This post on the benefits of Vishnu Sahasranamam parayanam reminds me of my own journey with this timeless practice. I learnt the Vishnu Sahasranamam in 1998. For most of the years since, I chanted it on special days: Ekadashi, some Saturdays, occasions that called for it. I enjoyed it every single time. A remarkable calm would come over me the moment I finished. And yet, despite the benefits I experienced, I somehow never found the discipline to do it daily. Twenty-eight years of an experience I valued, and I still let it stay occasional. This year, faced with some challenges, I felt I needed that calming anchor rather than merely admiring it and chanting it occasionally. Since the beginning of the year I have chanted it every day, and I am truly glad the discipline finally came. Somewhere in these months it stopped being something I do. I now feel incomplete on a day I have not chanted it. What prompted me to start in the first place was Adi Shankaracharya’s Bhaja Govindam, where he exhorts us: “Geyam Gita nama sahasram.” Recite the Bhagavad Gita and the thousand names. My reaction to that verse was not devotional. It was closer to an economist’s instinct about revealed preference. Here is Adi Shankara, arguably the finest philosophical mind India has produced, a man who dismantled every competing school of thought before he was thirty. He could have prescribed anything. Out of the entire corpus available to him, he pointed to two texts: the Gita, and the thousand names. When someone of that calibre narrows the field so sharply, the sensible response is not to argue. It is to try it. So I began. And I have really enjoyed chanting it every time in these 28 years. If I were to offer one thing to anyone starting out, it would be this. I try to chant it meditatively. Not racing to finish, but listening to the sound of each word as I say it, attention resting on the syllable being uttered right now. Done this way, the stotram becomes an anchor to the present moment, which is the hardest place to keep the mind and the only place from which anything useful gets done. The names do the work. You only have to listen. I write this mainly for the young. Somewhere along the way, many of our brightest students have absorbed the idea that a practice like this belongs to a different India, one they have outgrown. That you can have rigour or you can have the stotram, and choosing the first means quietly setting down the second. It is a false trade, and it costs them something. Which is why I am glad to share Prof. Kamakoti’s thoughts on the Vishnu Sahasranamam parayanam. Hear him in his own words. A computer scientist who has built his career in computer architecture, embedded systems and cybersecurity, now leading one of the most demanding technical institutions in the country. Nothing about that life required him to give this up. To any student who has wondered whether the two can sit together, there is your answer. Some things are best understood not by debating them, but by trying them with sincerity and consistency. Whether you come to the Vishnu Sahasranamam through devotion, through philosophy, or simply as a contemplative practice, I have found it a remarkable source of focus and inner energy. My thanks to Prof. Kamakoti for prompting this reflection. Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya.

Vishnu Sahasranamam - Prof. V Kamakoti Director IIT Madras