Vikram Beri

I am a father, a founder, and at one point — I was an inmate.

Building, losing, thinking I had it all figured out, then learning otherwise. Unshakeable one day, shattered the next. And somewhere in the wreckage of what I thought my life was supposed to look like, I found something that neither the success nor the loss could touch.

Mental health has met me from nearly every side — as the caregiver who sat up through the long nights, as the founder who built a place for others to find support sooner than they otherwise might, and finally as the patient, carried through wild, swinging manic episodes that revealed from the inside everything I once believed I understood from the outside. Each vantage taught me something the others could not. The last taught me the most.

The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads stay close, and writing is as near as I come to pointing at what cannot be said. If life has taught me anything, it is that suffering, once understood, becomes the most honest teacher there is.

In the stillness of soul lies the presence of mind, and vice versa.

This is not a curated version of me. It is just me.

It began in 2013, in a conversation with my wife — a psychologist — as I dropped her at an internship tucked into an inconvenient corner of the city. I asked why anyone would practice somewhere so hard to reach. Because, she said, people don't want to be seen walking into a therapist's office. The hiding was the whole problem.

So I asked: why not build something anonymous and easy, where nobody sees nobody? She said it would be a good thing to build. I said I would.

The idea never left. It kept returning, often pulling me back into my own younger years — the peer pressure, the loneliness, the grief of losing the man who raised me. I didn't know if help would have changed any of it. I only knew I needed to build this, as much for myself as for anyone.

We launched on October 10th, 2016 — World Mental Health Day, and, as it happened, my birthday. Day one, nobody called. Nobody chatted. We had offered professional support, for free, for anything a person might be carrying — and still, no one came.

It taught me the hardest truth of this work: anonymity does not dissolve stigma. People will recommend a doctor for a fever and stay silent about a mind in pain. So we set out to change that, one honest conversation at a time. In the years since, more people than I ever expected have reached out from around the world — and many of them stayed long enough to talk.

I poured myself into it, at a cost I did not always see — and learned, the hard way, that you cannot pour from an empty vessel; that the one offering care must also be willing to receive it.

BetterLYF is one of the things I have done. It does not define me. But the conviction beneath it does — that no one should suffer in silence, and that reaching for help is not weakness. It is where strength begins.

Consciousness is limitless. The mind is Prakriti's instrument — originally clean, conditioned into duality. The cloud is the conditioning, not the mind. Liberation is not arrival. It is deconditioning — the slow, patient removal of what was never true.

What I have come to is quieter than I expected. Bliss is real, but it is not the destination — clinging to it is the same attachment in more beautiful clothes. The work is not to disappear into the ocean, but to be the ocean while appearing as the wave. Stillness of soul and presence of mind turn out to be one state seen through two windows. And the joy that remains needs no reason at all — it is not caused by things; it is what everything else is quietly made of.

Jail Set Me Free is a memoir structured on the spine of the Bhagavad Gita and Advaita Vedanta — tracing an arc from confinement to clarity. It is ironic that liberation revealed itself through the depths of confinement.

It begins with a question I first asked at five, to my grandfather — who am I? — and the quiet void that question opened. It moves through a year I could not have scripted: a mind that began to outrun me, a manic storm in which I set out to cure cancer and tried to stare down the sun, a freak accident, and finally a cell — where the same question returned, softer this time, and at last willing to answer.

What I found there was not what I went looking for. Reading the Gita in confinement, I understood for the first time what it had been trying to tell me all along. Calm arrived where it had no business arriving. I learned about trust and choice from a man who threatened my life, about non-violence from refusing to raise my hands, about surrender from rising after each blow with nothing left to lose.

It is not a story of escape, for there is no escape really. It is a story of discovering the silence of the soul that was snubbed by a loud mind.

It began the way the best stories do — with two boys, and one more tale before sleep. Named for my sons, Viru and Yuvi, these are short adventures that carry the old wisdom forward in the one language every child already speaks: wonder.

The Gita and the Upanishads, the fables my grandfather once told me, the big questions that have no easy answers — handed down not as lessons to be memorized, but as journeys to wander into. Because the deepest truths were never too large for the young. More often than not, they are the ones who understand them first.