Reflections
Why I Started Shiv Gatha: A Personal Devotion to Mahadev
I wake up before the world does. 3:30 in the morning, when the house is still dark and the only sound is the one I make lighting a lamp. There's a version of this practice that could look, from the outside, like discipline for its own sake. It isn't. It's the one part of my day that belongs entirely to something larger than my to-do list.
The practice that came before the project
Long before I thought about building a website, there was just the routine: bathing, lighting the lamp, sitting with the same mantras I'd return to twice a day, every day. Om Namah Shivaya, repeated well past a hundred and eight times some mornings, until the words stop sounding like language and start feeling more like breath.
I didn't start this practice to build anything. I started it because something in me needed the stillness it offers, especially on the mornings when the rest of my life felt anything but still.
Where the urge to share it came from
Somewhere in years of this routine, a second feeling started showing up alongside the devotion itself: a restlessness to share it. Not to convert anyone or perform faith for an audience, but because these stories, the ones about Shiva drinking poison to save the universe, about a god who accepts outcasts and grants grace without condition, felt too good to keep entirely to myself.
I'd meet people who knew fragments. A mantra without its meaning. A festival without its legend. A symbol on a temple wall they'd seen a hundred times without ever asking what it represented. And I realized I had spent two decades building brands and telling stories professionally, and here was a story worth telling that had nothing to do with a career at all.
What Shiv Gatha actually is
This isn't a marketing project wearing a spiritual costume. It's the opposite: a genuine devotional practice that happens to use the skills I've built over a career, because that's simply what I know how to do well. The stories, the lessons, the reflections you'll find here come from an actual daily practice, not research done for the sake of content.
If you're here because you grew up with these stories and want to go deeper, I hope this becomes a place worth returning to. If you're here because you're curious about a philosophy you've only encountered in fragments, I hope this becomes an honest, unpretentious way in.
Either way, I'm glad you're here.
Har Har Mahadev.
Curious what a simple daily Shiva practice looks like? Read How I Start My Day With a Shiva Mantra next.