Hi everyone!

Dinesh and I have been blogging for sometime now and its quite an honour to be asked to blog right here on freshersworld.com where we can interact directly with young people with fresh minds from all over the country. If you guys have any questions about life issues, please write to us here or mail us , and we will do our best to answer. There are many, many questions that we have already answered and I welcome you to go through them at our blog http://bawandinesh.name …

But before that, a little about us…

I graduated from IIT Bombay about 15 years ago with a Master’s degree in mathematics. While still studying in IIT I did a then utterly unknown program called the Art of Living. As the program unfolded I was more and more fascinated by it, especially the effects it had on my body and mind. I practiced the techniques (Sudarshan Kriya) taught on the course for a few weeks and was astounded by the difference I experienced in my life.

I was a four point someone in IIT. I graduated as a seven pointer.

I used to play the piano, I started to learn quite late (at the age of 17), and so had a big disadvantage when it came to competing with people who had been playing since they were 6 or 7. My playing became so good that I actually won a few competitions!

I also used to do some acting and directing and people around me told me that my style and expression had improved a lot.

I had had rheumatic fever as a child, which meant that my immune system was weak and I was very susceptible to illness. Within a year of practicing Sudarshan Kriya, I found big improvements in my health. I could go more than 4-6 months without being sick.

I became more efficient, super creative and my productivity levels peaked. In short, I found that I was much better at everything I did or wanted to do.

This Knowledge, I felt, needed to be shared, so that more and more young people like me could start to live the life they dreamed of. I introduced many of my (very unwilling initially) friends to the course and they loved it every bit as I did.

Soon, I couldn’t see myself working in any corporate or teaching a math class. It was then that I decided to teach people meditation and Sudarshan Kriya and make them happy rather than teach them math and make them miserable! J

Here is Dinesh’s story

I was born in a village, brought up in various towns and cities of Maharashtra until I ended up studying in IIT, Bombay. I had mostly been a topper throughout school, played every sport available and made friends with everyone I could, though i was not too good at communicating with parents and people in power because of my super inflated ego and deflated sense of self-esteem. I always had a burning desire to do something for my people, my country and our planet.

After joining IIT, life went a little downhill as regards to acads (grades plummeting to 6) and personal habits like difficult-to-shrug-off-laziness and a passing affair with smoking, drinking and drugs.

It was at this time in my life, one fine evening, two dear friends of mine pushed me into the Art of Living program and… life was truly never the same again – It made a huge difference to who I was and what I did.

Grades improved and jumped to 8!

And I had found in Sudarshan Kriya a much cheaper and healthier brand of intoxication, a higher high and a better kick than any cigarettes, alcohol or drugs I had experimented with earlier.

Confidence, clarity, a sense of responsibility and coolness took over my life. The yoga and Art of Living practices improved my stamina and go-getting attitude tremendously.

When I met Guruji, H.H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, it was like reuniting with a wise old friend, who was in many ways much more youthful than me. His simplicity and profoundness, his wisdom and playfulness were an instant hit for my head and my heart. I was smitten. It was love at first sight and living happily ever after all rolled into one.

I realized that the Art of Living provided for me a perfect platform to fulfill my desire to excel personally and serve people, along with a healthy dose of fun.

I worked with Infosys as a part time software engineer (even then I considered myself to be full time with the Art of Living). After little more than a year I quit Infosys and made teaching Art of Living my career. I handled all the opposition coming from well meaning parents, relatives and friends, with skill and lightness and managed to win most of them over to my side.

Being with Art of Living has its own set of challenges which push you to your limit time and again, only to make you realize you are much bigger and vaster than any situation or challenge that could come your way…

Dinesh and I have been with Art of Living for 19 fantastic, adventurous years. We have travelled all over the planet, between us visited more than 30 countires, teaching and inspiring people with this wondrous Knowledge…

4 years ago, inspired by Guruji, H.H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, we designed a very special Art of Living program that we called the YES!+. Youth Empowerment and Skills. (The + stands for people who are 18+). YES!+ is fun. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s a potent and powerful experience for young people who want more from life. A deep transformation can take place in the way you face the ups and downs of life. You will get an edge that makes your successes grander and which will give you the ability to cope gracefully and skillfully with sometimes inevitable failure.

YES!+ has become a wildly successful program with more than 250,000+ young people having done it in India alone in the last 4 years. It is now taught in 50+ countries worldwide. Many universities around the world also offer it as a credit course in their curriculum.

Between Dinesh and I, we also run an NGO called WAYE. The World Alliance for Youth Empowerment, which, over the last 3 years has worked with various UN bodies in areas of social relevance to young people.

Dinesh and I also teach Mathemagic, a workshop of hard core maths made fun, another on appreciating western classical music, the SMS (Studies Made Simple) workshop, which ummm… makes studies simple, the Financial Literacy workshop based on the work of Robert Kiyosaki about non traditional ways of earning and managing money and of course seasonal cooking workshops. Many more such workshops are in the pipeline…

I still play the piano, though because of my traveling I cannot play and practice as much as I would like to. I became a vegetarian and took on the challenge of converting my strictly non veg family to a greener way of eating and in the process became a fairly good chef. I have a book coming soon with my favourite recipes, our blog http://bawandinesh.name has quite a few of them.

Dinesh is more outdoorsy than me and enjoys swimming, cycling, tennis, cricket, etc. When he is teaching courses at educational institutions, his students excitedly look forward to a few games of (midnight) soccer with him.

Its great to play with him, but if you want to work out with him, you definitely need guts. He is quite capable of doing 108 Suryanamaskars as a warm up…

He loves Sanskrit and usually does group chanting with his students, a beautiful, serene experience.

Lately, he has sincerely started to learn to sing and play the guitar… An astonishing number of people love his singing and guitaring which goes to show that Love is not just blind, but can go quite deaf as well.

We enjoy nature and long walks, and now live on our pristine Ashram in Bangalore. I enjoy funny, preferably musical, movies with happy endings. I also play many strategy and RPG computer games.

We frequently have board game nights, and no, we don’t play snakes and ladders, Ludo or chess J

Dinesh and I are directing and producing our first play after a very, very long time. “Anand and Benaifer” will be staged as part of the YES!+ program that we are teaching in Mumbai from 18^th to 22^nd March 2010.

We both made unconventional choices for our careers and our life. We chose happiness over money (though money came to us as well, much, much more than we expected we might add) and to do the right thing instead of doing the comfortable thing. We recommend you do too.

The Art of Living, YES!+ programs will help you do exactly that, as it did for us. Make your dreams a reality. Make a palpable difference to thousands of people. Meditate, relax, smile and thoroughly enjoy your time on the planet. Live a life you choose to live…

Jai Gurudeva!

Love

Bawa n Dinesh

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