Science and self-awareness.

If you've sat in any room where someone said "astrology" out loud, you know the small tilt of the head, the polite distancing. Anil knows it. Vikram knows it. I know it. So that's where the conversation begins — with the cringe.

What follows is an unhurried conversation with Anil Grovor — former technology leader with global product multinationals, founder of Atmatva, and facilitator of deep transformation journeys with individuals, leaders, and organisations — about his year-long exploration of Vedic astrology with Vikram Devatha. Not as a means of prediction, but as a doorway into deeper self-awareness and inner inquiry.

The same instrument a yoga therapist trains on the breath, the body, the way someone holds themselves — Jyotish trains on the more interior weather. Same gesture. Different surface. Anil is the kind of person who doesn't experience science and spirituality as two things asking to be reconciled — for him they're the same act of looking, just at different depths.

The first year of the programme is anchored in the five elements, with retreats held at 1,500- to 2,000-year-old Shiva temples. Krishna and the Moon are not learned at a whiteboard. They're learned at Vrindavan. Buddha and Mercury, at Bodh Gaya. Memorising a planet, Anil's quiet point is, is a category error. You sit with it, in a place that holds it, until it becomes recognisable inside you.

We also push gently against the Bollywood caricature — astrology as jadu-tona, occult, something to be feared. The shorthand for what Vikram teaches is closer to Prashna than prediction. The question isn't what will happen to me? It's what tendencies are alive in me right now, and what choice does that give me? That isn't fate. That's a useful kind of mirror.

This is the first of a small series I'm recording with fellow students from the All Things Vedic programme — each of us drawn to it for different reasons, each shifting in different ways. Anil was a clear note to start on.

— SREE