Most people go to India seeking enlightenment, or at least advanced yoga studies. I went because I liked the food. Twenty-two years ago, I had graduated from Stanford and was doing my PhD in psychology, with only my dissertation left. It was time for a travel break. I agreed to go to India, a place I knew nothing about, only because I was a staunch vegetarian, or “veg-terrorist” as my friends used to say. In India at least, I knew I wouldn’t have to grill waiters in languages I didn’t speak about whether there was chicken broth in their vegetable soup or in the water they used to boil rice.

I was not religious. I was not consciously seeking or searching or yearning for God’s grace, and yet 36 months after being one of the only students to ever get an A+ in Dr Phil Zimbardo’s psychology of mind control class, I was sitting on the edge of the sacred Ganga River in Rishikesh, India with tears of ecstasy streaming down my face.