There are mornings that begin like any other, with the same familiar weight of habit, and yet end with a strange clarity, as if the day has quietly shifted its axis. This was one of those mornings for me in Indore. I went to attend a Jain pravachan, a gathering shaped by discipline and devotion, and I returned carrying something that did not feel like information or entertainment. It felt like a kind of inward pause, a soft but insistent instruction to look again at how I live.
What makes the moment more curious is the geography of my own inheritance. My ancestral home lies within a stone’s throw, as our family says, of the place where Bhagwan Mahavir was born. I come from a region that Jain memory holds as sacred, a land that has given this tradition its greatest teachers. Bihar’s Jain geography is not a vague backdrop but a set of named, rooted memories: Vasupujya is associated with Champapuri (near Bhagalpur), Munisuvrata with Rajgir, and Mahavir with the Vaishali region. If one widens the lens to the older cultural map of the east, the horizon grows still more formidable: at Sammed Shikharji in present-day Jharkhand, Jain tradition holds that twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras attained moksha. It is easy to grow up near such landmarks and still miss what they are trying to teach.
I have visited Pavapuri more than once, and each time it has offered a kind of restraint that does not need to announce itself. Pavapuri, also known as Apapapuri, sits in Bihar’s Nalanda district and is revered as the place associated with Bhagvan Mahavir’s nirvana. At its heart is Jal Mandir, the water temple set within a lake, marking the site of his cremation: the story held by local memory is that devotees carried away so much material from the cremation ground, treating it as sacred, that a hollow was formed, which later filled with water and became the lake that now holds the temple like a held breath. The setting does not overwhelm by size; it persuades through stillness, as if the landscape itself has learnt the discipline it commemorates. Philosophy has been my subject for years, and I have studied the classical schools of Indian thought, including Jain darshan. And yet, despite the closeness of place, despite the study, despite the pilgrimages, I had never truly sat in a Jain sabha of this kind. Not once.
It is a humbling realisation, because it makes plain what we often avoid admitting. Proximity does not guarantee intimacy. Knowledge does not guarantee encounter. There are thresholds we circle for years, sometimes for decades, without stepping across. And then, on some ordinary day, without fanfare, the door opens. Not because we have finally earned it, but because life, in its own timing, makes room.
I started that day with intention. In an old Brahmin practice that still lives in the body long after it stops being spoken of, I chose to fast before attending the gathering. There is a discipline in fasting that does not flatter the ego. It gives you fewer places to hide. Gandhi ji believed in fasting as a method of purification, not as punishment but as a return to attentiveness, and I understand why he trusted it. When the stomach is quiet, the mind has fewer excuses.
It was a Sunday morning, which for me is usually an indulgent time. Truthfully, I rarely wake before 9.30. That day the programme began at 9.30, and the venue was a half-hour drive from my temporary base in Indore. I rose earlier than my body preferred. I dressed in ethnic clothes, not as performance but as a small gesture of belonging. My throat had been hurting for days, so I made myself kadha, drank it slowly, and then played music at a volume that was not holy in any strict sense, but was loud enough to pull my senses into wakefulness. I suspect I was trying to cleanse the sluggishness from my spirit before I attempted anything sacred.
The venue had the quiet efficiency of something assembled with care and speed. It was hosted at the residence of one of the founding family members of D. P. Abhushan, and my own colleagues were present, not as employees but as participants. They greeted me with warmth, the kind that makes you feel held without being handled. There was a small camp for those who wanted to change into a dhoti. Someone offered, kindly, to help me change. I declined, politely. I can manage a dhoti, but only when I am not being watched, and I did not want my struggle to become part of anyone else’s morning.
Then came a ritual I had not anticipated, and yet it seemed to define the atmosphere more than any speech could. Mobile phones had to be deposited at a counter. Jain munis do not use electricity, and it is considered respectful to keep such things away from them. I carry two phones. Yes, that is absurd. I also carry two trackers, and headphones. Yes, that is its own confession. As I handed over my devices, I felt the peculiar vulnerability of surrender. It was not fear, but a brief disorientation, like the moment at an airport when your pockets are emptied, or the moment you stand before someone whose stature forces you to set down your usual armour.
In that small act of giving up devices, something deeper surfaced. Here I was, bound to every modern tether that money can purchase, and I was coming to sit before men who had renounced not only comfort but convenience, not only luxury but the very idea of ownership. I wore jewellery: rings, a bracelet, a chain, a locket. I did not suddenly believe that jewellery is immoral. Yet in that moment, it felt heavy. It felt like noise. I felt small, and a little foolish, and perhaps not fully honest with myself.
Still carrying those thoughts, I walked towards the hall, a temporary space created for the occasion. It was divided into sections. Women sat in one area. In front, closer to the Guru ji, sat men in dhotis, each carrying a small bag that suggested a disciplined simplicity. To their right, sat the rest of the men. There were a few chairs. Someone offered me one. I refused. Not out of virtue, but because the floor felt like the correct height for the day. I sat with everyone else.
Almost everyone wore a special mask, and I did not know how to tie mine. I asked an elderly gentleman beside me. He showed me gently, without the impatience that older people sometimes reserve for the unprepared. Throughout the programme, whenever my mask loosened, he helped me tighten it. He did it with such unforced affection that I accepted his help even when I could have managed alone. There are moments when we recognise what we miss, not by grief, but by gratitude. In his quiet, fatherly care, I felt the absence of my parents with a sharpness that surprised me.
I arrived perhaps thirty seconds before the scheduled start. Two munis were already seated on a wooden platform. They looked ordinary, which in itself felt extraordinary. There was none of the theatrical grandeur that some televised babas cultivate, and none of the polished spectacle one sometimes sees in evangelical settings. The platform was plain wood. The cloth was unstitched, and looked neither machine-washed nor perfumed with detergent. The austerity was not curated. It was lived.
Indore is hot. There is no winter here in the way I understand winter. Yet people were wearing woollens, because for Indore, January carries a cold edge. And there sat the munis, under open air, on rough wood, in simple cloth, with nothing to shield them from discomfort except practice. One wore glasses. One held a slim book. There was no microphone. When they spoke, they spoke loudly enough to reach the back, but the voice was not shrill. It carried weight without aggression.
The theme was vice, and in particular intoxication: vyasan-mukti, freedom from addiction. The framing was striking. It was not couched in mystical threats or decorative fear. It was presented as the practical problem of a human mind that seeks escape, and then pays for that escape with bad decisions. The Guru ji used percentages at one point, and common examples, as if to say that moral insight does not require a rejection of evidence. Mid-sentence he would break into a bhajan, and the gathering would join at once, not as chorus but as community.
I did not know the words. I heard them for the first time, and so I joined with soft claps. Soon I realised that the Jain manner here was different. People did not clap in the usual way. They raised both arms sideways and sang with devotion. I continued with a gentle clap, not to make noise, but to show appreciation, and nobody corrected me. The same uncle beside me even clapped along near the end, as if to reassure me that belonging has more than one language.
There were moments of social-proof, as every gathering has, but these did not feel like performance. A twelve-year-old child was praised for having given up dinner for four years, and for inspiring his parents to do the same. Another story was shared about a granddaughter who asked her grandfather to remove a camera from the home, because munis could not enter a space filled with electricity and surveillance. The stories were simple, and yet they made the point with more force than any abstract sermon could. Renunciation is not always a dramatic leap. Sometimes it is a small refusal, repeated, until it becomes a new way of being.
What struck me was how personally the munis spoke to people. They addressed devotees by name. It felt as if they were continuing conversations held over days, perhaps weeks. This closeness, this attention, created a sense of intimacy that many spiritual settings fail to achieve. It suggested that guidance, to be effective, cannot remain general. It must be human.
About twenty minutes in, the senior muni arrived and sat on the floor with everyone else. His presence altered the room. The energy lifted, not in an excited way, but as if a steady current had entered the space. His address returned to the same theme: intoxication, self-control, and the need for weekly religious gathering as a disciplined practice rather than an occasional display. He urged people to bring their elderly parents. He urged them to keep company that strengthens restraint. He was full of energy, delivering almost 80% of his address standing upright, as though the purity of his convictions held him aloft, suspended in the air.
His delivery had power. He sang mid-sentence, recited a few shlokas, and moved between humour and admonition with ease. He used Valmiki’s transformation to suggest that people can change. He borrowed from Ram’s example to speak of moral steadiness. He did not hesitate to draw from Hindu reference points, as if to say that truth can be carried in more than one vessel.
He also referenced a recent accident involving a jeweller family returning from a celebration. The implication was clear. It was not meant to shame, but to warn. When intoxication enters a life, it enters not as a guest but as a creditor, and it collects its dues in sudden tragedy.
There was one moment that jarred me. In speaking against addiction, he referred to the seventh generation becoming “hijra”, and used the idea of “who will fight at the border” as a warning. I did not agree with that framing, and I winced at the language. It seemed out of step with Jain ideals of ahimsa and compassion, and it leaned on a stereotype that does not belong in a moral argument. Yet he also qualified it, almost as if he knew its weakness, saying it had been told to him. I read it as an attempt to reach a certain RSS audience present that day, and perhaps to speak in a register that would land with them. Even so, it reminded me that saints, too, are human instruments. They carry centuries of wisdom, and also the imperfect residue of the society around them. It is for the listener to receive what elevates, and to quietly reject what diminishes.
A few minutes later he spoke about a book he was reading, and he mentioned that it was a Hindi translation of an English work. I missed the title, but I felt genuine happiness at the mention of reading, and the place it held in his world. It is easy to assume that renunciation is anti-intellectual. In truth, the Jain tradition has always valued careful thought: logic, epistemology, disciplined debate. The mention of translation felt like a small bridge between worlds, between scholarship and devotion, between study and practice.
And perhaps this is the point where Jain philosophy enters, not as a decorative paragraph, but as the quiet architecture behind everything I saw.
Jainism does not merely preach virtue. It designs a life. At its heart is ahimsa, not as sentimental kindness, but as a rigorous commitment to reduce harm, even the harm we cause without noticing. There is aparigraha, non-possessiveness, not as poverty, but as freedom from the compulsion to accumulate. There is anekantavada, the recognition that reality is many-sided, that no single viewpoint can claim the whole truth. This does not weaken conviction. It strengthens humility. It makes space for dialogue, for restraint in judgement, for a moral imagination that does not rush to condemn. And there is the central insight that liberation is not gifted by a deity. It is crafted through conduct, through awareness, through deliberate simplification. When I handed over my phones, I performed a small aparigraha without knowing it. When I sat on the floor, I felt the equality that comes when status is lowered. When the uncle helped me with my mask, I saw how ahimsa can be gentle, and personal. And when the munis spoke against intoxication, it was not simply a social warning. It was a reminder that the mind, when clouded, becomes capable of cruelty, and that clarity is a form of non-violence.
As the discourse ended, people lined up for blessings. I waited. I let the most eager go ahead. Then I queued, touched the Guru ji’s feet, and spoke briefly. I told him it was my first Jain sabha, and that I admired his sense of humour and his manner of delivery. He asked my name, asked where I came from, accepted the compliment with calm, and then said we should meet and speak another day. I intend to take him up on that promise. Then I touched his feet again, received his blessing, and stepped away.
Outside, a buffet had been laid out. It smelled wonderful. The scent rose like temptation and hospitality together. My fast was challenged, but I walked past it. Not with struggle, but with a surprising ease. It felt right to keep the body slightly hungry, as if to preserve the honesty of the morning.
I collected my devices from the counter. I will not pretend I was suddenly cured of attachment. Yet I held them with less affection. They felt useful, yes, but also intrusive. My Uber was waiting. I sat in the car and rode back, while the city resumed its ordinary rhythm around me.
On the way, my mind began to compare. A week earlier, I had recounted to Nitin ji an old memory from around fifteen years ago. On a long flight, an ISKCON sadhu sitting beside me had tried to sell austerity as if it were a product. He spoke of the Gita, of heaven, of salvation, and he did so while flying business class, carrying a Blackberry, and preaching from a PlayBook tablet. Most people will not remember the PlayBook now, but I do. The contrast is difficult to ignore. Both men may be sincere. Both may be devoted. Yet they appeal to different instincts within us. One speaks from simplicity, and the simplicity itself becomes the proof. The other speaks from comfort, and requires you to trust the message despite the packaging.
I am not qualified to judge which path is superior. In both settings, I am still a learner. Yet I know what my heart felt that morning in Indore. It felt, for a while, unburdened. It felt as if the noise of ambition, consumption, and constant connectivity had been turned down, not by force, but by the presence of people who live with fewer demands.
There is a particular honesty in the Jain idea of renunciation. It does not ask you to hate the world. It asks you to see the world clearly, including your own cravings. It does not insist that pleasure is evil. It warns you that dependence is a chain, and that addiction is the modern form of bondage. The Muni ji spoke of gutkha, cigarettes, alcohol. I heard him. Yet I also heard something else, unspoken but obvious. There are addictions that look respectable: the addiction to status, to speed, to constant notification, to being needed. I walked into that gathering wearing the symbols of modern life on my body and in my pocket. I walked out aware that even my comforts have costs, and that some of those costs are paid by my attention, my patience, my calm.
I do not claim a conversion. I do not claim sainthood. I returned to my life. The phones came back. The calendar returned. The noise resumed. Yet something stayed.
It was the image of two men on a plain wooden platform, speaking without amplification, holding a room full of people through nothing more than voice, discipline, and presence. It was the feeling of an elderly stranger tightening my mask as if I were his own. It was the moment of surrender at the counter, when I felt my devices become small. It was the buffet I did not eat, and the strange peace in that refusal. It was the thought that my ancestral home has always been near Mahavir’s birthplace, and yet I needed this January morning in Indore to feel what that closeness might mean.
Perhaps that is the quiet miracle of such gatherings. They do not give you fireworks. They give you a mirror. And if you are lucky, and if you are willing, you look long enough to recognise yourself, not as you perform, but as you are.
I paused that day, as one pauses before a temple threshold, or before a truth that feels larger than opinion. And in that pause, I understood something simple: the highest form of devotion is not emotion. It is conduct. It is the courage to live with less harm, less excess, less pretending.
If the reader takes anything from this, I hope it is not my narrative, but the invitation hidden within it. Do not wait for perfect readiness. Do not wait for certainty. When a door opens, step through. Sit on the floor. Listen carefully. Let a stranger help you with your mask. Hand over what you cling to, if only for an hour. And then return to your life, not lighter in possession, but lighter in spirit.
Some mornings, that is enough to change the direction of a year.