Why I left the mountains for Bombay

Because I have learnt to inhabit a mind I don't need to escape

I chose to write this letter because people keep asking me why I'm back in Bombay when I could live anywhere in the world. It's a fair question. I built a startup, sold it, and could afford to live and party anywhere. Instead, I rode a Bullet across India, from Himalayan ashrams to Goa's beaches, for a year looking for happiness, but ended up back in Bombay, honking and all. And it has nothing to do with being practical. I had already lived my “been there done that” moments, and there was nothing left to prove. Then why did I return to the boredom of city life?

Because the answer was in returning - peace isn’t somewhere you go. It’s a different relationship with what’s happening inside you. I learnt that a builder living the life of a monk isn't at peace.

The calm outside of us

Imagine you had loads of money. What would you do? Most of us would do the obvious thing. Leave the city for mountains, beaches…no alarm, no honking. I've lived that life, vacation to vacation, weekend to weekend. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it. The calm outside of us is real. Less noise, more sky, nobody needing anything from you. I can understand why people start planning the next trip the day they come back from the previous one. I can also relate to why Friday feels different from Monday.

That is because weekends, meditation retreats, or quiet holidays do reliably produce calm.

In a Stanford study of 38 people, those who walked 90 minutes on a grassland path lined with oak trees and greenery replayed fewer negative thoughts afterwards. Those who walked 90 minutes along a busy four-lane road didn't. A 2025 meta-analysis of 32 studies found a large boost in wellbeing. The boost was bigger when people actually switched off from work and moved their bodies.

The only problem is that the calm does not last long. Within a week of coming back, you're where you started. In a 2018 APA survey of 1,512 workers, 24% of workers said the benefits vanished the moment they got back, and another 40% said they lasted only a few days.

So the calm outside of us is very real, but it just doesn't stay forever. One explanation is Relaxation-Induced Anxiety. The assumption is always that if someone is stressed, they just need to relax. New research reveals that the nervous system views the sudden absence of stress as a dangerous vulnerability. Relaxation does not fail because it does not work, but because the autonomic nervous system treats stillness as a threat cue.

But what if the vacation never ended?

That's what I did for a year. I had abs, nothing to worry about financially, and calm all around me. An endless holiday should do away with Relaxation-Induced Anxiety as well, but sustained inner steadiness is not that easy to come by. My inner self was still in turmoil. The irritation. Sometimes even sadness, about how things didn't go the way I expected. My mind kept going back to work, replaying how I couldn't scale the company to an IPO. It kept asking what I could have done differently, if I should start the next thing.

The restlessness in the head wasn't just about work. I remember getting irritated watching people, me included, perform enlightenment for Instagram sitting at G-shot (one of the best coffee places in Goa, if you ever go). I remember the sting of rejection when a woman I smiled at didn't smile back. I remember the anger when my landlord asked me to move out of the apartment I'd picked because it was close to the shala, where I went every day at 7 AM. I remember the irritation of tourists making unrealistic demands, and yes, honking. And, of course, a nagging feeling that I needed to do something with my life. I had changed my circumstances, maybe even my body. But the peace wasn't lasting. I could leave the city anytime. The turmoil within did not leave my head.

Labelling my thoughts

I'm a fairly weird guy with a lot of eccentric habits. I love solitude. You'd find me walking the beach alone in nothing but red shorts. One day I was talking to myself as usual. But instead of getting lost in my thoughts, I started labelling them out loud - useful or not useful. A grown man talking to himself on a beach. Yes, it's weird. But it helped a lot. It sounded something like this.

"What if I had taken the company the other way?" Not useful.

“I can't do anything about it anymore.”

"Maybe I'm not ripped enough? Not good-looking enough?" Not useful.

“I can't change how I look today.”

"People are saying I left and became a yogi. Ugh." Not useful.

“Who cares what others think?”

Hearing them out loud, I started noticing a pattern. Most of my thoughts weren't about where I was. They were about the past I was replaying, the future I was worrying about, or what others thought of me.

Walking on a beach, my mind was in a meeting room that no longer existed. Every label came down to the same thing. The company; my looks; what people said. None of it was in my control. The only thing I could control was my thoughts. It didn't happen in one walk, but that's where it started. For the first time, the calm wasn't coming from the beach. It was mine.

Walking the same beach, your thoughts may be different. But they'll be some version of what already happened in your life, what might happen next, or what someone else thinks of you.

Stopping the thought stream is not the point. It’s about changing the flow of thoughts. Do not stress your brain with "Is this thought true?" Just, "Is this thought helpful?" That's how Russ Harris puts it in The Happiness Trap. If it isn't, you don't have to argue with it. You just don't have to follow it.

There is no empty mind

Notice what I didn't do on that beach. I didn't try to stop my thoughts. I think we've overblown the advice on meditation and mindfulness. And I think a lot of meditation teachers get this wrong.

Somewhere along the way, meditation was interpreted as emptying your mind. Zero thoughts. There is no such thing as an empty mind. I think of it the way I read it in a book by Osho years ago. Your thoughts are clouds in the sky. After one cloud comes another. Maybe some blue sky in between. As long as we have a mind, we'll have thoughts. We can't really stop thinking. But with enough practice, we can witness our own thinking.

You don't have to embrace the thought. You don't have to fight it. You accept it, and you stay indifferent to it. If it is not useful, let it pass.

The Yoga Sutras open with this. "Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah." Yoga is the settling of the mind's fluctuations (1.2). Not the pose. The evenness of mind.

The Purpose Within

Once I could see my triggers, my reactions and my thoughts, the calm started to stay. But that was only half of it. As human beings, we need something to strive for. For me, one old feeling kept returning: I missed building. At first, I treated that as another thing I needed to let go of. Eventually, I wondered whether it was something I needed to listen to. Learning not to follow every thought didn't mean ignoring everything happening inside me. Some thoughts needed less attention. Others were pointing towards something I genuinely wanted. I wanted to build again. The question was whether I could do it without making the outcome a measure of my worth.

I'm an ambitious man. I grew up with nothing and worked hard to become who I am. My dharma was to build. A builder living the life of a monk wasn't going to work. So I decided to change that. If I can take my calm wherever I go, maybe I can build differently this time. The Gita has a word for what was missing. Swadharma. Your own dharma, even if done imperfectly, is better than someone else's done well (3.35). Arjuna was never asked to leave the battlefield. Krishna told him, "Yogastha kuru karmani." Be steady in yourself, then act (2.48). That's the order. Steady first. Then fight. My battlefield is my ambition. Building. Writing the book. Maybe something else later.

Why I'm back in Bombay

I'm not back in Bombay because it's calm. It isn't. I'm back because peace and purpose have followed me here. And Bombay is where my work is. At least for now. Vacations are not bad. Take them. A vacation is a warm room. But eventually you have to leave. Changing your city, your job or your routine isn't running away. Sometimes it's the right call. If a place is hurting you, leave it. The problem is only when changing the place becomes the only thing you know how to do. What I built on that beach is more like a jacket. It doesn't change Bombay's weather. But I carry it everywhere.

I still get irritated. I still replay things. But I have learnt to come back faster. I have learnt to inhabit a mind I don't need to escape. The biggest compliment I get these days is that I'm very calm. It's because I'm more aware of my thoughts. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I lost my temper. Maybe I have found a way to live on a perpetual vacation. It just isn't a place.