Before Devotion

She could measure everything except faith.

At 3:12 one morning, Meera Rao wakes with her heart pounding and her smartwatch reading a heart rate variability of 19 milliseconds. She is the youngest vice president in the history of Kavach, a Bengaluru health-technology company ninety days from launching Triage Sahayak, an AI system that will decide which patients in rural clinics are seen first. A night in the emergency room ends with a verdict she cannot argue with: "Your heart is fine. Your nervous system is not."

Meera admires faith but has never been able to feel it. When she confesses this to her mother in their village in the Kumaon hills, she gets not a sermon but a question: "Who told you to feel it? Do you serve anyone, beta? Start there."

What follows is an unlikely education. In a modest breath lab, alongside an auto-rickshaw driver, a retired schoolteacher, a nurse and a teenager, Meera learns a slow breathing practice whose effects she can see on a screen. It does not give her peace, at first. It gives her a gap of a couple of seconds between provocation and reaction, and that turns out to matter more than she could have imagined. In the waiting hall of a crowded government hospital, a nurse tells her, "The machine only knows the hospital it was born in." Meera discovers a flaw in the system she has spent years building, and must choose between a comfortable version of the truth and the whole of it, at real cost to herself.

Before Devotion is a novel for everyone who admires devotion but finds that it does not come naturally, and wonders whether truthfulness, love and service might come before the feeling rather than after it. Written by an engineer who has spent decades studying how inner steadiness can be cultivated and measured, it is a story about technology, conscience and grace.

The book includes the author's Afterword, "Imperative for Building Better Humans," on why the inner state of the people who build and govern powerful technologies matters as much as the technologies themselves.

Dedicated to Neem Karoli Baba and to H. H. Gurumahan, founder of the Universal Peace Foundation.