I met her in one of her sessions on ‘How consciousness can help?’ I couldn’t help but smile as she spoke, excited and jumpy, a session filled with examples from her own life answering questions that were asked by the audience but invoked by her thoughts. I just knew, I had to speak to Aditi Surana, so I scheduled a call with her for the next morning.
“My father was a South Indian Communist and my mother is a Maharashtrian.”
She tells me as she reminisces about her childhood, where every decision had to have a reason, dinner table conversations were spent debating politics, an outing was attending art exhibitions or seminars. An environment completely different from kids her age.
“I did a lot of theatre workshops and documentary filmmaking as a teenager, something I still remember and smile about. I still remember as a child when I wanted to become a filmmaker, I asked my father, ‘How do I start and what do I do?’ and he told me if you want that, you’ll have to observe people.” That is when she kindled in herself, a fire of curiosity to observe people.
She was a very curious child, about how people think, how they look at life. Aditi’s intrigue towards how people think took her to a level where she picked it up as a part of her vocation. But her father, an art director, who had been encouraging and progressive for so many things, couldn’t absorb the idea that she chose a field of social sciences and human development.
“My father was my idol and I looked up to him, but for the first time then, I didn’t agree with him. So, in his own way, he got so worried that he asked me to leave the house, assuming I wouldn’t leave or I’d come back, but I didn’t.”
So, at the age of 18, she left her house where many of us have absolutely no clue what we should or would do. She started her professional life as by analyzing handwriting at a Cafe Coffee Day, through which she paid off for her education. She didn’t want to study handwriting analysis initially and work with the human mind instead, but her father wanted her to pursue something core or filmmaking as opposed to what was considered tangential.
“After I left home, I met my friends in a coffee shop. In a middle-class family we didn’t spend hundreds on coffee, but I went to meet them. They said, ‘Hey, why don’t talk to CCD, they might want you to analyze handwriting for people’, and I met all 5 western region heads and analyzed their handwriting, explained the idea and surprisingly, they agreed. I used to charge Rs. 50 for each analysis.”
During this phase of her life, she struggled a lot with speaking the dialect fluently because she came from a vernacular medium and the people who came to CCD were from upper-middle class or youngsters who smoked a lot, a complete contrast to the environment she grew up in.
“When you visit any counselor they kind of tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, but since I was too young to know anything of that sort to anyone elder to me. So, as I didn’t have answers, I used to ask them questions, because I could see that they had fixations that they were operating from. Merely asking would make them rethink and get them to move them from their fixed ideas of life.”
Slowly she got called at events as a speaker to talk about handwriting analysis and of course people had a lot of questions because the subject was new to them. This is when her theater training helped her become an amazing speaker.
During her childhood she had a lot of trouble reading and which other people mistook for tardiness, because she could answer questions, and that meant she wasn’t a dull kid. So, this came as a surprise to me, when she mentioned during her session at AMA, that she was dyslexic. I suppose, it was a surprise for her as well, because she discovered it at the age of 25.
“When I explained to one of my friends how I had difficulty reading, remembering, and how I avoided bank work, she said, “Hey have you taken, dyslexia for adults test?”. I did my research and I had one of those, Oh-shit-I-wish-I-knew-this-sooner moments.”
Things did turn out for the better for her as struggle paid off when she approached two radio stations at the age of 22, and within 15 days she was live on the radio doing a radio show. She started her own company and worked along with her two friends, like a small team. Now they had to reach out to people and corporates weren’t giving her any response.
“I literally approached 100 companies, but I don’t think the corporate India wasn’t ready for something like this, even though I had my certificate and a radio show, but people were open to handwriting analysis on a personal level.”
In an attempt to reach out to people they went for an HR conference in Delhi.
“I literally bumped into HR head of IBM with his wife, and I was like, ‘Hey, can I talk to you? Can I analyze your handwriting?’ And they said yes. I remembered we talked and how much we laughed and laughed. That evening, he had received the best HR professional award, we had dinner together and spent pretty much the entire evening together. People started approaching me in the conference asking questions like ‘Who are you? Why this person was hanging out with you?’.”
She got an assignment with IBM nationally, to analyze their executives’ handwriting. From then on she got signed up to big names like ISPAT too(now JSW), Torrent Pharma, and celebrities like John Abraham, Bipasha Basu, and Smriti Irani et. al. All along the way, she kept studying and honing herself in different skills.
“My father collected newspapers, so from 1980 we had every single newspaper that came to our house. So for me learning to upgrade yourself or investing in you to add value to you was a very normal thing to do. Between the next birthday gift and a course, it was encouraged that I chose the latter, which I still hold today.”
The one we know as Aditi Surana today once went around by the name Chandraprabha. She felt that without knowledge she was providing feedback to these people, that she wasn’t growing. So she let go of her staff and took a sabbatical for two and a half years.
“I looked at everything that I owned and thought as to what am I creating here? So I went for a transcendental meditation, a thing which people take up after they have retired. At 25, I changed my name to ‘Aditi’. Aditi means unbound. I could do whatever I’d like to do.”
During this period she got married too. It mattered to her if whatever she was doing is making her happy or not. According to her very few people really pay attention to whether they are enjoying their life or not.
She went through a lot of emotional abuse as a child, physical and emotional. For people, it wasn’t okay to be different or dyslexic for that matter.
“As I married my entire name changed. Suddenly, I was a nobody. I wasn’t amongst high end people. The yoga teacher in Rishikesh, where I went, didn’t care for who I was. All of that shed a lot of myth of achievement and success that we have.”
But you never know what the future has in store for you. After her sabbatical, she returned back to work. She started realizing that she wasn’t the wife that he had in mind. For him, it was fun being with a random and unpredictable person, but playing that game, in the long run, is something neither of them was ready for. They looked at each other and said that probably they didn’t want to do this. But as fate had it, things didn’t stop there, along with this came another wave,
“As I had started to work again, my father started falling ill and husband had decided to call off our marriage. Again I was a stage where I had no clue, I had to go to my father to be the caretaker.”
With so much resentment in the past, she went to nurse her father. Where she hadn’t spoken to him in years, now she had to be there for him. She tells me how it was one of the toughest phases of her life. Her husband filed for a divorce and in December her father passed away. Her husband stuck around for a couple of months as he knew she was in a very fragile state.
During this, she jolted herself back to the realizing that she cannot shut down the connect she has with consciousness and the experience with people she gained over the years. Aditi has changed 13 apartments, so far.
“Then, I moved to a different apartment. I realized that I was losing on everything that mattered to me, the connect with body, consciousness, and connecting with the universe. I couldn’t shut down. I met a friend who was a client and she told me about Access Consciousness.”
She couldn’t stop, a course that usually takes 2-3 years to complete to become a facilitator, she completed in 11 months, and I went to Italy, for my certification training.
“After my father’s death, everything that was unresolved between us showed up and I couldn’t go back to him and talk. I used to cry for my father, somebody I didn’t meet for 7-8 years. But Access Consciousness help me get through it and resolve the conflict within me. I realized through Access, that I didn’t have to blame him or rationally understand to choose all that I want. I could reconnect with mind and body, which is what gives me the intellectual kick I need.”
During no point in the conversation did I feel her voice losing confidence. You hear people’s version of their struggle. At no point in her life did she give up whether she was aware of the problem or not, the abuse, her dyslexia, her relationships, she kept believing in herself. She has an aura brimming with confidence which makes you feel there will always be problems but if I have a calm like her, you’ll get through it like a fish in water.
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