The offsite was Rajesh's idea.
"Team alignment day," he'd called it in the all-hands Slack message, as though the team was a set of tires that needed rotating. Two days at a resort near Mulshi — forty-five minutes from the office, just far enough to feel like an escape but close enough that nobody could claim travel as an excuse. The itinerary had been shared in a Google Doc that looked like it had been written by someone who had Googled "how to plan a meaningful corporate retreat" and followed every suggestion:
Day 1: Arrival. Ice-breaker activity. "Purpose and Values" workshop led by an external facilitator. Bonfire and team dinner.
Day 2: Wellness session (yoga + meditation). "OKR Alignment" workshop. Closing circle. Return to Pune.
Meera read the itinerary on Thursday evening and felt nothing. Two months ago, she would have felt something — a mild excitement, maybe, or the specific anticipation of spending two days not looking at Jira. She might have texted Priya about what to pack. She might have looked forward to the bonfire.
Now she felt the way you feel when you've upgraded your phone and the old charger doesn't fit anymore. The socket is the same shape. The pins are different.
🏔️ The Resort
The resort was called Sahyadri Greens. It sat on a hill overlooking the Mulshi backwaters — the kind of place that had "Eco" in its marketing materials and plastic water bottles in every room. The rooms were adequate, the Wi-Fi was bad (which was probably the point), and the common area had a motivational poster that said "Teamwork Makes the Dream Work" in a font that had never been within shouting distance of a dream.
The team arrived in two Innovas. Twelve people from the Finova payments squad — Meera, Nikhil, Aditi from design, Rajesh, the QA trio (Sneha K., Varun, and a new guy named Rohan who nobody was sure had been properly onboarded), and five others whose names Meera knew from Slack but whose faces she still occasionally mixed up.
The ice-breaker was a game called "Two Truths and a Lie."
Meera had played this at every corporate event she'd ever attended, at COEP orientation, at three birthday parties, and at her own engagement party. The game had the shelf life of a Maggi noodle — endlessly reheated, never improved.
When her turn came, she said:
"One. I once argued with a Swiggy delivery guy for eleven minutes about missing paneer tikka. Two. I've been reading the Bhagavad Gita. Three. I can solve a Rubik's cube in under two minutes."
Everyone guessed number two was the lie. The Gita one. Because nobody in this room would believe that Meera Kulkarni — SDE-2, COEP, the woman who once described the office meditation room as "a nap trap for people who can't handle Slack" — was reading a religious text voluntarily.
"Actually, the lie is the Rubik's cube," she said. "I can't solve it at all. I've been reading the Gita."
The room went quiet for half a second. Then Nikhil said "Since when?!" and the moment dissolved into laughter and the game moved on.
But the half-second stayed with Meera. That tiny pause where the room recalibrated. Where the label Meera-the-engineer-who-doesn't-do-spiritual had to be briefly updated.
Labels. Tags. Jira categories for human beings.
She was starting to see them everywhere.
🎤 The Workshop
The "Purpose and Values" workshop was led by a man named Deepak Mathur, a "certified leadership coach" with a LinkedIn profile that listed seventeen credentials and a speaking style that combined TED Talk cadence with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once questioned his own framework.
Deepak stood at the front of the conference room — flip chart, marker, the energy of a man who believed he was about to change lives.
"Let's start with a question," he said. "Who are you?"
Meera almost laughed out loud.
"Not your designation. Not your role. Not your title. WHO. ARE. YOU."
He paused dramatically. The room was silent. Twelve IT professionals stared at him with the polite blankness of people who had been through enough corporate workshops to know that the question was rhetorical and the answer would be provided in the next slide.
"You," Deepak said, pointing at Aditi, "are not a designer. You are a creative problem-solver."
"You," pointing at Rajesh, "are not a manager. You are a people enabler."
"You," pointing at Nikhil, "are not a developer. You are a digital architect."
Nikhil looked genuinely pleased by this. Meera wanted to tell him that a man who consistently forgot null checks was not an architect of anything.
Deepak continued. "Your purpose is not your job description. Your purpose is the value you create. And when you align your purpose with your company's values, magic happens."
He wrote on the flip chart:
PURPOSE + VALUES = IMPACT
Meera stared at it.
Six weeks ago, she would have nodded. She might have even written it in her notebook. It sounded right. It sounded important. Purpose. Values. Impact. These were the words of the performance economy — the LinkedIn vocabulary that turned humans into productivity units and called it empowerment.
But now — after BG 2.13, after the car metaphor, after 215 petabytes per gram and the gravitational constant tuned to 10⁶⁰ and a verse that said you are My eternal fragmental parts — now, Deepak's flip chart looked like someone trying to describe the car's paint job to the driver.
Who are you? You're a creative problem-solver!
No. She was the ātmā. She was Krishna's fragment. She was an eternal being in a temporary body in a world that was working very hard to make her forget all of that.
And this workshop — this well-intentioned, professionally facilitated, HR-approved workshop — was part of the forgetting.
Not maliciously. Deepak wasn't evil. He probably believed his own flip chart. But the entire framework — purpose equals value-creation, identity equals function, fulfilment equals impact — it was all car talk. It was all about the vehicle. The dashboard. The performance metrics. Nobody in this room was talking about the driver. Nobody was even asking if there was a driver.
She excused herself to the bathroom. Sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat. Pulled out her phone.
Meera: I'm at a corporate offsite and a leadership coach just told me my purpose is the value I create. And I want to scream.
Arjun: Why?
Meera: Because it's all car talk. It's ALL car talk. The whole thing — the workshop, the ice-breakers, the OKR alignment, the wellness yoga tomorrow — it's all designed to make the car run better. Shinier paint, better mileage, fewer breakdowns. Nobody is talking to the driver. Nobody even knows there IS a driver.
Arjun: Welcome to the third question.
Meera: What?
Arjun: You just asked "Where am I?" — without realizing it. You're looking around at the world — the corporate world, the social world, the whole setup — and for the first time, you're seeing it clearly. And what you're seeing is: everything here is set up to keep the driver focused on the car.
Meera: Yes. That's exactly it. It's like... the whole world is a really well-designed distraction. Not fake — I'm not saying it's fake. The offsite is real. My job is real. Deepak's flip chart is real. But it's all pointed in the wrong direction. Like a map that's accurate but upside down.
Arjun: Hold that thought. Seriously, hold it. Don't lose it in the bonfire and the team dinner. We'll talk when you're back. There's a verse for what you're seeing. And an image that'll make it click.
Meera: An image?
Arjun: A tree. An upside-down tree. 🌳
🔥 The Bonfire
The bonfire was the part of the offsite that was supposed to feel authentic. The part where you stopped being colleagues and became humans. Someone brought a guitar. Varun from QA knew three chords and played them all. Rajesh told a story about his early career that was meant to be inspiring and was mostly long. Aditi did an impression of the Finova CEO that was devastating in its accuracy.
And somewhere between the second marshmallow and the third chai, people started talking. Actually talking. Not standup-meeting talking. Not Slack-channel talking. The real kind.
Sneha K. talked about her father's heart surgery last month — how she'd sat in the ICU waiting room refreshing Jira on her phone because she didn't know what else to do with her hands.
Varun talked about his breakup — a three-year relationship that ended over WhatsApp, which made Meera's stomach turn because she knew exactly how that felt.
Even Nikhil — emotional intelligence of a for-loop, Nikhil — talked about how he missed his mom's cooking and how he called her every night at 10 PM and always said he was fine even when he wasn't.
Meera listened. And she noticed something.
Every single person around this bonfire was performing.
Not cynically. Not dishonestly. They were performing the way everyone performs — sharing just enough to seem vulnerable without actually being exposed. Curating their pain the way they curated their Instagram. Selecting the stories that made them look brave, or relatable, or deep — while the real stuff, the 3 AM stuff, the stuff that actually kept them up at night, stayed locked behind a login they shared with nobody.
And she wasn't judging them. She'd done the same thing. For years. She'd performed being fine at office. She'd performed being happy on Instagram. She'd performed being in love at the engagement party. Performance wasn't dishonesty — it was survival. It was how you navigated a world that rewarded the car's appearance over the driver's condition.
But now she could see it. And seeing it changed everything.
Because if everyone was performing, then nothing here was original. Everything was a version of something else. The bonfire vulnerability was a version of real intimacy — close, but not the original. The corporate "purpose" was a version of real purpose — similar shape, different substance. Varun's breakup grief was real, but his healing strategy — dating apps, gym, "keeping busy" — was a reflected version of actual healing.
The whole world was a reflection.
Real. Visible. Experienceable. But inverted.
The love was reflected love — real until the surface rippled. The success was reflected success — satisfying until you realized the satisfaction was temporary. The happiness was reflected happiness — felt in the moment, forgotten by morning.
Everything here looked like the real thing. But it was upside down.
🌙 That Night
She couldn't sleep. The resort room was cold — the AC was stuck on 18°C and the remote was missing. She wrapped herself in the thin resort blanket and pulled out the yellow book.
She wasn't sure where to look. Arjun had said a tree. An upside-down tree. She flipped through, scanning chapter openings.
Chapter 15. Verse 1.
"It is said that there is an imperishable banyan tree that has its roots upward and its branches down and whose leaves are the Vedic hymns. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas."
Bhagavad Gita 15.1.
She read it twice. Then a third time.
An upside-down tree. Roots above, branches below.
She put the book down and thought about it the way she thought about a new system architecture — not devotionally, not reverently, but structurally. What was this image saying?
A tree reflected in water. She'd seen it — in the Mulshi backwaters, just that afternoon, from the resort terrace. The trees on the bank, reflected in the still surface of the lake. The reflection was perfect. Every branch, every leaf, perfectly mirrored. But inverted. The roots — which in reality pointed upward, anchored in the sky — appeared to point downward in the reflection. The branches — which in reality grew downward toward the earth — appeared to grow upward.
Everything was there. Nothing was missing. But the entire orientation was reversed.
That was this world.
The Gita wasn't saying the world was fake. It wasn't saying Pune didn't exist, or her job didn't matter, or the bonfire conversation was meaningless. It was saying: everything here is a reflection of something original. And the reflection is inverted.
The original — the tree with roots in the sky — that was home. The spiritual reality. The fire where the spark originated. The source where the fragment belonged.
This world — the reflection — was the same tree, but upside down. Everything that was a root in the original appeared as a branch here. Everything permanent appeared temporary. Everything essential appeared optional. The things that should have been foundations — identity as soul, relationship with Krishna, awareness of the spiritual reality — those were treated as fringe, as weird, as the kind of thing your Aaji talked about and you politely ignored.
And the things that were actually branches — job titles, relationship status, salary, Instagram followers, ₹6.3 lakh engagement budgets — those were treated as roots. As foundations. As the things your entire identity hung from.
Upside down.
Sahil hadn't broken her. A branch had broken. Branches break. That's what branches do — they're temporary, they're fragile, they grow and they snap. She'd been hanging from a branch thinking it was a root. And when it broke, she thought the whole tree had fallen.
But the tree hadn't fallen. The tree was still there — roots above, anchored in something she was only now beginning to see. The real tree. The original. The one she'd been a part of all along but had been looking at upside down.
She picked up her phone. Opened the Notes app. The "Things I know about myself" list now had six entries. She added the seventh:
- This world is a reflection. Real, but inverted. Everything here is a version of something permanent — but the versions are temporary. Sahil, Finova, Instagram — all real. All branches. I was hanging from branches thinking they were roots. The roots are above. — BG 15.1
She put the phone down. Stared at the ceiling of the resort room. Somewhere outside, the Mulshi backwaters were still. The trees on the bank were reflected perfectly in the water — roots up, branches down. And somewhere, a twenty-seven-year-old engineer was looking at the reflection and, for the first time, thinking:
I want to see the original.
Who am I? The driver. Not the car. (BG 2.13)
Whose am I? A fragment of the designer. A spark from the fire. (BG 15.7)
Where am I? In the reflection. A real world, but inverted. Temporary, not permanent. (BG 15.1)
Three questions. Three answers. One framework.
The GPS was installed. ✨
📖 Next chapter: The Temporary — Back in Pune, Meera starts seeing the reflection everywhere: in the office, in her family, in the news. And she discovers the hardest truth about living in an inverted world — not that it's fake, but that it's beautiful enough to make you forget it's not the original. BG 7.14: why the reflection is so hard to see through.