Why was my soul born in a place like Kesur to a father and a mother like mine? To a casual observer, my deeply feudal origins are completely at odds with the person I have become: a modern multicultural global citizen who embraces the need for feminine and masculine energy in business and in family. It just doesn't add up, which means there is probably a deeper purpose to it.

The way I have come to make sense of it is this: I left India to make a life in the United States of America, to thrive in the “land of the free.” But wherever you go, there you are. I carried inside me the DNA of Kesur as well as the traumatic history of the Rajputs. My journey of healing and the reason I helped launch Conscious Capitalism is that through the lens of business, my real work has been to try to heal the patriarchy. Unconscious capitalism was clearly the product of patriarchal traditions. Conscious Capitalism has been a stepping‐stone to my greater purpose, which is to challenge patriarchal mindsets across all sectors of society. I believe I was destined to connect these worlds and do this kind of healing work.

The Need to Heal Kesur

For much of my life, I thought of Kesur as a place of darkness and decay, of abuse and tyranny. I assumed that it had always been that way, with some exceptions like my great‐grandfather Hari Singh, who was renowned and loved for his kind, generous, and forgiving nature. He reflected the benign paternal side of the patriarchy.

People sometimes took advantage of Hari Singh because he offered help to anyone who needed it. If he discovered that someone had cut down a tree from his lands and stolen it, his response was, “He must really need it.” Later, he would say to the person, “Why didn't you ask me if you needed something?” When Girwar caught people stealing, he punished them harshly and publicly, often beating them with a stick.

***

Many in my family have bought into the idea that “we must not let anything sully the name of Kesur.” Now more than ever, Kesur has become an integral part of the identity of members of my extended family. Most don't use Sisodia as their last name anymore; they use Kesur. Late in his life, even my father started calling himself Narayan Singh Kesur. The license plate of my car in the US has been KESUR for over 20 years. I don't know what caused me to do that, other than thinking it would be easy to remember. But every time I looked at it, I cringed a bit. The word Kesur had come to stand for cruelty, misogyny, and selfishness in my mind.

Only after writing most of this book did it occur to me that Kesur itself may have a soul or a spirit that is yearning to be healed. If healing can happen there, it can happen everywhere.

Looking for guidance, I turned to Mesina, a healer I have come to trust. I asked her to tell me what came to her when I said the word “Kesur.”

After closing her eyes for several seconds, Mesina replied, “When you mentioned Kesur, I felt a hugely masculine vibration. But the energy is very pure, not negative or malicious in any way. It is a forgiving and giving energy, a powerful vibration that seeks to preserve and protect the family and the community. This energy doesn't want to create chaos; it wants to absorb and remove chaos. It is not a warlike energy; it is the energy of a peaceful warrior, a protector, a preserver. A desire for peace reigns over this vibration.”

This was a pleasant surprise to me. Could it be true that I came from a place of light rather than darkness? Could it be that Hari Singh was closer to the founding energy of Kesur than my grandfather Girwar was? How could I help reconnect Kesur to that light?

Kesur is a microcosm of the wounded toxic patriarchy in India and across the world. I realized that healing my personal story was incomplete if I didn't also help heal Kesur's story.

What would a healed Kesur look like? What could it stand for? What could it become a symbol of?

My Duty and Destiny

By June 2022, I had been on a personal healing path for over four years. That had strengthened me to the point that I was able to take on the challenge of trying to heal my extended family and the soul of Kesur.

Independently, two friends spoke to me about the role they saw for me. “Not everyone has your child essence; it's not everyone's archetype, but it is yours,” said my friend Nilima. “It takes an innocent to bring the truth to light… Your psyche has taken on all the challengers and has survived. You're now the immune innocent, the resilient innocent. No one can make a fool out of you. You have become the wise fool: you have wisdom, but you still lead from your innocence. Only the truly innocent can be trusted with power, to not get corrupted by it.”

In other words, someone needed to be Frodo from the Lord of the Rings, the innocent who takes the ring to the volcano to burn it, saying, “We've carried this curse long enough.” I didn't choose that responsibility; it chose me.

Not long after that, Mesina said something similar. “Raj, this is your soul's journey: to break this cycle for your family, as hard as that is to do. You represent a new class of energy that has come into this family. That's why it's often difficult. They're edgy with you at times. What you have done and the way you have educated yourself are so different to them. You see the world in a more balanced way. You're here to set a new precedent and a new vibration for the younger generations. You and your energy have already healed many of these patterns of behavior. That's what makes you a cycle breaker. This will also further your children's healing because the healing filters to all the family members. It's a part of their history too.”

***

Could Kesur become a place of pure, loving energy? It couldn't happen unless we first acknowledged and atoned for what had happened to my aunt and her baby.

My aunt and her baby were erased. I believed that restoring her identity and honoring her memory would help heal the women in the family. I also wanted to inspire the men of the next generation to look at women differently and question their male desire for dominance and control. I wanted them to see women as equal partners whose emotional and spiritual needs matter as much as their own.

Ten days before I was scheduled to go to India, I called my sister, Manju, and brother‐in‐law, Sangram, to tell them that I would be arriving in Indore on June 27, 2022. Manju said, “Oh, wonderful! That is a day before your birthday! How would you like to celebrate?”

“I would like to gather our entire extended family so that we can go through a healing experience together. Sangram, I am counting on you to help orchestrate this experience in your wise and loving way,” I told them. “I will start by sharing why I asked them to come. I will then invite each person to reflect on how we can honor the memory of the souls that were extinguished and seek forgiveness on behalf of the whole family. I especially want the younger generation to play an active role. I want this to be a powerful and loving healing experience that will transform the Kesur family for generations to come.”

A Healing Circle

As the extended Kesur family sat around me in the sunken living room of my late father's house, I looked around with anticipation and some trepidation. How would they react to hearing the details of the incident from 72 years ago? Would they be angry, shocked, or dismissive? Would we be able to navigate the turbulent emotional waters to get to a place of hope and healing by the end of the evening?

I gathered myself and started reading the Hindi text I had prepared:

Thank you all for coming and being part of this important gathering of our extended family. I believe that we will look back on this day as a very significant one in our family's history.

I think all of you will agree that our family has experienced an incredible amount of suffering over the last three generations. For example, I was stunned to learn that my father had six siblings who died in childhood. We can only imagine the suffering the family must have experienced at the loss of each of those precious lives.

Other tragic things that our family has experienced include Kunwar Saheb's mental illness and its impact on his wife and children; his son's suicide; a worker trying to kill Mohan Kakosa; Mohan's son's death; Baby's murder by her husband; Channu's cancer; and so much more.

I've asked us all to gather here today because of something that Papa used to talk about. He said, “I have heard that there is a curse on our family because two souls died unnaturally and never found peace.” But he never revealed the truth of it, even though he was aware of it. Three years ago, Gajju Bhaya told me what he had heard about it. Since then, I have tried to find out additional details about that episode. The details are fuzzy, but I have pieced together the story as best as I could. As we all know, memory is tricky, especially after so much time has passed.

I described what I had learned about the events of that night. My cousin Ranjit then spoke:

I do believe there is a curse. It is a natural human response to bless others when they do good to you and curse them when they harm you. This was the ultimate harm, so the curse is equally powerful.

The fact is that there were many such cases in the old days. Daughters and daughters‐in‐law were killed and cremated right within the Rowla compound. Such actions have an impact on future generations, who pay the price in suffering. Kunwar Saheb paid a price for his actions: going mad and being locked up for the last 24 years of his life. As his children, we paid a price by growing up without a father.

My brother‐in‐law Sangram spoke next:

It is true that such incidents were quite common back then. But that doesn't mean they didn't have a huge impact on the family. We should not minimize or hide this. We must accept that this happened and ask: Now what?

If somebody dies in an unnatural and untimely manner after great suffering, it casts a long shadow on the family. If they are not properly grieved at the time, that too affects what happens to their souls and the lives of those left behind.

None of us gathered here today were alive when this happened. But we still have a collective duty to heal from it.

One thing we must do is a Narayan Bali, a special pooja (a worshipful ritual) to honor and bring peace to our ancestors, including the mother and baby who were killed. That will happen tomorrow.

The greatest healing must happen within each of us – starting with a deeply heartfelt acknowledgment that this was wrong. We must beg forgiveness on behalf of our forefathers. We must pray to a higher power to guide us and release us from the shadow of this act and give our family the strength and wisdom to move ahead.

I responded:

Many families in India try to neutralize painful histories simply by having a pooja. But that is not enough. We cannot heal and experience peace without first acknowledging the truth of what happened 72 years ago. Let us meditate on what we need to learn from this, and how we can honor the memory of those two souls. Let us collectively seek forgiveness and find ways to atone for what happened.

This is part of our DNA; the trauma that our ancestors experienced still impacts us today. It will remain in our bodies until we find a way to release it.

My hope is that our gathering today and the pooja we will have tomorrow will prove to be a loving and life‐altering experience for all of us. I believe that this process can transform the destiny of the Kesur Family. It will help us reconnect to our true Dharma (our divine duty) and the Dharma of all Rajputs, which is to be the protectors and defenders of people.

I asked everyone to sit in silence for a few minutes to reflect on what had been said. I then invited other voices into the room, starting with the women. My sister, Manju, spoke up, then Gajendra's wife, Mohini. Both thanked me for taking on this difficult challenge.

Ranjit's wife then told us about a mysterious incident that happened after my nephew Chandraveer died of cancer a few years earlier. Four women – my mother, Ranjit's wife, Gajendra's wife, and my cousin Beena – all had the same experience in their own homes the night before the family gathered to mourn. Around 4:00 a.m., each of them heard a baby crying, hungry for milk. They each believed that they had heard the voice of the baby who had been killed in the middle of the night 72 years earlier.

After we absorbed that information, I asked the gathering, “Let's talk about the future, where we go from here. We have all been born to privilege and status. How should we commit to living in the future? What do we need to change?”

One by one, my family members replied. Their resounding answer? We must help others. We must abandon harm. Our duty is to leave all that we own better than it was given to us.

My cousin Gajendra said, “Our village and community should benefit from our resources, our success, and our achievements in the world. But we are so disconnected from people's lives in Kesur. What can we do for the people who live there, especially the young people? I would like Raj and my daughter Rohini to come and speak at the village school to inspire the kids. More than money, they want our time and our involvement. They want to know that we care about them. This is how we will win the hearts and minds of people in the village.”

Tearing up, Gajendra continued, “I don't feel that there is much love between family members in Kesur. For example, we have been fighting for years over tiny amounts of land. How do we awaken love amongst each other so that we become a truly united family? If any one of us is suffering or needs help, we should all be there for each other.”

I could see transformation beginning. I caught a glimpse of how Kesur could once again become symbolic of something positive and beautiful, rather than a suffocating and decaying place that elicits sadness and grief. It could become a place of atonement, humility, and healthy pride. The experience we had shared could open new horizons for our family members. It could cohere our fragmented family and enable us to become a single powerful unit. It could herald the rebirth of Kesur as a place of healing and renewal, the effects rippling out to the Rajput community and beyond.

The Path Ahead

My family's story may be extreme in some ways, but its contours are familiar and all too commonplace. Just like there is a “Me Too” movement, I hope my story gives others the courage to say “We Too” as they realize, “My family also has a troubled history. We have dark secrets too.”

I concluded our family gathering with a simple thought: Just as I needed to blend my mother's love with my father's strength, the Kesur family needs to blend Hari Singh's heart with Girwar Singh's toughness.

Over the last several years, I have worked on healing myself, my relationship with my mentor, and my relationship with my children. I have started the process of healing the soul of Kesur, and continue to work on healing the world of business. In coming years, I hope to be able to come to a place of healing with my failed marriage.

What are you ready to face and heal? Remember, with every wound and trauma, we must reveal it, feel it, and grieve it in order to heal it. The singer Juliana Hatfield reminds us, “A heart that hurts is a heart that works.” A heart that hurts is also a heart that loves. The only way to heal is through love. We all need to be healers now, starting with ourselves.