Tomorrow it’s Parama Ekadashi, and I am fasting, no food, no water.
I have been observing every Ekadashi as Nirjala since last year, a birthday gift I gave myself as I got to mid-40s and felt my metabolism asking for a different kind of attention. Before that, for nearly a decade, Nirjala was only once a year. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start with a Nobel Prize.
In 2016, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the science behind autophagy. The word comes from the Greek auto, self, phagein, to eat. Self-eating. When the body is deprived of food, it turns inward and begins consuming its own damaged cells, thereby breaking down toxic cellular buildup that accumulates with age, hence triggering a deep internal reset.
Research shows autophagy meaningfully activates after 16 to 24 hours of fasting and intensifies as the fast continues. Today, autophagy is the hottest concept in global wellness. Biohackers swear by it, longevity clinics charge handsomely for protocols built around it, and Silicon Valley has done what it is really good at i.e. turned it into a subscription.
If India had a Ministry of EduCulture, it would have surely built on if not led from front on Autophagy Research because it has encoded it into a lunar calendar for Free, twice a month, for everyone. A reset built into the rhythm of daily life thousands of years before Ohsumi’s laboratory existed. Based in Nobel Laureate’s research is our argument still going to be that Indian civilisation arrived at 24-hour fasting by accident? Isnt it entirely possible that it arrived there through centuries of careful observation of the human body from the inside out. This is precisely the hashtag#EduCulture argument I keep making: we have stopped teaching our children why our traditions work. We perform them. We have largely stopped understanding them. And in that gap between ritual and meaning, an entire generation grows up dismissing as superstition what a Nobel committee is now awarding prizes to explain.
Nirjala Ekadashi — the most demanding of all, the one without even water — falls on June 25, 2026. Fifteen days from today.
Here is my invitation.
Start tomorrow if you can on Parama Ekadashi, observe it with water only, a full day without food. That alone puts you past the 16-hour mark where autophagy begins. Let your body remember what it feels like to be clean from the inside. Then, between now and June 25, observe each meal with a little more intention. On June 25, if your doctor gives you the go-ahead, join me for Nirjala, no food, no water, sunrise to the morning of June 26. I will be doing it regardless. I do it every fortnight now.
This is what EduCulture means to me in practice. Not just writing about our civilisational inheritance. Living it. Understanding why it works. And inviting others to do the same. Mark June 25. Your cells will thank you in ways that took a Nobel Prize to articulate.
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