Mayur Kalbag on Aghori 3, Chanting, and His Author Journey
Welcome back to Author’s Journey, the author interview series where I sit down with writers about how their books actually came to be. I’m Mangal D Karnad, author of Folded Away Softly and Malli and the Mulki Stories — and this time, my guest is someone whose “books” are really one petal on a much larger flower.
Mayur Kalbag is a transformational leadership coach, TEDx speaker, painter, and the Penguin-published author of Aghori An Untold Story and Aghori 2, both national bestsellers. He’s trained more than 100,000 professionals across India, Malaysia, and Fiji, and his Kailash Manasarovar pilgrimage — the one that reshaped his life and gave him the material for Aghori — has already been told well, and often, on some of the biggest podcasts in the country. So we didn’t go back there.
I’m choosing to run this as a text interview rather than another podcast appearance. There’s no shortage of podcasts with Mayur already—I’m looking for people who still read. Let’s see how this one lands.
This conversation stays with four things I don’t think have been asked of Mayur as directly anywhere else: how he actually holds together several identities at once, what really happens in a boardroom when he opens a session with (Sanskrit) chanting, what actually made him quit a stable sales career in his twenties, and what’s coming next —a third book — Aghori 3 — and Penguin has already accepted it, due out in September.
A quick note on how this actually happened: Mayur is warm, fast, both of us talking over each other half the time, him occasionally more excited about the questions than his own answers. I’ve tried to keep that energy on the page rather than smooth it into something more formal than it was.
One Flower, Many Petals
I’ve followed Mayur’s work off and on for years, mostly through his interviews and his personal brand rather than his books. What’s always struck me is that he doesn’t hold trainer, author, and painter as three separate lanes — he treats them as one thing wearing different clothes. I put that to him directly.
You’re a trainer, an author, and a painter, all wrapped into one. How do you actually think about that — as three careers, or one?
Right, right — so, now I’ve added one more petal to the picture. I think of it as a small flower that my guru, Swamiji, has inspired me to become, and every so often another petal gets added. Chanting is the newest one — that was actually suggested to me by my mentor, who was also my first boss. He’s the one who got me leave to attend the Pattabhisheka in the first place, which is where my connection with Swamiji actually began, so I credit him for that whole branch of it. He said, why don’t you also bring in chanting? Because I already loved chanting stotras, and it had become integral to how I run my Anahata spiritual retreats. And then there’s poetry too, which I don’t even count separately anymore — it’s just part of living. So the honest answer is: trainer, author, painter, poet, chanter. Unintentionally, having all of them together creates its own kind of intrigue in people. Even when I hand someone a copy of one of my books in person, I don’t just sign it — I give them a Panchamukha Rudraksha and do a small chant right there. All of that chanting comes only from Swamiji.
Chanting as part of the Curriculum
“Fantastic,” I told him, “because I remember you mentioning this — that you chant with the groups you train.” I’d heard in an older interview of yours, and it had stuck with me long enough that I wanted it to be the centre of this one, not a footnote.
You’ve said you begin almost every corporate session with chanting, before any training content starts. Where does that actually fit into what you’re teaching?
I believe in the significance of connectivity. If you want to sell something, promote something, or lead people, the first thing you have to do is connect — and to connect with people, you have to connect with yourself first. That self-connection happens through chanting. I tell every room the same thing: go beyond the meaning of the words. Ravi Shankar plays the sitar, Zakir Hussain plays the tabla, Kishori Amonkar sings a raga — most listeners don’t know the literal meaning of what’s being played, but they still throng to hear it because it touches something beyond language. Chanting works on a corporate audience the same way. I’ve done this everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Fiji, and at seminars across India — it’s not a one-off gimmick; it’s how every single session opens, whether it’s CXOs in a boardroom or a larger seminar.
Corporate rooms aren’t exactly primed for Sanskrit chanting. Did you get resistance?
Less outright resistance than a need for explanation — and even the resistance isn’t really resistance; it is more what I’d call inspired exclamations. People reacting with surprise, not hostility. Corporate audiences simply aren’t used to just sitting and listening, so I had to justify why we were starting this way, every single time, for 26 years running.
In Chennai once, someone told me flatly, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in this.” I said, fair enough — but do you listen to music? Then listen to this the same way: as vibration, not religion. The OM chanting and its repetition are doing something in the room, whether or not anyone believes in what it represents. Some people, for their own religious reasons, told me directly that they wouldn’t chant — and I’ve always respected that completely. I’ve never once tried to bulldoze anyone into it. What I will say is that the training itself is a small fraction of the session. The invocation — the chanting — is the real doorway.
“Training is maybe ten per cent. The chanting — the invocation — is the other ninety. It’s the door opening.”
“So it’s really an invocation before anything else?” I asked. “Correct, correct, correct,” he said, three times over, clearly pleased I’d put it back to him that way. “That’s exactly what it is.”
Where do the chants themselves come from?
Every chant I use comes directly from my guru, Swami Sadyojats Shankarashram — Swamiji. I started with the Daridriya Dukha Dahana Stotra from the very first day I began training, decades ago, and whenever I’ve mentioned that to Swamiji, he’s just smiled. The ones I return to most are the Daridriya Dukha Dahana Stotra, the Lingashtakam, and verses from the Saundarya Lahari that we chanted together on the banks of Manasarovar itself — that one is a full series of shlokas, not just a single Stotra, and it’s extraordinary. In the Anahata retreats specifically —which are purely spiritual rather than corporate —we go further: bhajan singing, visualised meditation, all of it learned or absorbed from watching Swamiji conduct meditation himself.
Has the chanting ever worked against you — made people see you differently than you intended?
Honestly, yes, in a strange way. People who’ve heard me chant have told me I sound like Swamiji himself. It’s a bit like Aditya Kalyanpur playing the tabla — you can hear whose lineage he trained in, even though he doesn’t sound identical to his teacher. But beyond that, it’s been received far better than I expected, across every kind of audience I’ve taken it to.
“In 26 years of training, I have never used a single PowerPoint slide. If you want to fall asleep, keep watching slides — that’s my joke about it.”
The Real Spark
Every existing profile of Kalbag traces his career back to Kailash — the pilgrimage, the guru, the decision to quit made in its aftermath. That story is already well told elsewhere, in his own words, on some very large platforms. So I asked what actually put the idea in his head in the first place, long before any of that — and separately, what the ground he grew up on was actually like.
Before Kailash, before any of the spiritual context — what actually made you take the plunge to do this for a living?
Before I made the jump, a trainer came in to run a sales-skills and negotiation session at the company where I worked in sales. He was so polished and so pleased with himself that he genuinely forgot about the content. He spoke to maybe one or two people in the room the entire session and completely lost the rest of us, and we were sales guys — we were the ones who had to go out and actually carry a conference of sales afterwards. And for two of those days, he was paid what I made in a full month. That’s the actual seed. Just watching someone mediocre get paid several times over to hold a room he wasn’t really holding, and thinking, why can’t I do that, at least part time, if I know I can do it better.
Once the idea existed, what actually made the leap possible?
When I told my mother I wanted to leave a stable job to do this full-time, she didn’t try to talk me out of it. She asked one question: if it doesn’t work, will you get a job back? I said, easily — sales and marketing, no problem. She said, then why don’t you try it for a year and see how it goes? That one year is the canvas on which everything since has been painted. I was 28, unmarried, with very few overheads — the timing gave me a lot of room that many people don’t get, and I don’t take that for granted. My father, for his part, was completely ok either way — it was really that one piece of logic from my mother that made the difference.
What did preparing for your first paid session actually look like?
I went full hog. I used to go up to the building’s terrace with nothing but the potted plants and run entire training sessions out loud, treating the plants as my participants, just to get a feel for holding a room before anyone was paying me to.
My first real session was in Hubli in 2001, for Miven Mayfran — I went completely blank halfway through. Vikram Sirur and Sandeep Sirur were the ones who gave me that opportunity, along with my uncle, Dinnu Maam. The company called me for a second training session after the first one. That’s the actual starting point of this career.
Aghori 3 and What Comes Next
Near the end of our conversation, almost as an aside, Kalbag mentioned two things he hasn’t discussed publicly before: a third book already on its way, and a completely different one he’s only just begun.
What’s coming next?
There’s a third book in the Aghori series. Penguin has already accepted it, and it’s due out in September. And separately, I’ve started something entirely different — a paranormal horror novel called OverwHELLmed, and yes, I write the HELL in capitals on purpose. I haven’t actually started the manuscript yet, only the opening chapter, but I already know exactly how it has to open, because the first chapter sets the tone for the whole book. A teacher walks into a classroom and finds a student sitting alone, mouth dripping with blood, calmly pulling out his own tooth and trying to eat it. The boy has been possessed by something. From there, it becomes the story of a tantrik trying to understand what he’s dealing with.
Note from Mangal
What stayed with me most is the idea of “a door opening” before the real content begins — that presence has to be established before craft can land.
Closing Thoughts
Near the end, almost to himself, Mayur said something that’s stayed with me more than any single answer: “I’ve never spoken like this, but I’m happy to do that now.” That’s really the whole point of doing this as a slower, text-based conversation rather than another podcast — my thanks to him for trusting that format with things he hadn’t said out loud before.
If this piece made you curious, Aghori – An Untold Story and Aghori 2 – An Untold Story Continues are both available wherever Penguin titles are sold, Aghori 3, the third book in the series is due out in September, and OverwHELLmed is one to watch for further down the line.
You can also follow the rest of the Author’s Journey series here on the blog. If you’re an author who would like to be interviewed or featured, or a reader with a suggestion to interview an author, please get in touch.