A Seeker's Srimad Bhagavad Gita

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A Seeker's Srimad-Bhagavadgītā is a book on yoga that tries to integrate the eternal wisdom of yoga into daily life using modern management and scientific principles, which makes the wisdom easy to understand and implement. The book explains the conceptual underpinning of yoga in simple language with examples that today's Bharat can relate to and find easy to adopt.

From translation to commentary, everything in the book is the author's personal effort. He is a corporate professional with a strong yoga background, and this is reflected in the unique approach that this book takes to explain the complex concepts embedded in A Seeker's Srimad- Bhagavadgītā. This is a book that will evolve with the reader, giving new meaning every time it is read and implemented.

Vishwanath Iyer is a fourth-generation researcher, writer, teacher, and yoga practitioner hailing from one of Bharat's oldest yoga families. An engineer with advanced degrees in management, he has over 30 years of corporate experience in a spectrum of leadership roles across several foreign and Indian Multinational companies. He uses this experience to integrate yoga with the old and new ethos of Bharat, trying to provide a scientific explanation for the many yoga concepts and practices in a language that can be understood by today's youth. He also has a website on yoga (www.schoolofyoga.in), where he writes extensively on a multitude of subjects related to yoga.

I received my copy of Srimad-bhagavad-gītā from my parents at age 15. It was the work of Swami Chidbhavananda and has remained my primary reference book for Śrīmad-bhagavad-gītā. However, I admit that for a long period, the book sat in a cupboard and was rescued only occasionally.

I began serious work on Śrīmad-bhagavad-gītā in 2016 to support my website www.schoolofyoga.in. However, I faced multiple challenges, the most important being that I did not know Sanıskręta. So, I decided to use the method of triangulation, which was to use three reference books and a Samskąta-English dictionary.

The advantage I had was that I had no preconceived notions about the book, so I started with a fairly clean slate, one that was low on bias.

My first attempts were crude, but I learned two things. First, all English translations of Srimad-bhagavad-gită were coloured by India's invasions, colonisation, and post-Independence socialism. Second, all the commentaries and translations of even the most evolved in this subject, reflected bias of personality and background.

Another discovery was that translation from Samskąta to English brings with it a drop in transferability because cultural nuances cannot be transferred. This freed me from fears of inaccuracy because all efforts were clearly approximations, and correct interpretation was personal.

Only Śrī Krşņa knew what he was saying, everyone else was approximating.

So, all I had to do was focus on the accuracy of my interpretation. This is what I have done. I have translated and re-written this document at least three times with a gap of at least 6 months between each effort. So, what I got was fairly fresh-eyes every time I rewrote the manuscript. Also, by rewriting it thrice using triangulation, I think that I have obtained my best possible outcome.