I am my parents' firstborn. When I was an infant, my grandmother would tie a little bundle of neem twigs and turmeric roots to the carved wooden post of my crib to keep away mites and negative energies and to cleanse the surrounding atmosphere. You could say I imbibed Ayurveda from the day I was born, and perhaps even earlier, for my mother was cared for throughout her pregnancy using all the traditional Ayurvedic therapies and remedies of the Baidyanath household.

And so it is only fitting that this book, too, was conceived at the time of the birth of my own firstborn. My mother and I had moved to Anand in Gujarat for the baby's arrival. Shortly after we moved there, the country went into a total lockdown in March 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. Isolated from the outside world, we spent hours chatting and enjoying each other's company. It was then, perhaps for the first time that I realized the depth and breadth of her knowledge of Ayurveda. I had known that she had trained under the eminent vaids Pandit Ram Raksh Pathak and Pandit Brihaspatpati Dev Triguna² soon after she had married into the Baidyanath family, and later under Baidyanath's own expert in-house vaids, Vaid Sukhram Babu, Pandit Vishwanath Sharma and Vaid Deo Nandan Tripathi, but it was only then that I had an insight into her masterly grasp of the subject.

The timing was auspicious and serendipitous, for in the rough and tumble that is the hallmark of modern living, it is rare to find a hiatus long enough to allow you to engage intensely with a person or a subject. But this was a once-in- a-lifetime moment when the whole world had hit the pause button. It was a time to reconnect, look within and take stock. When the world struggled in vain to grapple with a strange virus whose origin, treatment and spread remained unknown as it marched inexorably across continents, my thoughts returned again and again to Ayurveda, the science of life-a science so complex and subtle that it made modern medicine look almost rudimentary. A science that went far beyond the nuts and bolts of biology and chemistry to address human health in the context of the individual psyche and universal consciousness. A science that bridged not only all other life sciences but was also the bridge to the cosmic.