Peepal Baba

So when she came, she brought in a lot of

excitement and lot of energy into the house you know because she came from a hardcore rural background you know so mother side father side this is in fact the the agro background the agriculture background came from my nana and from my dada means from a parental and maternal both both sides both sides and they were very well off farmers and you know today we call them organic farmers they were into natural farming and they didn't get into any pesticides into chemicals and

And it was not even a fashion those days, but they were good farmers.

There was large scale farming they were doing.

And from my paternal side also, from a maternal side.

So I think for the first one decade, apart from good schools, I studied in Christian missionary schools and my father was being posted from one and a half years here and two years there.

And, you know, but I had a lot of influence from my grandparents.

I think more than my parents, parents came much later.

It was my grandparents.

So my paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother.

So, and both were, you know, they were very spiritually down to earth people, very much connected to the soil and very human centric, very spiritual, very meditative.

We saw a lot of prayers in the house.

Satsang and all that.

And I won't call them rituals.

But it was very pure energy.

And a lot of reading.

A lot of good books.

One of the first books I read was Mahatma Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth.

And there was a trunk, you know, there was this box and we had books on Vivekananda and then Dainan Saraswati and Aurobindo and then Acharya Rajneesh and all these books in Hindi and English lying around.

And, you know, you could just pick up a book, read a few pages here, pick up this book, read it.