Sri Aurobindo didn’t ask you to renounce the world — he asked you to transform it from within. This deeply personal talk at Shakti Kumbh 2024 opens with the speaker’s childhood existential crisis at age six — recognising that the cycle of birth, work, marriage, and death offered no genuine purpose. Jain monks offered spiritual life but demanded renunciation of dance, mathematics, and art. Neither path satisfied.At 16, the hand of the divine brought her to Sri Aurobindo Society’s youth camp in Pondicherry, where for the first time she encountered a philosophy that said yes to everything — sing, dance, write, discover, and use all of it as the very material of transformation. Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine is introduced through its seven-fold framework: the gradation from Matter through Life, Mind, and Supermind to Sat-Chit-Ananda, showing how evolution is not a separation from the physical but its divinisation.The closing meditation on community — building networks of value-aligned people who can be self-sufficient and care for each other — grounds the spiritual vision in immediate practical necessity, ending with Krishna’s Gita promise: past, present, and future are all

About the Speaker:
Gitanjali is a social entrepreneur and educationist. After having founded several business and social ventures, she is setting up Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh, as its Founding CEO & Dean. HIAL is an alternative institute for mountain development that aims to revolutionise higher education in India through the pedagogy of contextual and experiential learning that is trans-disciplinary. Gitanjali is a spiritual seeker with a deep interest in Indian Spirituality. She teaches Vedanta and the Gita in the Light of Sri Aurobindo. She is a Chevening fellow and is the recipient of the Women Transforming India national Award from the Government of India. A multifaceted person, a black belt in Karate, an Odissi and Russian Ballet dancer, she believes in holistic education that makes a complete person.