A Pune story about anxiety, the feed, and a verse from the seventeenth chapter that quietly disagrees
Eleven Forty-Three
Ira Deshmukh, thirty-one, senior product manager at a fintech in EON IT Park, Kharadi, lay in the dark with the only light in the room coming from her own face. Just one scroll before sleep. She knew the lie even as she told it; there is no such thing as one scroll.
The post arrived at 11:43.
A boy from her COEP batch — 2016, the same year, the same campus, they had sat two rows apart in the same dull thermodynamics lectures — smiling against a wall of blurred investors. Thrilled to share that we've closed our Series A. Forty-one likes already. The comments stacking up like applause she could hear through the wall.
And there it was. The burn. Right under the ribs, instant and familiar, the body reacting before the mind had even read the second line. She had been fine all day. Calm in standup, sharp in the roadmap meeting, generous even, complimenting a junior's deck. And one post at 11:43 dissolved all of it like sugar in hot water.
She did not sleep. She lay in the dark and did the arithmetic she had done a thousand times — he started after me, I had better grades, where did I go wrong, what is wrong with me — until the ceiling went grey with morning.
She was brittle at breakfast. Her younger sister Anvi, twenty-two, staying with her for the months of the job hunt, came into the kitchen holding her phone with both hands the way you hold something you're afraid to drop.
"Tai — I got the interview. The Deloitte one. They called."
And Ira, hollow-eyed, acid still in her throat from a stranger's funding round, said without looking up, "Deloitte's not what it used to be. Don't get too excited."
She watched the light go out of her sister's face. She watched it happen and could not stop it, as if she were a passenger in her own mouth.
Later, alone, she pressed her palms into her eyes. Why am I like this. Why can't I just be happy for people. I don't even mean it. And then the sentence she always reached for, the one that closed the case and let her sleep: It's just how I am. I've always been competitive. I'm just wired this way.
She filed it under identity and went to work.
There is a verse for the thing that happened to Ira at 11:43.
In the seventeenth chapter of the Bhagavad-gītā, Kṛṣṇa says that the faith of an embodied person is svabhāva-jā — born of one's own nature (17.2). And then, more sharply: śraddhā-mayo 'yaṁ puruṣaḥ — a person is made of his faith; yo yac-chraddhaḥ sa eva saḥ — as is your faith, so are you (17.3).
We hear the word "faith" and think of temples. But faith is just what you most deeply, automatically trust to be true about reality. And Ira's faith — the one she didn't recite but lived — was that her worth was a number on a leaderboard, and that someone else's rise was, by the cold logic of rankings, her fall.
That is the faith that squeezed out of her at 11:43. Not a thought she chose. A thing she was made of. As her faith, so was she.
What Came Out Was Already In
The therapist's office was in Koregaon Park, above a café, with a fan that turned too slowly. Ira had booked it the way her generation books these things — quietly, almost ashamed, between two meetings.
Dr. Phadnis did not tell her she was broken. She asked a stranger question: "When did the comparing start?"
So Ira traced it back. The rank lists pinned to the school corridor. JEE. The family WhatsApp group where an aunt forwarded every cousin's admission and salary like scripture. Then college placements, then LinkedIn, then — this was the part that made her go cold — an algorithm that had spent nine years learning exactly which posts lit the fuse, and served them to her at 11:43 because that was when she was softest.
"You didn't decide to feel inadequate last night," Dr. Phadnis said. "You've rehearsed that feeling ten thousand times. It's a groove now. Show the brain the trigger and it runs the groove. No decision required."
Ira sat very still, because something was rearranging itself.
She had always believed her ambition was hers — fierce, chosen, the engine of everything good she'd built. But the thing that fired last night had not felt chosen at all. It had fired before she chose, like a reflex when the doctor taps your knee. She thought she had been deciding. She had only been discharging.
Picture the self as a sponge. For nine years — longer — Ira's sponge had been sitting in one liquid: comparison, measurement, the acid of not enough. Soaking. Soaking. By the time any morning began, the sponge was already full, set, saturated before her first real decision of the day. And when the world squeezed her — a post, a promotion, a sister's small win — out came exactly, and only, what was already inside.
The Gītā saw this too. Sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ — we are continually shaped by what we are absorbed in, and at the end we move toward whatever we have steeped in (8.6). What you soak in, you become. Ira had soaked in the feed. The feed had become Ira.
"I Built This"
The freeing thing and the crushing thing turned out to be the same thing, and it arrived on an ordinary Tuesday.
She had spent weeks assigning the blame outward. The industry made me like this. Indian parenting did this. The algorithm did this. It's just how I'm wired. Each of these had the comfort of letting her off the hook, and each had the poison of leaving her powerless — because if the industry built her, only the industry could free her, and the industry was not coming.
Then, doing the arithmetic again one night, she did it differently.
Nobody held the bottle.
Every late-night scroll — she had reached for the phone. Every time she measured herself against a stranger and quietly lost — she had run the measurement. Every comparison she fed, she had fed. Nine years of pouring the same acid into the same sponge, choice by tiny choice, ten thousand unwitnessed times. No villain had filled her. She had filled herself.
The weight of that was enormous. It's mine. I did this.
And then, underneath the weight, so quiet she almost missed it, came the relief — the strangest relief of her life:
If I built it, then it isn't me. It's a thing I made. And a made thing can be unmade.
This is the exact seam the Gītā keeps prising open. The threefold, mode-stained faith belongs to the dehī — the embodied one (17.2) — never to the self as such. Dehino 'smin yathā dehe (2.13): you are not the body, and you are not the conditioning stitched onto it. The anxious, comparing Ira was a coat she had sewn over many years, one stitch at a time. It was not the one wearing the coat.
She was not the orange juice. She was the sponge — and the sponge could hold something else.
Dr. Phadnis had a phrase for how: "Change isn't a decision you make once. It's a practice you repeat until the new groove is deeper than the old one." The Gītā had the same phrase, three thousand years older: abhyāsena tu kaunteya vairāgyeṇa ca gṛhyate (6.35) — the restless mind is mastered by practice and by letting go. Repetition had built the cage. Only repetition would open it.
So Ira began, unglamorously. The app went off the home screen. A walk before the inbox. The first hour of the day defended like a border. The acid came, but it came less — and when it came she could, sometimes, watch it pass instead of becoming it.
It was real. It helped. She was calmer.
And it was not enough.
Because the comparison had gone quiet, but the hollow underneath it had not. She had traded a louder, worse liquid for a milder, better one — and a milder liquid is still a liquid. She was no longer drowning. She was simply, cleanly, empty. She had managed herself into a smaller cage with nicer bars.
The Voice Across the Gap
The woman lived two doors down. Sumati-kaku. Ira had nodded at her in the lift for three years and never once seen her — an old woman, Ira had assumed, with nothing left to do.
It was the new habit that did it. Up before the city now, Ira stood on her own balcony in the blue half-light, watching the Mula-Mutha catch the first colour, and she heard it drift across the gap between the buildings.
A soft, unhurried string of syllables. The faint click of wooden beads. Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa — over and over, with no audience, no phone propped up to film it, no one to like it. Forty years, Ira would later learn, every single morning, before anyone was awake to be impressed.
And it struck her, standing there, that this woman she had written off had the one thing Ira had been clawing toward through therapy and walks and defended mornings: Sumati-kaku was full, and she was not comparing herself to a living soul.
Ira knocked, eventually, on a Sunday. She didn't know how to ask the question, so she asked a smaller one — about the beads.
The kaku didn't lecture. She didn't quote anything. She just put a strand of worn tulsi beads into Ira's hands, warm from her own, and said, "Try it. In the morning. Before you pick up the phone. Just the names. You don't have to feel anything."
That night Ira understood the difference, and it was the whole thing.
Her therapist's tools had been good, and all of them had pointed inward — manage your reactions, regulate yourself, observe your thoughts, fix you. Useful, exhausting, and still all about the small frightened kingdom of me. But the kaku's chanting pointed the other way entirely — away from herself, toward someone else. The names were not about Ira at all. And the relief of that — of being, for ninety seconds, not the subject of her own attention — was unlike anything the apps or the walks had given her.
Here the Gītā makes its highest move. To swap a worse mode for a better one is good, but every mode still binds; even goodness is a brighter cage. There is only one input that is nirguṇa — above the whole system of liquids — and Kṛṣṇa says that the one who serves Him with unbroken devotion transcends the modes altogether (14.26). And Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu names what that input does that no technique can: ceto-darpaṇa-mārjanam — the holy name cleanses the mirror of the heart.
Ira's better habits had been diluting the acid. The name did something else. It did not manage the stain. It lifted it — and showed her, underneath, a face she had forgotten she owned.
The Next Bead
A morning, some weeks on. Ira on the balcony, beads in hand, clumsy, her mind bolting off every third name toward the day's to-do list and back. One round, badly done. The phone lay face-down on the bed inside, where it would stay until she was finished.
She had no illusions. A post would come today — a funding round, a move to Singapore, a wedding, a promotion — and the old groove was nine years deep; it would rise, the acid would come. You do not unpour nine years in a single season. The sponge was still mostly orange.
But this morning, before any of it, she had said the names. And for a few minutes she had not measured herself against one single human being on earth — because the names were not about her, and you cannot rank yourself in a place where you have forgotten to be the centre.
She did not feel fixed. She felt something better and stranger: that the anxious, comparing Ira was not the bottom of her. That beneath the nine years of poured-in acid there was someone older and quieter and entirely unbothered by leaderboards — someone who had been waiting the whole time, who had never once needed to win. Not a self she had built. A self she had buried. And the name was a thread let down to her, all the way to the bottom of the well.
Across the gap, the kaku's voice went on, steady as a heartbeat.
That afternoon Ira found Anvi at the kitchen table and sat down across from her.
"Tell me about the interview," she said. "The real version. From the start." And when her sister's face lit up, Ira let it light hers too, and felt — for once — nothing rise to put it out.
You are made of what you soak in. That is not a curse; it is the only instruction you need. You did not choose the first nine years — but the next bead is yours. And of all the things a person can pour into the sponge of a single human life, there is exactly one that does not merely change the colour of the water, but dissolves the staining itself, and gives you back the face you had before the world taught you to compare it.
Ira said the names.
And picked up the next bead.