TadEkam Blog

I did not yet know that the seva waiting for me would bring me so much happiness and joy. It turned out to be deeply, unexpectedly creative — and I loved every single minute of it. We had to decorate the Kangundi Bouldering Festival Village Haat, Café and View Point. Everything had to be handmade: banners and posters for the stalls, hand-painted buntings, leaves crafted one by one for what we called the Tree of Memories — and terracotta plates and glasses painted in traditional Muggu style, later sold in the village haat.

I did not know, before this, what skills the children of Kangundi and the college students of Kuppam carried within them. Nor did I expect that the language between us would be no language at all — I did not know Telugu, they could not follow Hindi. And yet, simply coming together and creating with them, hands moving before words could, was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life

The warmth and openness of Kangundi’s people touched me in a way I had not prepared for. So often I would simply walk through the village to get some work done, or to coordinate with a fellow TadEkam sevika for her dance practice. I would sit for hours in Shanmugam’s printing shop, doing whatever had been assigned to me that day. He trusted me so completely that he would leave the shop open and go home for lunch while I continued working there alone. Sometimes I even attended to his customers and handed him the money later. It was such a delightful, disarming kind of trust — the kind a village gives when it has decided, without needing to say so, that you belong.

Major General Sanjay Sir who was leading this seva project trusted me completely with the creative process — and I, in turn, trusted him, and every member of the TadEkam team, just as completely. We had wooden mementos that needed repainting, and somehow, everything simply fell into place. The colours arranged themselves. Someone appeared to help us paint. Ideas kept flowing, one into the next, and together we brought them to life with whatever resources we had at hand. Kangundi is a small village near Kuppam, and whenever we needed materials — paints, papers, whatever the day demanded — we had to travel to Kuppam, since nothing of the kind was available locally. The planning, the sourcing, the brainstorming, the creating, the sheer act of making things happen with limited resources in the tiny room we shared (Aswath Anna’s homestay) — it filled me with a joy I still find difficult to fully describe.

And then came a moment I could never have planned for, and would never have dared to ask for. Among the leaves we had shaped, coloured, and hung upon the Tree of Memories at Kangundi View Point, one blank leaf found its way into the hands of the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Sri Nara Chandrababu Naidu Garu, during his visit on the 30th of January, 2026. On that leaf — a leaf shaped and prepared by a sevika’s hand — he wrote, in his own hand, his vision for the years ahead: Swarna Kangundi, 2047.

I do not have words for what it meant to see this. A leaf that had passed through my hands — cut, coloured, strung with quiet devotion and no expectation of being noticed — became, for one moment, the place where the highest office of the state set down a dream for the next generation. Babaji works in ways none of us can fully trace. I have simply stopped trying to explain them, and started, instead, to be grateful for them.

I had originally planned to stay a week. I ended up postponing my return by three more days. Looking back, I am so grateful that I did — because it allowed me to complete the seva that was destined for me. There is no greater satisfaction than that: to arrive not knowing why you have come, and to leave knowing, without a doubt, that you were exactly where you were meant to be. I remain forever grateful to Babaji, to Guruji Naushir, and to Swamiji, for this opportunity — for a seva that did not wait to be chosen, but simply found me, and would not let me go until it was complete.