About us
aKarma.life is a Trust that has been long in the making since 2008.
We started out as a small group of people wanting to explore redesigning our lives through sustainable practices. We began with natural farming in a few villages to which each member of the group had moved into. And gradually added to it nature cure, native energy and technologies, eco-friendly homes and other structures, natural education, meditation, yoga, rural activities like youth training, sports etc. First we embraced these practices for our own living and then started offering them as gifts to hundreds of people who got in touch with us. Over the years, we had kept our activities personal, informal and nameless. In 2017, due to the organic scaling of our activities, we realized that we needed a formal organization to efficiently manage all the people and activities we had been indulging in. Hence the creation of aKarma.life.
Akarma is an aspect of Karma Yoga which is the core teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. “Detached action” is its simplest definition.
We wanted to embrace and grow all the wisdom that detached actions can generate and hence we adopted Akarma as the name of our Trust. Under the guidance of this Trust, we intend to continue to walk our chosen path in the direction of simplicity, sustainability and spirituality.
Some of our Team Members
Most people tend to call him Anand (bliss) perhaps because they see him in a quiet, joyful state. Quite early he dropped out of school. And dropped into reality. Ever since, all the certificates he has received are hard earned, bestowed on him by the reality that he choicelessly embraced. Without so much of intentional striving, over the years, he has quietly become a servant leader. After leading a team to enter and exit two successful technology startups, he immersed himself into vipassana meditation, yoga and nature cure. In all three domains, there are hundreds of lives he has touched. Currently he works and oversees organic farming in a 50-acre farm where he lives; organizes aKarma’s residential health camps; and is managing projects like constructing eco-friendly structures in the farm, laddering youth who have taken refuge in the farm, and attending to individuals and families who seek healing by staying at the farm under his care. He is the moral and ethical compass of aKarma and sets the tone for all its activities.
If you had ever wondered how a fruit tree could consume so little water and nutrients and produce countless fruits, Roopa is the human version. Literally invisible most of the time because she is clocking the hours like there is no tomorrow. A computer science graduate, she was part of Ananth’s team in the startups. She moved into the farm along with Ananth and ever since has been a living Gantt chart for aKarma’s activities. She continues to run a software service company while keeping an eye on the ladies planting and harvesting produce in the raised beds out of her window. She volunteers with all aKarma activities from software coding to kitchen management. Her only indulgences in life are vipassana and yoga (and occasionally air-fried samosas :).
After finishing her masters in computer application, Nisha spent over a decade in developing software in India and the US with multinational companies. After volunteering with Service Space, a volunteer run international NGO, she shifted to India to settle in a village farm. With the farm as the base, she has given herself to internal and external practices of stillness and service through vipassana, yoga, organic farming, nature cure and homeschooling. She is a volunteer at aKarma taking up different roles from hygiene to hi-tech as needed. Deep connections spontaneously blossom in her presence; and she holds the spaces she is present in with high wattage yin energy.
After a rewarding career in advertising, marketing, television and web development in India, Ragu spent a decade in the US along with Nisha doing a technology startup, worked with an executive coach and was part of a Stanford based co-laboratory researching sustainable communities. After volunteering with Service Space, along with Nisha he moved to a village farm and manages to offer enough challenges to her practices. He volunteers with aKarma focusing on its direction, strategies and communication.
Since the Trust aKarma.life was formed in order to better organize several projects already successfully run by a group of friends, we have no vision, mission etc. Instead, we are focusing on what is already going on in our group in the following areas:
- aKarma.health | being well – A network of people committed to being healthy and healing oneself through fully natural means
- aKarma.eco | sustainable living – A network of people committed to sustainable living through natural farming, green building, products & services
- aKarma.guru | natural learning – A network of parents and children following the “Living is Learning” approach to education
While the activities we indulge in are our conscious choices because they are aligned with our values, they are also activities that happened to show up in our flow of life. They happened to flow by along with the conditions required for us to pursue them. What enabled those conditions is our actual, singular focus: our own inner transformation. It is in the process of questioning ourselves in terms of our values, beliefs, motives, purposes and attitudes we happened to make innumerable small and iterative changes to our lives that created the flow. Therefore, no matter what our external actions are, our constant focus is on being aware of and enable whatever inner transformation that those actions can lead us to.