitudes and longitudes later, I found myself in Venezuelan territory. I had flown nearly 36 hours and reached there the same day I had taken off from India! I realized I had just time traveled, warping space-time continuum, as if I had been through one of those time tunnels in the fabric of the Universe. And yes, I had also gotten a day younger, as I traveled from the future to the past!
But Venezuela was nothing like what I had imagined. From the moment I set foot there, I was gripped with fear. Stories of crime, violence, drugs, murder, kidnap, robbery, rape were everywhere. Everyone I met told me different versions of the same story, about how dangerous the place was. I worked as an ESL teacher there, having taught English and Business Communication to locals of all age groups at the reputed Wall Street Institute (WSI) and Centro Venezolano Americano del Zulia (CEVAZ), and lived with the Contreras family who loved me like their own daughter. “You should have gone to Colombia”, some told me. “Teacher, why on earth did you choose to come to a country like Venezuela?” My students posed. I don’t know why I went there. But it seemed to me that nobody loved their country. It was not their fault. Everyone was absorbed with the same fear, of losing their lives at the hands of a stranger with a gun. That’s all it took to grip an entire nation in terror. Just show a gun and you have power, even if you’re more afraid than they are, you control. Because the fear of death can be so real! And some stupid men with guns had managed to keep the people from enjoying the bountiful beauty their country was blessed with; abundant sunshine, rain, fertile soil, exotic beaches, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, mountains, tepuis, greenery, shrubbery, and beautiful people. Tepuis are huge flat mountains found only in South America and we hiked to the highest Tepui, Roraima in the Canaima forest which extends into the Amazon. Venezuela is one of the most beautiful countries I have ever seen. The pristine beaches of Los Cayos and Choroni with natural swimming pools in the middle of the ocean surrounded by palm trees, cocoa plantations, flat-top mountains amidst thick rainforests, the world’s highest waterfall Salto Angel or Angel falls, the grand savannah bordering amazon jungles were simply breathtaking. Many of them had not even explored their own country. It was hard to find a middle class civilian taking a nice evening walk on the streets of Maracaibo where I lived. Everybody I met only told me how unsafe the country was. I jokingly called it the 3C’s – Crime, Climate and Chavez! Maracaibo was very hot. So people either complained about crime or the climate or President Chavez.
I lived in Venezuela for two years with an old couple as a paying guest who I fondly called los abuelos, i.e. grandparents in Spanish. I began writing in Venezuela. While my friends and work colleagues invited me to go out partying with them, I stayed home and wrote day and night. It felt so good, sometimes I stayed up all night pacing the rooftop at the abuelos’ house listening to the owls in the night sky, or beholding the magical Catatumbos, a strange lightning phenomenon that only happens in Maracaibo. I took long walks on the Maracaibo streets and always felt protected. Through the process of writing, guess I was having an experience of myself.
After Venezuela I did not go back to India, instead went straight to Costa Rica in Central America on yet another foreign internship through AIESEC. I had so much money left from my Venezuelan internships that I could not change into dollars before leaving due to the black market system there, so I took the Bolivares with me. I still have those Bolivares saved but now they are worth nothing, merely paper, my hard-earned money! While the previous internships were local, this one in Costa Rica was global as I had my interview and selection process from Germany. I taught corporate English and Business communication at the Central American headquarters of Deutsche Post in Costa Rica for a year and a half then for another year and a half at the biggest language institution in the country, CCCN – Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano. I shared an apartment with seven other interns from Belgium, Netherlands, USA and Mexico.
One day I was having lunch with a Belgian intern, when I told him how much I longed to do something I was passionate about, something I absolutely loved. He asked me what I really loved doing and I said I had been writing something for a while and whenever I wrote I felt connected with this magical universe all around us. He asked me to show him some of my writings but I was reluctant. It was personal and I didn’t want to show him. But he kept insisting. So I sent him a few paragraphs. Immediately he called me up to say he loved reading it and asked me to send more. We discussed the possibility of publishing it as a book, but I wasn’t sure. So as usual I turned to the universe whenever in doubt. I asked God to give me a sign, a sure sign that I couldn’t miss. That day when I got to work, I was teaching a Level 9 class, grammar lessons when suddenly a student shouted out “The teacher must have written a book” as an example of modal verbs that I was teaching the class. I was dumbfounded! No one knew about my writings except for me, and now that Belgian guy who worked at a different company. A couple of days later, the same student in the same class, again while giving examples to past and past participle verbs shouted out, “The teacher wrote a book”, “The teacher has written a book”. By now I knew, the universe had a way of repeating a message until you get it! I published my first book “magicNine” while in Costa Rica.
After publishing the book my life changed! The very organizations and institutions where I taught before, including local Universities started inviting me as a motivational speaker to address their students, because now I was an author. The avid reader has started writing her own books! By then I had also begun dancing. What I experienced through writing, I expressed through dancing. I combined dance performances with speaking gigs and did many events in the local language, Spanish. Suddenly I had found my passion and purpose in life, after all the years since those Computing days at NUS.
I loved public speaking, writing, dancing, creating and working towards advancing consciousness on the planet. I am an evolutionary artist, a global community member of IDEA – International Directory of Evolutionary Artists. Besides dancing, I also tried my hand at acting. I did a couple of student short films at a local Universidad Veritas and also translated a few songs from Hindi to Spanish for a Bollywood Spanish film in Costa Rica, titled Enredados. Later, I stayed a few months in New York where I acted in a short film and a political documentary which went on to win a few international film festival awards, so now I am also on IMDb.
My first book talks about signs and synchronicities that guide us on our destiny paths, through my own journeys across the globe. It is raw, crude, and explores the concept of Synchrodestiny, a new dimension of reality approaching humanity. I also published an inspirational calendar and an inspirational journal with three variations based on the book. Recently I visited India and during that time I got the idea for two new books which I penned there before returning to CR. My upcoming books are titled, Life Is Abracadabra –21 magical stories from my travels across the globe that will make anyone look at life with new eyes and Nrit –the dream of finding the self, which I intend to turn into a movie post publication.
I have a holistic understanding of life and death, health and diseases, culture and belief systems, the law of attraction and the pitfalls of manifestation, why positive thinking doesn’t always work and what does, shadow aspects of our consciousness, energy and matter, time and space, dreams and parallel realities, and lecture on a wide range of topics spanning these themes. A lot of my events and evolutionary videos can be found on my book channel: youtube.com/magicNine. You may also like to visit my bilingual blog: baisakhisaha.com/blog, my amazon author page: amazon.com/author/baisakhisaha or my website: baisakhisaha.com. Recently, I was selected to speak at five TEDx events across India and Costa Rica. I have spoken publicly in Costa Rica, USA, Canada, India, at various organizations, institutions, communities and universities, including Lion’s Club, UNICEF/UPGI, AFUNPI, Theosophical Society, Alliance Française, International Book Fair, and appeared in Media interviews on Radio, TV, Newspaper, Magazine and Digital press; to name a few channels like All India Radio – Akashvani, Doordarshan TV, Times of India, Super Canal TV New York, JUS Punjabi TV NY, Prime 24 TV NY, Radio Zurquí Costa Rica, Radio 94,7 CR, Canal 7 Teletica CR, Free Press CR, La Nacion CR, Radio 104.8 FM India, TV24 News Hooghly India, Goge Africa TV show, UNICEF LINK Newsletter, Scouts Bulletin, besides many local Newspapers and other forms of print & digital media in multiple languages.
So that is the story of my life, a strange one at that, but the strangest stories are often the true ones. And of course the story doesn’t end here; I still have quite a journey ahead full of adventure and magic. Going back to the prayers of that little girl who pleaded with God every night to cure all diseases and relieve humanity from the experience of death, she now knows that diseases are created and uncreated in the mind. Today epigenetics is proving that our consciousness plays a huge role in determining whether we live a healthy life or not. Our immune system, our healing mechanism, is not a protector, but a confirmer of our consciousness. A disempowered consciousness creates a disempowered healing mechanism. The environment or the perception of the environment controls our genetics. And that is good news. It means we do not have to be controlled by our genes or our physical conditions anymore and that chronic and terminal ailments are reversible. If you change your perception you can impact your biology. Epi-genetics is above genetics. By just shifting our consciousness, we can become the masters of our reality, and not at its behest! You see back then, I was in a career that I did not enjoy at all. IT was the popular choice, so I took it. But I had no clue what I really wanted to do in life, what my dreams were, what my passions could be. Although it looked like I had it all together, I was not happy and lived in a perpetual state of disempowerment. So I became a vibrational match to that back injury. Everything is vibration. The animal and plant kingdom communicate through vibrations, but we humans are most times out of sync with our own vibration. You see, everything is energy, and energy produces interference. Hence everything is connected. Thought is energy and energy creates matter. Our bodies are not separate from our thoughts. The mind plays a huge role in our ailing or our healing. Think about it. The MRI reports, the diagnosis, the medical records, the doctors’ certificates, the hospital bills, the university accounts, the painkiller prescriptions, all had enslaved me to a life of pain and suffering, until I refused to let the diagnosis cripple me. That’s when everything changed for me. I internalized this mind-body connection at a profound level of my consciousness. That night, I made a promise to myself never again to do anything in my life that I did not enjoy. And so after graduating, I traveled the world, did extreme sports, scaled mountains and hiked for days, backpacked, climbed down waterfalls, wore heels and started dancing again. But my back hasn’t complained since then. Not only that, I never got sick or needed to go to a doctor during all those years on the road, traveling and living across different continents. I knew I had broken the barriers in my perception hence my reality had shifted. You see, we create all these walls in our consciousness, these limitations, restrictions, inhibitions of what is possible and what is not, what we are supposed to do and what we aren’t, that govern what we think, say, do, act or create in life. All we have to do is break these boundaries in our perception to recreate reality.
During my travels, I met people who have had Near Death Experiences that validated what I had read in those books about death, dying and the afterlife, comatose patients with out-of-body experiences, and my own landlady who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when doctors had given her 8 months to live with two little kids; it was a relapse of cancer she had had earlier when she had undergone the ruthless conventional therapy to no avail. However, after receiving her death sentence from the doctors she decided to give up on medicine and take her health into her own hands. She healed her own cancer by removing some metal fillings in her teeth, taking intravenous Vit C injections, unblocking the energy centers in her body and learning Pranic healing which is a form of energy work. Today she is absolutely cancer free and has become a healer herself.
You see, everything is cultural. That is why there is such a vast difference in people’s morals, ethics, behaviors, values, beliefs, thoughts, perceptions, religious doctrines, spiritual practices from culture to culture. Having literally grown up in different cultures across five continents, studying life through diverse mirrors of reality, trying to understand human suffering, dysfunctional belief systems, the cause of all diseases, from Asia to Europe to Africa to South, Central and North America, I have lived with local families, eating their food, adopting their lifestyles, contributing to their economy, living their culture, speaking their language, navigating extreme realities and harsh conditions, attending weddings and religious events, perceiving diverse traditions & religions whence belief systems and cultural values are formed, scanning the energy of each country I lived in, for several to find answers to life’s most pertinent questions. Coming from a conservative family background in India, I had to overcome many cultural limitations to do this. So I am coming from that space, when I say every belief system in the world is different, but thinks they are the only ones who are right, and condemns others. Beliefs are powerful as they create our reality. And our beliefs can indeed be the root of all suffering! The immune system of the body confirms our beliefs and acts accordingly. If you have a disempowered consciousness, you will have a defenseless immune system. And the immune system does not function at an intellectual level. It has to be at the level of mind-body, where it can be affected and conditioned. For instance, if you have a genetic predisposition to a particular disease, it is not necessary that you will get it. It depends on how you live your life and what you come to believe is true for you. So you see, we round back to belief systems which are cultural!
I firmly believe if more people could understand this, there will be little or no room in our world for religious wars, racial discrimination, cultural hatred, dysfunctional and disempowering belief systems or judgement in our societies, because we will see the futility of it all! We will see that our individual culture is just one culture, one way of looking at life, but not the absolute truth or the only way. Someone in Asia believes this, someone in America believes that, someone in Africa believes something else. Do you know that in Africa men pay dowry to marry women? Do you know that in Latin America there is no concept of shaming a woman’s body whereas in Asia if a woman exposes her body she is considered to be of loose character? While in a rich oil producing corrupted country like Nigeria people literally live in darkness with almost 20 out of 24 hours a day of no electricity, in yet another oil producing country like Venezuela one could fill a whole car tank with less than what a bottle of water costs. During my escapades, I noticed opposites and marveled at life’s idiosyncrasies. I found out that sometimes nonsense makes the best sense. I discovered that what is right in one culture, is wrong is another. What is polite in one country is rude in another country. What is respectful in one region is disrespectful in another region. What I thought was good, another thought bad. At times, I lost my grapple of reality, not knowing what to believe anymore, how to behave appropriately. Sometimes I didn’t know right from wrong, good from bad. I felt alone that nobody understood me, a feeling that I did not belong. But then I realized people around me were still holding on so strongly to their cultural beliefs while I had seen so many different cultures that I knew inherently, none of it was real. We are all making it up, all the way! As I got a bite size of all cultures, races, religions, traditions, ethnicities, backgrounds, my world view expanded to hold more of reality in it, a grander truth, a bigger picture of humanity. I saw that what was going on within me was going on inside everyone else. I started to understand myself for the first time as the storm inside my soul suddenly started speaking to me. Now I do not let culture define me, rather I define culture, create new ones should the old be dysfunctional, developing more tolerance and love for humanity, breaking molds, shifting paradigms and transcending mindsets through my work.
That little girl’s prayers were answered. She knew now the mechanism of all diseases and that death did not exist. It was just a different dimension of reality invisible to the naked eye. But if one could train their eyes to see energy, they may also start seeing auras and spirits. Isn’t that liberation? Imagine if everyone could be free of the fear of death. That would wipe away crime and terrorism in an instant. Also I was not too far away from my childhood dreams of being an astronomical scientist. I had already visited many dimensions beyond the space-time continuum in my mind and experienced their wisdom on my journeys!
Life is not about getting that job, that big house, that flashy car, that trip to Disneyland, that lover, spouse, or kids… yes those things add color to our existence and define our experience, but the process of life actualizes us. Life is about realizing the self, interacting with this magical universe all around us and experiencing ourselves as the co-creators of our own unique destinies.
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