Karan Bajaj: Living Yogi-Engineer-Novelist Shoots the Breeze on Dharma + Karma
Indian Engineer Churns out another Best Seller
Karan Bajaj invites you into dissolving yourself. He invites us into purifying our actions right where we are now, instead o f looking for something outside ourselves. You’ll be in a yogic experience of reinventing yourself. He asks, are you in a hurry to accomplish something in this life? Or are you going at the pace that life is engaging you. All of this coming from an Indian best seller, who today is releasing a book which already has major movie contract, The Yoga of Max’s Discontent. He has excelled in corporate America. He grew up in the Himalayas and currently lives in Brooklyn NY.
Karan is a magnificent conversationalist. Relax into the flow of our conversation.
What you’ll learn on today’s episode:
- The powerful link of long-term sabbaticals and creativity.
- Karan’s work/life balance with the 4, 1, 4, model
- How to take a vacation from your mind by building a muscle of dissolving the patterned mind on vacation.
- How to purify your actions , which leads to better reaction. “Change happens to you versus you making it happen sometimes… if you just purify where you are.”
- Where “gut is greed”…
Links from this episode:
- Buy the book
- A Hard-Driving Executive’s Year of Learning to Let Go – NYT article
- How much does a gap year cost?: The full finances of a sabbatical.
- My 4,1,4 rule or why you shouldn’t feel the pressure to become an entrepreneur
About The Yoga of Max’s Discontent:
A violent encounter on the streets of Manhattan forces Wall Street banker Maximus Pzoras to confront questions about suffering and mortality that have dogged him since his mother’s death. His search for a mentor takes him to the farthest reaches of India, where he encounters a mysterious night market, almost freezes to death on a hike up the Himalayas and finally, finds himself in an ashram in a small drought stricken village in South India where strange things begin to happen to him.
But are Yogis who walk on water, do impossible poses, and live agelessly for 200 years the stuff of fiction or fact? Can a flesh and blood man ever truly achieve nirvana? Max struggles to overcome his rational skepticism and the pull of family tugging him back home. In a final bid for answers, he embarks on dangerous solitary meditation in a freezing Himalayan cave. Will Max penetrate the truth of human suffering, or is enlightenment just a new age illusion? THE YOGA OF MAX’S DISCONTENT is both a page turning adventure story and a journey of tremendous inner transformation, a Siddhartha for our generation.
About Karan Bajaj:
Karan Bajaj is a #1 bestselling Indian novelist with more than 200,000 copies of his novels in print, both optioned into major films. Karan’s first worldwide novel, The Yoga of Max’s Discontent, will be published by Random House on May 3rd’ 2016. The book, called “The greatest adventure of our Generation” by The Daily Telegraph was inspired by Karan’s one year sabbatical traveling from Europe to India by road and learning yoga and meditation in the Himalayas.
Karan has also worked in senior executive roles at companies like Procter & Gamble and the Boston Consulting Group and was named among Ad Age’s “Top 40 Under 40 executives” in the US.