A Child and a Name in the Lila of Becoming

 My younger brother Salil Tiwari’s son, Sudhanshu, and his wife, Stuti, have been blessed with a son. They live in Meerut, my hometown, and visited me recently. Like all visits involving a newborn, it carried a quiet gravity—soft footsteps, hushed voices, time slowing itself to the rhythm of breath. They have named the child Pranav, a name that is bothintimate and cosmic, tender and vast.

In Indian cosmology, Pranav is ‘Omkara’—the primordial sound from which creation unfolds. It is not merely a syllable, but a principle: the first vibration that disturbs perfect stillness and allows the universe to appear. To hold such a name in one’s arms is to be reminded that every birth is not only biological but also metaphysical.

Before sound, before form, before the long procession of time, tradition tells us there was equilibrium—a flawless balance of primordial energies. What modern language might call potential energy, kinetic energy and inertial mass, ancient thought named sattva, rajas and tamas. In that original state, none dominated. There was no motion because there was no imbalance. It was not emptiness, but fullness without expression—a silence pregnant with worlds.

Then came Pranav. Shri Krishna declares:

प्रणवःसर्ववेदेषुशब्दःखेपौरुषंनृषु।

पुण्योगन्धःपृथिव्यां च तेजश्चास्मिविभावसौ॥(Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7, Verses 8-9)

I am the sacred syllable Om in all the Vedas;I am sound in space and ability in human beings.

“I am the pure fragrance in the earthand the brilliance in fire.

The Mandukya Upanishad opens with a declaration as simple as it is total:

ॐ इतिएतदअक्षरंइदंसर्वम्

“Om is this entire universe.”

Creation does not begin with an object, but with a vibration. Om unfolds as A–U–M: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Itfinally dissolves into silence—Turiya, the witnessing consciousness beyond all states. Sound emerges from silence, and silence remains beneath sound.

 The Bhagavad Gita presents a parallel perspective, rooted not in abstraction but in real life. Shri Krishna explains that all actions stem from the interaction of the three gunas—sattva (clarity and harmony), rajas (movement and desire) and tamas (inertia and physicality). These gunas belong to Prakriti, nature itself. The Self—the witnessing consciousness—remains unaffected, taking on bodies like an actor assumes roles, entering the stage without being changed by the costume.

Seen this way, the world is a stage, but not in the trivial sense of illusion. It is a theatre of becoming, where consciousness repeatedly steps into form to experience, learn, struggle, forget, remember and evolve. Each birth is a new entry, not of something entirely new, but of something ancient continuing its journey.

A child, then, does not arrive as a blank slate alone. He arrives carrying impressions—samskaras—not as fixed destinies, but as tendencies, textures, unfinished melodies seeking expression. The Gita speaks of this continuity with startling clarity: the embodied self leaves off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones, just as a person discards old garments and dons new clothes (Chapter 2, Verse 22). The journey is uninterrupted, though the forms change.

In this sense, Pranav is not merely beginning life; he is resuming it. Consciousness has chosen a new arrangement of matter, a new family, a new historical moment, to continue its exploration of itself. The stage has shifted, the script has evolved, yet the play goes on.

What is this play? No one knows fully. Every civilisation has attempted an answer—myth, science, theology, philosophy. Today, we speak of evolution, genetics, neural networks and cosmology. Yesterday, we spoke of gods, avatars and cycles of creation and dissolution. Tomorrow, we may speak in entirely different metaphors. But beneath all explanations remains the same intuition: there is intelligence unfolding through form, and we are participants within it.

Children remind us of this truth because they arrive without explanations. They do not justify existence; they embody it. In their stillness and sudden cries, in their unfocused gaze and grasping hands, one sees the gunas awakening—rajas in movement, tamas as grounding in the physical body and its needs, sattva in the quiet clarity of presence. And behind them all, one senses the silent witness the Gita calls the ‘Akarta’—the non-doer, the one who watches the play without being bound by it

To name a child Pranav is, therefore, an act of recognition. It acknowledges that this small life is aligned with the oldest rhythm we know: vibration emerging from silence, form arising from balance, experience unfolding from stillness. It is to say that the birth of the child is not a coincidence, but an expression of family, of history, of consciousness itself.

As Sudhanshu and Stuti cradle their son, the vastness of scripture finds its most intimate proof. The MandukyaUpanishad is no longer a text; it breathes. The Gita is no longer a discourse; it lives. The cosmic sound has taken a human name.

And perhaps this is the deepest comfort these traditions offer: that life, for all its uncertainty, is not random chaos. It is Lila—a play, a game, a divine experiment whose rules are not fully known, yet whose coherence we intuit. We stumble through it, misunderstand it, suffer within it, and occasionally glimpse its beauty. That glimpse is enough to keep us playing.

Welcome, Pranav.

You enter a world that Shakespeare once saw as a stage, where men and women make their entrances and exits, each playing many parts, and you enter the same world that the Bhagavad Gita understands as a field of action, where consciousness takes form, performs its work and moves on. On this vast stage, roles change, but the witness endures. You will wear many costumes in the course of your life—child, learner, worker, giver, observer—and each role will require something different of you.

Perform each role fully and sincerely, without holding onto any mask longer than needed. Forget when forgetting is necessary, so each act can start unburdened; remember when remembrance arises so that wisdom can temper desire. Act with intention, yet be free from attachment to results, offering your work for a greater good, so your presence brings steadiness, happiness and light to those sharing the stage with you.

 This world is an ongoing play—in medias res, as the Latin has it. By taking birth, we enter a story already in motion. Yesterday’s son becomes today’s father. Scenes continue to unfold, much as the same sun rises and we name it a new day. And at some moment—sooner or later—we realise that,though our role in the play was earnest and exacting, the play does not begin or end with us; that the stage, the actor and the audience all arise within a single, unbroken field of consciousness.