Nalla Madras

The short version (for the busy and the skimmers — the scenic route is below) The clock doesn’t make it 10:30; it only points at it. Confuse the pointer with the cause and you’ve made the oldest mistake in the book — like believing windmills create the wind. We do this everywhere, but the costliest version is blaming the planets and stars for our predicament: “Saturn is ruining my life.” Saturn,…

Clarity, Magic, Mantras, Doubt. The Long Search Between Silence and Song. There was a period in my life when Jiddu Krishnamurti was not merely an interesting philosopher to read over morning coffee. He was a full-blown obsession. The kind that makes you slightly difficult to talk to at dinner parties. From my early teens well into my late twenties, I devoured his books with the intensity of…

Where Music, Silence and Consciousness Meet When I first started learning music seriously, I thought music was made of notes. This is a very common beginner’s disease. Fortunately, it is curable, though the treatment can take several years and may involve many stern looks from music teachers. In the beginning, we are obsessed with the visible parts of music: the swaras, chords, tempo, raga,…

There are some forces in life that quietly shape us long before we fully understand them. For me, that force was always Devi — the Divine Mother. Even as a young boy growing up in India, I felt an unexplainable pull toward Her. Not out of fear, nor because of strict religious conditioning, but from something much deeper and strangely familiar. Looking back now, I sometimes feel it may have been…

There is an old Indian legend about elephant trainers—mahouts—that perfectly explains why I sometimes sit in my studio staring at a Logic Pro session, completely paralyzed, while the rest of the world just goes ahead and makes music.  Let me paint the picture. You have an Expert Mahout and an Inexperienced Mahout. The Expert has spent decades studying the ancient texts. He knows every…

You Didn’t Hire the Digestion Department: On Ramana Maharishi and the Supreme Doer The 3 AM Regret Committee You know how it works. It’s somewhere between 2:47 and 3:15 AM, and your brain, which had absolutely nothing useful to say during the actual meeting, has suddenly convened an emergency session. The agenda? Every bad decision you have ever made. The tone? Prosecutorial. The mercy on…

The Stationary Camera: Why Time Doesn’t Exist (And Einstein Agrees with the Rishis) You know that feeling when you look at a time-lapse video of the night sky? The stars are streaking across the heavens, the Milky Way is spinning like a giant cosmic pinwheel, and the earth seems to be on a wild carousel ride. But the camera? The camera sits there—rock solid, unmoving, silently watching the…

The Inverted Pyramid Scheme of Enlightenment Let’s talk about spiritual enlightenment. You know, that lofty goal of self-realization, the grand finale of the cosmic show where you finally get it. We imagine it as a pinnacle, the top of a mighty mountain we must climb, laden with backpacks full of mantras, vegan recipes, and well-thumbed scriptures. But what if we’ve got it all upside down? What…

For centuries, sages, saints, and that one uncle at weddings who insists he knows “the truth of everything” have been shouting in unison: shed the ego! According to them, the ego is the villain of the spiritual soap opera, the moustache-twirling bad guy who blocks us from enlightenment. One modern guru even turned it into a neat acronym: E.G.O = Edging God Out. Sounds convincing, right? But…

Have you ever walked past a giant generator or one of those industrial motors and felt it in your bones before you even heard it? That low, steady hum… reassuring, powerful, unbothered. It’s just there. Not shouting for attention, not needing to prove itself, but quietly powering the whole building. That, my friend, is exactly what the sense of “aliveness” feels like. We’re so used to…

They say the ostrich buries its head in the sand to avoid danger. That’s not true, of course — it’s a myth. The ostrich does no such thing. But if it did… ah, then we’d have a bird with a very promising career in philosophy. Because the idea behind the myth — that shutting out the world makes it vanish — is actually a rather elegant pointer to one of the oldest truths in spiritual…

If you’ve ever been stuck at a wedding between the nadaswaram/shehnai player and the Western band belting out “Summer of ’69”, you’ve probably asked yourself the deep, philosophical question: Why on earth are there two ways to write music, and which one should I bother learning before my next rebirth? So, let’s introduce our two contestants. Contestant One: The Indian Sargam Sa Re Ga Ma Pa…

“Ghoonghat ke pat khol re, tohe piya milenge…”“Lift the veil, beloved — and you shall meet your Eternal Lover.” In a time divided by caste, creed, and the rigid formalities of religion, one voice emerged from the modest lanes of Kashi. It was not the voice of a scholar, nor of a priest, but that of a weaver — Kabir — whose threads joined the sacred and the everyday, the word and the…

Intro Let’s start with a simple experiment. Look at a tree. Any tree. Don’t label it. Don’t call it beautiful, ugly, or a neem tree near uncle’s house. Just… see it. You’ll notice something strange. For a fleeting second, there’s only tree. Not your memory of a tree, not your opinion of it, not even you looking at it. Just… tree. Now imagine living like that, always. That, my friend, is what…