About this lab

The teachers we owe this to

Seven Gītās, read since childhood, each one a different way of hearing the same song.

T. Subba Row 1856 – 1890 Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita

A Gītā read through the Logos. His lectures took Krishna as the Logos and Arjuna as the human monad — man, Nara, one of Arjuna's oldest names — and worked out the song's cosmology in strict philosophical terms, at the founding of the modern theosophical movement.

Sri Aurobindo 1872 – 1950 Essays on the Gita

A Gītā of integral yoga. Essays on the Gita reads the song as scripture for a life lived in the world rather than withdrawn from it — knowledge, devotion and works gathered into a single yoga, and the whole read as a stage in the evolution of consciousness toward the divine life.

Paramahansa Yogananda 1893 – 1952 God Talks with Arjuna

The microcosmic Gītā, carried to its furthest point. In God Talks with Arjuna every character, weapon and army is mapped to something within the human body and consciousness — the whole war read as an event in the spine, the senses and the breath, with nothing left outside.

Sri Sri Sri Vidyaprakasananda Giri Swami 1913 – 1998 Gītā Makarandamu

A Gītā of patterns and of ordinary days. His Telugu Gītā Makarandam takes the song verse by verse in unhurried, comprehensible language — drawing out its recurring structures, and turning each teaching towards the life a householder is actually living. It came out of a lifetime of Gītā discourses, and was carried into most Indian languages.

Swami Chinmayananda 1916 – 1993 The Holy Geeta

The great English commentary of the modern era, and a classic by common consent. A Vedāntin reading, delivered with the force of the spoken word — the song expounded as the Upaniṣads' own conclusion, addressed to a thinking reader without a trace of distance.

Swami Rama 1925 – 1996 Perennial Psychology of the Bhagavad Gita

A Gītā read as psychology. The battlefield taken as the mind itself, the figures as its faculties and its conflicts, and the teaching as a practical therapy for the mind one actually has, in the language of both the yoga tradition and modern psychology.

Master E. K. 1926 – 1984 Ekkirala Krishnamacharya

An esoteric Gītā, and a synthesising one. He rendered the whole song afresh in plain numbered verse — the Mandra Gītā, written for the coming age — and read it as symbol throughout, setting its images beside those of the Vedas and of scriptures far outside India, on the premise that the wisdom under all of them is one.

and many more . . .

पुस्तकानि  the books

How a chapter is built

Every chapter in this lab is laid out the same way, verse by verse, so once you know the shape you can read any of them:

Where a thought is our own rather than the tradition's, it says so in place — as an expansion, or as received but not a claim of fact.

Atom and Ātman

One thought holds this lab up: the atom and the Ātman are the same enquiry, at two scales. भूः भुवः सुवः — physical, vital, luminous — three floors of one house. That is why this Gītā is read as carefully as a measurement, and as quietly as a prayer.

This lab is one of the Vedatom Edu-Labs — a series that puts ancient and modern wisdom into a form you can see and interact with. In that three-plane way of reading the world, the Gītā sits on Suvaḥ, the plane of spirit. The same author has built labs for the other planes and other texts too — Arka for astrology, one for the Rāmāyaṇa, and more — each built to guide a sincere seeker in its own way.

The hope is simple: give a reader — a child, a grandchild abroad, anyone once handed this book and shut out of it — the confidence to open it alone. Unhurried. Unafraid.

Who keeps it

Dr. Tejaswi Katravulapally keeps this lab — a quantum physicist by training and a Carnatic flautist for over twelve years, who has spent as long with the Bhagavad Gītā, the Upaniṣads and Sri Vidya as with a physics textbook. He carries the lineage of Master E. K., and teaches both sides of that life together: physics to engineering students, and this song to anyone who asks.

B.Tech in Electronics & Communication, LNMIIT Jaipur; M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Madras; a PhD in Quantum Physics from Dublin City University and MUT Warsaw, as an Erasmus Mundus fellow. He has guest-lectured on Indian Knowledge Systems at LNMIIT and taught Mantra Śāstra for the Kriya Tantra Institute, USA. He received the Spiritual Scientist Award in 2024 from the All India Institute of Local Self-Government and Andhra University, for his work in Indian Knowledge Systems. He has written three books on the scriptural tradition, on the Puruṣa Sūktam, the Lalitā Sahasranāma, the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and related texts. Vedatom is the home for all of it — this Gītā lab, a Rāmāyaṇa lab, a Sanskrit school, a lab for the sky, and the physics he still teaches — one enquiry, taught from its two ends.

A correction is welcome always; if you find an error in a verse, a citation, or a diacritic, please write in.