An engineer’s commonplace book for the Indic canon.
I’m Rajiv Lulla, an engineer by training and an operator by trade. Three decades of my working life have gone into building and running technology companies. Most of my reading life has gone into a small set of texts that keep getting more useful with the years. This site is where I keep the notes.
Why in Hindi, and why this site
I grew up in Delhi, and Hindi was the natural choice for my family and the first few readers of these pages. In fact the first few pages came from a copy and paste of a month-long WhatsApp conversation with immediate family. For a long time I read the Bhagavad Gita the way most engineers do: as a curiosity, occasionally inspiring, mostly opaque. Then a teacher pointed out that it is structurally a problem statement followed by a sequence of attempted solutions, each more refined than the last. The Gita opens with Arjuna paralyzed before a decision he has the data, the authority, and the agency to make. Krishna spends the next seventeen chapters answering that paralysis. Once I saw it as that kind of dialogue I could not stop reading. Japji Sahib and the Hanuman Chalisa reward the same care: they are working claims about how attention, action, and devotion behave, and they open up under close reading.
What you’ll find here now
What began as WhatsApp notes has grown into a library of more than forty texts. The complete Mahabharata and Ramayana in story form, sixty-five stories of the Shrimad Bhagavata, story cycles from the Shiva Purana, Vishnu Purana, and Devi Bhagavata, the Upanishads, the Gitas, the stotras, and Gurbani. Around them: reading paths for the time you actually have, character pages, a glossary, and experiences like the Story Sky. The English edition keeps growing alongside the Hindi, and many stories now carry narration in my own voice.
How these pages are made
The primary witness for every story is the printed Gita Press edition. Drafts are made with the help of today’s tools, which is to say AI; they are then read, checked against the source, and reworked by hand. The paintings are commissioned for this site and verified against the text of each story; their own story is on The Paintings. Mistakes that surface are recorded on the Corrections page. If you spot one, write to me: lullarajiv [at] gmail [dot] com
A note on lineage
Hari Om. Shalom. Namaskaram. Pranams. Salutations.
I grew up in a family of refugees from Sindh who came to India after Partition in 1947. My family has been hardworking, resourceful, perhaps spiritual, though not particularly religious. Yet from a very young age, something within me was leaning toward the spiritual. As a child around five to seven years of age, I could direct the flow of blood to my forehead at will; by fourteen, an interest in silent meditation arose on its own, without any instruction. Later I would notice cold electric shivers running up the spine at places of worship. I am fortunate enough to remember these experiences, though I had no one to explain them to me at the time.
Over the years I pursued both worldly and spiritual education in earnest. I have earned a few degrees. Alongside, I sought the inner life with equal dedication: Chinmaya Mission under the guidance of Pujya Swami Shantananda ji, Vipassana retreats, time at Siddha Yoga, deep study with Isha Yoga, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Integral Yoga, Kriya Yoga from Sri M and from Paramahamsa Hariharananda and his successor Paramahamsa Prajnanananda, and Yogananda Paramhansa’s Self Realization Fellowship. By dedication I mean initiation, taking every advanced course, and including them in my daily sadhana, steadily and without modification. Personal stories from each lineage have stayed with me deeply.
I am based in Dallas, Texas now. My sadhana has been steady for over twenty years. I have not lacked sincerity, discipline, or willingness, and yet I carry an honest question: whether further progress on the path now depends less on doing more, and more on the kind of guidance that comes through a living relationship with a teacher who can see where one truly stands. Many of the traditions affirm that at a certain stage the guru-disciple relationship becomes essential. I do not wish to window-shop among teachers, and I continue to seek orientation with total surrender. I am also a current student in the Himalayan Institute tradition (Vishoka meditation and the broader Sri Vidya stream), and I read across several other Eastern and Western living and historical teachers.
The commentary on this site is not initiated transmission from any of those traditions and should not be read as such. It is one engineer-seeker’s reading, offered openly, with an invitation to disagree.
