Pune: The City That Keeps Teaching Me

My relationship with Pune began in 1996, when I was in the 12th grade at Fergusson College. It was not entirely my idea, but it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable years of my life. My parents, convinced that I had become a little too spoilt growing up in Delhi, decided that a year away would be good for me. In retrospect, I think of it as my enforced year of adulting, being sent away just enough to learn how to navigate life a little more independently.

I took up Arts and studied Maths, Psychology and French that year. Of the three, Psychology was what I loved most. Perhaps that was an early clue to something that would stay with me, an interest not only in what we know, but in how we understand people. I lived in Pune for just that one year, but I remained fascinated by it. Back then it was known as an education city, but what stayed with me was more than the presence of colleges and universities. Pune offered a particular kind of freedom, an academic atmosphere that quietly widened your perspective. Later, when I moved to the US, that widening continued, but Pune was the first place that gave me a taste of it.

Years later, Pune entered my life again through Ayurveda. During my Ayurveda education, two of my teachers, Dr. Mahesh Sabade and Dr. Abhijit Jinde, both Pune natives, became important influences. Once I had completed my formal education, I would return simply to be a fly on the wall and observe them. These visits were usually three days of pure immersion. They made no special arrangements for me. I simply followed them into whatever they were doing and had the privilege of sitting quietly in their clinics, watching how they worked.

There is something very different about seeing multiple patients in a single day, each with different conditions, presentations and personalities. You begin to understand dimensions of healing that go far beyond herbs and therapies. It is the human-to-human part.

You watch how one person is met differently from another. You see how tone changes, how questions change, when to speak and when not to, how reassurance is offered, and how a practitioner reads what may never actually be said. These are skills no textbook can quite teach. And so Pune became part of my education once again.

This year was my second year teaching at Pune University. Last year, I spoke about plants and their connection to us from an Ayurveda perspective. This year, the theme deepened into Ayurveda in Changing Times, a six-hour workshop spread across two days. The students came from interdisciplinary programs across different universities, some studying BAMS, others statistics, public health, design and many other fields. They spend two or three months at the Department of Health Sciences, and what I love is watching them bring whatever knowledge they already carry into conversation with Ayurveda.

One example stayed with me. A student from a design school, trained in different art forms, brought that background into her research and translated her findings into mandalas, moving from the microcosm all the way to the macrocosm. Seeing that kind of synthesis is very different from reading about interdisciplinary thinking as an idea. Art becomes a way of understanding research. Statistics enters a conversation with Ayurveda. Public health begins asking different questions. Each discipline brings its own way of seeing, and together they expand one another. Perhaps that is another reason Pune keeps drawing me back. The city that first widened my perspective as a seventeen-year-old student continues to do so decades later.

This time, my children had the chance to sit in on some of these talks as well. I know it is planting seeds, even if they are at that fragile age when they may be listening, or appearing not to listen. They may understand very little of what is being said. But I know these things live with you, because this is exactly how I was exposed to so much myself.

Cooking is one example. As a child, I absorbed the language of the kitchen without knowing I was learning it: the rhythm of hands, the order of movements, the quiet adjustments made by instinct. I did not imagine that these gestures or flavors would one day return to me. Yet they remained, waiting in memory. When I miss a particular taste, I am drawn not just to the flavor but to everything held within it: the hands that made it, the movements that shaped it, the childhood attention that gathered these details without knowing their value. When I try to recreate it now, it is never exactly the same. Memory alters what it touches. And yet, somehow, the dish comes together.

Perhaps this is what it means for something to become part of us. It passes through observation, memory and experience until it can be made anew as a form of recognition. Education may work this way too. What we absorb quietly often returns years later, transformed into something we can finally call our own.

Some experiences reveal their meaning only with time. We live them first, and understand them later. Looking back, I can see that Pune has been quietly teaching me all along.