Freedom! [Excerpt from Foreword]
…What I have described as ‘freedom from’ the cognitive bondages… insights have shaped the direction of my work for decades. Samir Kumar’s book speaks directly to this process…For anyone seeking to navigate life with greater integrity, self knowledge and calm, this book offers a grounded and sincere guide… I appreciate Samir’s dedication to bringing Indic understanding into contemporary life without diluting its depth…
…Being free is both a culture and an attitude… This book by Samir Kumar will give the reader a road map into themselves. We teach our children about the outside world. We never teach them about themselves… This book will enlighten many. I wish this book, its author and all the readers great success in Self-connection to self-realisation.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book began as questions and restlessness. It arose in quiet moments that hinted at something beyond roles, thoughts, and effort. It took shape through life itself as my personal journey unfolded through mistakes, reflection, and pauses that revealed what lay beneath the surface of things.
With the light of Vedantic wisdom as a guide, I found myself drawn into a quiet journey of remembering, of resting close to what is true, even when words could not name it. In that stillness, simple practices revealed themselves, carrying a gentleness that shaped the way I moved through life.
What began as a personal unfolding now becomes a shared offering, an invitation for you to enter your own remembering. The Koshas offered me a language. A way to see what I was moving through. A way to listen more closely to where I was living from. But even that became secondary. What mattered most was the presence that kept showing up when I stopped trying to control the journey.
This book is a reflection of that path, less a map or a system, and more a gentle act of remembering, shaped into words.
If it has helped you pause, reflect, soften, or come home to your own stillness, even for a breath, then it has done its work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samir Kumar has walked many paths, an Entrepreneur, Investor, Engineer, Global Derivatives Trader, Civil Servant, CEO, National Award Winning Film Maker, and above all a Sincere Spiritual Seeker. What connects all of them is a quiet and steady desire to return to something essential. To live in service of truth. To make space for what is real.
Educated at IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta, and once an officer-trainee in India’s Civil Services, Samir has worked across London, Tokyo and Singapore in Financial Markets for over a dozen years, and back in India working in new domains of Public Broadcasting, and Digital Transformation. He has led institutions through reinvention and helped shape how stories are shared in a fast-moving world.
But beneath all of it runs a simpler thread of the ongoing journey inward.
A student of Vedanta, Samir lives with deep reverence for the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the power of silence. He is drawn to what remains when the roles fall away. This book is an offering from that space, shared as a quiet act of remembering.
Samir continues to serve through writing, media, mentorship, and initiatives that aim to empower young minds, especially in rural India. This is his first book in this form. But it comes from a lifelong relationship with the Self behind all forms.
Freedom!
Freedom! Let Us Begin the Journey is a quiet invitation to remember what has always been present beneath your breath, beneath your thoughts, beneath your search for meaning.
Drawing from the Vedantic Framework of the PanchaKoshas (five sheaths), the layers of body, energy, emotion, identity, and bliss, this book gently guides you inward. Each chapter offers honest reflection, practical tools, journaling prompts, and meditative pauses to help you return to yourself, again and again.
This book draws on the vast and varied experiences of immense intensity of the author who himself understands that the deepest quest is not about fixing one’s mind or polishing one’s life. His invitation is much gentler, where you are encouraged to see with clarity, to welcome every part of your experience, and to rest in the quiet presence that remains when all else has fallen away.
This is a book for anyone who has felt distant from their own stillness, anyone who has tried to become something, and anyone ready to stop running from the simplicity of being.
Instead of a distant goal, this book invites you to see freedom as the simple remembering of what has always been yours.
Let us begin.