Cosmopolitan is not a term one typically associates with a town like West Windsor, but one resident is setting out to change that. “Achieving Our Cosmopolitan Community: Conversations for the Twenty-First Century” is a coffee and conversation series facilitated by Jayant Kalawar, a longtime resident of West Windsor, at Grover’s Mill Coffee House on Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m.
“Cosmopolitan is an adjective describing a social environment with multiple clusters of individuals interacting with each other,” says Kalawar. “Each cluster of individuals has its own distinct vocabulary that individuals use to navigate their personal environment of experiences. Community is a public square environment where individuals from each of the clusters interact with each other.”
Kalawar’s book, “The Adavita Life Practice,” is a collection of essays offering insights on how to live confidently and effectively in the 21st century. Kalawar provides a framework for a life practice to nourish, develop resilience, and sustain harmonious balance in the face of demanding relationships, financial pressures, and work. He combines teachings from the traditions of India, as interpreted in the Bhagavad Gita, with modern problem solving and planning methods.
Kalawar was born in India. His father, a high school graduate, worked on the Indian Railways. His mother was a homemaker who had dropped out of school after eighth grade due to ill health. They lived paycheck to paycheck and were considered lower middle class.
“My father could not go to college due to family circumstances, but he was determined and ambitious to rise in his job, which he did through hard work and problem solving using whatever he learned on the job,” says Kalawar. “Between the two of them I was raised in an environment of driving ambition on one hand and a calmness that taught me patience of delaying any gratification for another day.”
Life changed drastically when he was 10 and his father was promoted to a job in a remote area of the country — without schools. Kalawar moved in with his maternal grandparents.
“That is where I began to be exposed to an entirely different perspective to life,” says Kalawar. “I used to go around with my grandmother to her bhajan (chanting) and satsangh groups.” He wrote about his thoughts from those years in his newly released book, “The Advaita Life Practice,” now available at Amazon.
When he was 17 he entered the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, managed in the mid-’60s by a consortium of universities including MIT, UC Berkeley, and Purdue. The admissions process was grueling and competitive.
“The drive, from my peers and teachers, was to get into the prestigious institute and not due to any specific interest in engineering and technology on my part,” says Kalawar. “I did enjoy the problem-solving approach and opportunities that the process presented and I did and still do get satisfaction from solving problems.”
“At IIT, besides doing well in my engineering courses, I spent quite a bit of time reading and discussing Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharishi, and Sri Aurobindo, three author-philosophers who practiced and wrote about Advaita traditions in the 20th century,” says Kalawar, “A handful of my classmates exposed me to a philosophical, yet practical, perspective of Indian traditions.”
In the early 1970s he moved to the United States as a graduate student at UC Berkeley through the educational program. After graduation he spent eight years in banking related jobs — in the research department of the Federal Reserve and consulting with McKinsey & Co and Bank of Montreal. “I then caught the quintessential American bug of becoming an entrepreneur,” says Kalawar.
“I came to Plainsboro in 1986 to join a classmate of mine from IIT to start a bio-fuels company, to make fuel grade ethanol from ethanol produced either from sugarcane molasses or corn sugars,” says Kalawar. “The start-up flourished for four years and then in 1991-’92 the oil prices and the economy went through a recession and with it our company had to be unwound.”
By then he was married to Kaveri, known as Kay in the community; and they had two young children — their daughter, Anuva, and son, Arjune. The family moved to East Windsor in 1987, and then to West Windsor in 1996. “The children were born in Princeton, and we are a tightly knit family of four,” says Kalawar. Kay has been the office manager with West Windsor Arts Council for several years.
“A particularly stressful time as we had no income and jobs were scarce, it became a turning point in our life,” he says. “I had to figure out how to take care of my family, look for ways to make a living, and put food on the table while staying in balance and anxiety-free. I went back to the reading and the Advaita life practices my grandmother taught me.”
Anuva graduated from Princeton Friends School, Princeton Day School in 2006, and Barnard College. A working artist, she lives in Queens and is assistant to the president of Reversible Destiny, a boutique architectural firm in Manhattan.
Arjune graduated from Princeton Friends School and High School North in 2008. He is working at Capital Health while completing coursework toward a nursing degree. An emergency medical technician since he was 16, he is the volunteer deputy chief of the Twin W EMS squad.
Kalawar became a management consultant for banks throughout the United States. He developed a blend of collaborative group practices to facilitate complex problem solving by diverse groups of individuals during intense management consulting engagements at large regional banks for the next 18 years.
He also became a life coach offering “Advaita life practices from Indian traditions through which I bring postures, breathwork, and contemplation and meditation practices into play.” In the past 20 years he has facilitated study groups using Advaita texts from the Upanishads, the foundational texts of Indian philosophy. His learning source has been Swami Shantananda of the Chinmaya Mission on Cranbury Neck Road in Cranbury. “My practice includes attending regular weekly lectures and study sessions of the ancient philosophical texts based on the Upanishads,” says Kalawar.
Advaita Life Coaching is rooted in the Advaita traditions of India and blended with the learnings of the 21st-century American approach to problem solving. “Most of us play on three stages simultaneously: relationships, work, and money. Excelling in the roles you choose or find yourself playing on each stage, in a balanced manner, requires the stamina of a marathon runner,” says Kalawar. “That, in turn, requires robust physical, emotional and spiritual health.”
As Kalawar writes in his book, “The sometimes surprising result of this attitude, when practiced diligently over a period of time, is a new ability to move efficiently and with renewed vigor and pleasure between the various leela or “theaters” of career, family, and finance. A natural rhythm begins to arise and new energy is generated.”
Coffee and Conversation, Grover’s Mill Coffee House, 335 Princeton Hightstown Road, West Windsor. Sundays, 2 to 4 p.m. 609-716-8771. www.groversmillcoffee.com.
Sunday, April 7, “Co-Creating a Cosmopolitan Community: Artists’ Voices.” Sunday, April 14, “Creating a Cosmopolitan Community: Futures Through Science and Technology.” Sunday, April 21, “Co-Creating a Cosmopolitan Community: Will Philosophy and Politics Catch Up?”
