September 5th is Teachers Day in India — the birth anniversary of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher, statesman and one of the finest minds this country has produced. He once said that teachers should be the best minds in the country. Not the most qualified. The best minds. People who think deeply, who question honestly, and who bring that quality of thinking to every person they encounter.
I have been thinking about that distinction today. Between qualification and quality of mind. Between certification and genuine transmission. Between someone who teaches and someone who is, at their core, a teacher.
My first teacher
My first teacher never stood in a classroom. He has no degree, no certification, no title. He is my father — a farmer from rural Telangana who has spent his entire life tending the same land, through every season, harvest or bare.
The lesson he taught me — that you show up for what you love regardless of what it gives you in return, that devotion is its own reward, that the relationship between a person and their work is sacred — is a lesson I have never found in any textbook. And it is the lesson that underlies everything I teach.
When I stand in front of a student in a yoga class, or sit with someone in a Sudarshan Kriya session, or hold space in a sound healing immersion, the quality I am trying to bring is the quality my father brings to his fields at sunrise. Full presence. No agenda. No performance. Just showing up completely for what is in front of you.
That is what I learned from my first teacher.
The teacher who changed everything
In 2009, I encountered Gurudev Sri Sri Ravishankar ji through the Art of Living Foundation. My first guided meditation was in his voice. And something shifted in me at a level that I had not known was possible — a level that no corporate training, no IT project, no professional achievement had ever touched.
What Gurudev transmitted was not information. It was not technique, though the techniques are profound. What he transmitted was a quality of being — a lightness, a joy, a depth of presence that made you realise, in his company, that you had been walking through life carrying far more than you needed to carry.
That is the rarest kind of teaching. Not the transmission of knowledge from one mind to another, but the transmission of a state of being. The great teachers — in any tradition — do not primarily teach what they know. They teach what they are.
With the blessings of Gurudev, I became a certified Art of Living teacher. And I carry that responsibility every day. Not as a credential. As a commitment. A commitment to continue becoming someone worthy of passing on what I have received.
What I learned from 15 years of teaching
I began teaching yoga in 2011 — voluntarily, in corporate offices, while still working full time in IT. I was not trying to build a career. I was trying to share something that had genuinely changed my life, with people whose lives looked exactly like mine had looked before the change arrived.
Fifteen years and more than ten thousand students later, here is what teaching has taught me.
The teacher learns more than the student. Every class, every session, every person who sits in front of you and trusts you with their attention and their vulnerability — they teach you something about yourself that you could not have found alone. The student who cannot breathe deeply shows you where you are still holding. The student who resists shows you where you are still attached to outcome. Teaching is the most accelerated form of learning I have ever encountered.
Presence is the curriculum. Students remember very little of what you say. They remember how you made them feel. They remember the quality of attention you brought to the room. They remember whether you were genuinely there with them, or performing being there. The most important preparation for any class is not the sequence or the content — it is the quality of your own inner state when you walk in the door.
Every student is your teacher. I have learned from every single person who has ever come to a class or a session. The corporate executive who could not sit still for thirty seconds taught me about the particular kind of suffering that ambition produces. The elderly woman who came to her first yoga class at sixty-two and cried during savasana taught me that it is never too late and the body never forgets what it needs. The student who came back after years away and said the practice had stayed with them through everything — that student taught me that genuine transmission is permanent.
You cannot teach what you do not live. This is the hardest and most important lesson. Students see everything. They feel the gap between what you say and what you are. The yoga teacher who is anxious, the meditation teacher who is reactive, the breathwork teacher who is disconnected from their own breath — these contradictions are felt immediately, even when they are not consciously named. The only way to teach authentically is to practice authentically. The teaching is the living.
To every teacher reading this
If you are a teacher — of yoga, of mathematics, of music, of code, of cooking, of anything that matters to you — today is your day. And I want to say something to you directly.
What you do is among the most important things a human being can do. Not because of the subject you teach. But because of the relationship you hold. The relationship between a genuine teacher and a genuine student is one of the most sacred relationships in human life. It is a relationship built on trust, on vulnerability, on the willingness of one person to say I do not know, and another to say let me help you find out.
Dr. Radhakrishnan was right. Teachers should be the best minds in the country. Not because they know the most. But because they think the most carefully, love their subject the most genuinely, and bring the most of themselves to the people in front of them.
Be that teacher. Your students will carry you with them for the rest of their lives.
To every student reading this
Think of the teacher who changed something in you. Who said something, or did something, or simply was something — that shifted the direction of your life even slightly. Who gave you a tool, or a perspective, or a feeling of being seen and understood, that you still carry.
Go and tell them. Today. A message, a call, a visit if you can manage it. Teachers rarely know the full extent of what they have given. Tell yours.
Happy Teachers Day. To my father, my first teacher. To Gurudev, my most transformative teacher. To every student who has taught me more than they will ever know.