Making room for Krishna

I spent thirty years asking God for things. He was waiting for me to run out, so we could finally talk.

Young Avi dressed as Krishna. This is how my mother dressed me up every Janmashtami.

That achievements bring no lasting happiness is beyond doubt. I realised it after my successful exit from CreditVidya, because there is always the next thing - a unicorn in my case. My intention here is not to argue the futility of ambition, because it's not. To be human is to aspire, dream and achieve. Aspirations gave us civilisation, art, science, exploration and invention. It can also give us envy, greed, status anxiety and endless dissatisfaction. In short, despair. And because there's despair, there must be God as well. Or, God has always been around; just that we fail to feel his company. For 30 years, my relationship with God was transactional, then something changed everything for me. I escaped despair. Research supports the possibility that a secure relationship with God can provide meaning, attachment, coping, and felt companionship. This essay is about how I discovered my friend, my Krishna.

The God of small things

Eight of us lived in a beaten-down two-bedroom house in Kathmandu. Every evening my mother would recite the Hanuman Chalisa and make three of us siblings sit around her. There was barely enough space for the people living in that house. But my mother found a small corner in the kitchen for her favourite Krishna. Whenever I think of Kathmandu, I can still feel the warmth of her embrace while she did her pooja. That was my first experience of God.

I did not wonder whether Hanuman could be proven or whether Krishna existed outside the imagination. My mother prayed, so I prayed. Everyone around me believed, so I believed. God entered my life the way language and food did - through the people who loved me before I had decided what I thought about anything.

But sitting in my mother's lap, I also learned something else. I learned that God is where you go when you want something. So every evening, tucked against my mother while she sang, I made my request. Get me out of Kathmandu. Get me to America. Then my life will finally be complete.

In search of comfort

I went through the stage that engineers go through, when you begin to ask why you should believe in anything that cannot be detected by the five senses or derived from first principles. My logical mind questioned Krishna's existence, but it survived my rational phase for two excellent reasons. First, the gurdwara near my apartment was where you could meet Indian girls who had come with their parents. So I went and hung around the gurdwara. And second, there was langar: free Indian food in the US, and I couldn't say no to that.

But God played a larger role in my life than I admitted. He helped me upgrade my ambitions.

I prayed for a beautiful girlfriend. I prayed for a better job. I prayed for money, success, and eventually a billion-dollar exit. Every prayer was a request for something that would finally make me feel complete. I did not have a relationship with God. I had a wishlist. To be more honest, I treated him less like a friend and more like Santa Claus. When life went well, God seemed to be listening. When it did not, I wondered whether anyone was there at all.

I do not judge the younger version of myself for that. The logic made sense. If you grow up around scarcity of money, opportunity, certainty, or access, you learn that improvement is not an abstract aspiration. You learn to close the distance between where you are and where you need to be. You work harder. You become more capable. You build skills, savings, credibility. The strategy works because the gaps are real, and closing them can change the course of a life. It changed mine.

Achievement does not deserve the contempt it sometimes receives in spiritual writing. The boy in that Kathmandu kitchen was not wrong to want out. Anyone who tells you ambition is spiritually inferior has usually never been poor.

In search of meaning

Osho has a line I return to often: peace of mind is a million miles away from peace of stomach. Only when your stomach is at peace do you go looking for meaning.

My stomach finally found its peace. The salary came. Then the company. Then the exit. Somewhere in my thirties, I looked around and realised that every request the eight-year-old had made from his mother's lap had been granted. America. Money. Success. All of it.

And yet every morning, I woke up feeling empty, anxious and like a failure. I believed happiness was one achievement away. I believed that once I reached a certain threshold, the restlessness would settle. But the game had no natural ending. There was always someone with a larger exit, a larger company, a more impressive life, more money, more freedom, more public proof that they mattered.

This was confusing, and sitting in that emptiness, I understood something that frightened me more than failure. I was never going to be happy this way because I had made achievement responsible for answering questions achievement was never designed to answer.

For twenty years, the central question in my life had been, "What do I want next?"

Now it became, "Why?"

To get an answer, I did something I had never done before. I packed my bag and set forth to "just be" at an ashram. Yoga every morning. Slow days. No targets, no metrics, no request pending anywhere. For a man whose entire identity was motion, it felt less like peace and more like withdrawal. The mind kept offering exits. Start something. Buy something. Fix something. I let the offers pass, and I sat with the emptiness instead.

Finding Krishna within

After months of wandering around aimlessly, one morning, something happened that I do not have the words for. After a long yoga practice, I opened my eyes and for a moment I lost the visible sense of my physical body. It felt like I had merged with everything around me.

My heart filled with joy. Tears rolled down my face. My mind, usually busy solving problems or making up stories, had gone quiet. I was not seeking anything. I was not trying to get anywhere. I was simply there. My conscious mind still cannot prove what happened. It can only describe the stillness, the slow breath, the absence of any pending request.

For a brief moment, Krishna no longer felt like someone I needed to reach, impress, persuade, or ask for something. He did not feel outside me. He felt present within me and beside me. The boundary between "me" - the anxious, striving, endlessly planning person - and the world around me became less solid.

For most of my life, I experienced God as someone outside me. He was above me, somewhere beyond reach, listening to requests and deciding whether to grant them. I approached him as a child approaches a powerful adult: with need, hope, fear, and a list of things that might make life better.

The feeling I experienced in that yoga studio was not permanent. It still comes and goes

Some days, my mind is as restless as it has always been. It wants to plan, optimise, build, acquire, improve. It wants to find the next thing that will make life feel settled.

But the emptiness doesn't frighten me the same way anymore.

There is no metric for this kind of peace. You can measure income, valuation, output, followers, revenue, sleep, calories, and time spent in meditation. You can measure how much you have earned, built, acquired, or given away. But there is no dashboard for the moment you realise that the life you are trying so hard to improve is already being lived with you.

That is what I think my mother understood in the kitchen in Kathmandu.

I used to think she was praying to him because she needed something.

Now I believe she was doing something simpler.

She was making room for a friend.

This territory, where God becomes a "friend", resulting in unburdened joy, clinically aligns with the development of a "Secure Attachment to God", where individuals utilise their belief system as a "secure base" and "haven of safety." It translates into lower loneliness, higher optimism, and superior emotional regulation during demanding situations.

Transactional spirituality fuels anxiety. On the other hand, treating a higher power or meaning system as a mechanism for secure attachment offers measurable emotional protection.

And perhaps that is what faith is for - not to help us get everything we want, but to help us recognise that the next thing may or may not work, the next goal may or may not be achieved, but we are already accompanied by a friend who acts as our charioteer in the daily battle against despair.