He Got Into A Prestigious University. Now He Feeds The Poor.
Many scientists often don’t believe in God or religion, seeing them as separate from reason.
For Madhu Pandit Dasa, an alumnus of India’s prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, the door to spirituality opened when he could not find the answers he sought in science.
Today, he heads the largest International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) temple in India, one of Bengaluru’s landmarks; he built it using his civil engineering background — on land once considered uninhabitable. He also leads the largest food aid program for children — Akshaya Patra — with the help of kitchens that use technology to minimize human contact with food.
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And he explains spirituality in a language that remains rooted in science.
I met Dasa during a visit to the ISKCON temple in the fall of 2025. He was dressed in traditional Indian attire, a white kurta and dhoti, wearing the ISKCON white tilak, a sacred marking on the forehead symbolizing devotion to Krishna. A necklace of tulsi or basil beads signified his deeksha, or initiation into formal spiritual discipleship.
Smiling gently and observing me through his glasses, he invited me to sit on the floor cushion in front of a low desk, opposite him. A large painting of the movement’s founder, Srila Prabhupada, right behind him, so imposing that Dasa appeared small in comparison.
I would later learn that the placement of the painting was intentional: It signaled that he does not see himself as a leader, but as a servant carrying out Prabhupada’s vision, and ultimately serving Lord Krishna, the divine consciousness worshipped by ISKCON devotees.
As a science journalist who later moved into writing and reporting about religion, I was curious about his journey from science to spirituality. Growing up in India, I also understood the pride and potential disappointment of parents whose children enter a prestigious university and I wanted to understand the forces that shaped their path.
Journey to Krishna consciousness
Dasa received the highly competitive National Science Talent Scholarship, awarded to only 150 students across India, which enabled his admission to IIT Mumbai, considered at one time its flagship institution. In other words, he fulfilled the dream that many Indian parents have for their children.
At IIT, he chose to pursue physics. He hoped that it would lead him to the “absolute truth,” to “discover the cause of all causes.”
But he was dissatisfied with what he was learning.
“Within six months, I got frustrated. It was all about grades, it was all about relative grading and attending classes, doing tutorials, weekly tests and then like this journey it was, it was against my nature,” he told me.
It’s not that he quit, but he started to spend more time in the IIT library in his pursuit of knowledge. He started reading Western and Indian philosophers: Aristotle, Kant, Osho, J. Krishnamurti, Aurobindo.
“I was open-minded,” he told me. “I had no reservations. I wanted to understand the approach of all this.”
What he found was that no philosopher, Indian or Western, offered a definitive answer about the nature of reality. While that realization was, as Dasa put it, “freeing,” it did not satisfy his quest.
Physics became less appealing as he realized that there was an assumption that from physical matter one can explain everything, including consciousness, as, what he said, “a mixture of chemicals.”
The meaninglessness he started to feel made him contemplate suicide, even leaving a note in an exam paper. It was then, just as he was mulling over his next steps, that he came across Prabhupada’s book. And one verse caught his eye:
Ishwara Paramakrishna Satchitananda Vigraha Anadhiradhir Govinda Sarvakarana Karana. That’s translated as: The Supreme Controller Krishna, Ishwara Paramakrishna Satchitananda Vigraha, not of a body of flesh, but a body of eternity, knowledge, and bliss; a person who has no beginning, no end; the cause of all causes.
He found it “logical and scientific”: From these words, he understood that the absolute truth cannot be discovered through “mental speculation” alone. You have to receive this knowledge from the texts and then go and apply it in your life and see if it is the truth.
As he explained, “Then it struck me, this is almost what I am doing. In modern physics, also, in chemistry, I believe the textbook…I trust the chemistry book first, and then I go to the lab. This pressure and this temperature I mix, I find it is. So I realize the truth. I thought, my God, this is another process of receiving knowledge. So I said this is no less than science. There, the laboratory is the chemistry lab. Her,e the laboratory is our body, our mind, our own self is a laboratory."
In that moment, he found himself, as he said. “When you come to Krishna consciousness, you find yourself really.”
On the path as a missionary
The path ahead was not easy. As expected, his father, a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), was upset with his decision to join ISKCON. He thought a senior colleague at ISRO might be able to drill some sense into his son.
Dasa reminisced: “I went, sat before him, and he asked a few questions. Then he told my father: ‘He’s very serious. If he were not, I would have said he’s misled.’ He told his father, ‘Let him do what he wants.’”
His relatives thought he had gone insane. The only ones who aligned with him, he recalls, were the children in his neighborhood. Over summer vacations, he would call them and ask his mother to prepare sweets. He would offer the food to Krishna and then distribute it to the children. They would chant Hare Krishna and dance in joy. To his relatives, this confirmed that he had indeed lost his mind.
“You come from IIT, now you’re jumping and dancing with the joy of discovery of truth,” they would say, and Dasa chuckled as he recalled it.
His father, though initially upset, ultimately resigned himself to Dasa’s choice. “It’s your life. I’ve educated you to do what you want.” His mother eventually became a Krishna devotee herself.
As a young missionary, he had to perform all the basic ashram work — cleaning toilets, asking for donations — not the path one would imagine for a promising science graduate. But he never wavered. In 1984, he was made the temple president in Bangalore, starting in a rented apartment, as new branches often do.
Akshaya Patra
Dasa’s most transformative initiative is the Akshaya Patra Foundation. The name Akshaypatra come from the Indian epic Mahabharata, meaning an inexhaustible pot
ISKCON missionaries recount a story about the founder as the inspiration for the program. Prabhupada once saw children fighting dogs over scraps of food and instructed that no child within ten miles of an ISKCON temple should go hungry.
Applying his engineering training to a humanitarian mission, Dasa began by serving 1,500 students in Bengaluru in 2000. Within a month, demand had grown to 100,000 meals. Today, Akshaya Patra feeds some 2.3 million children across India through 78 state-of-the-art kitchens in 16 states. More recently, it was launched in New Jersey, as part of its World Food Movement initiative.
Technology ensures efficiency: industrial steam boilers and gravity-fed rice and lentil systems make traditional Indian khichri, lentil soup, and other staple foods. Automated machines produce 40,000 rotis, or flatbreads, per hour. I watched the kitchens function with limited human touch.
The program is a partnership with the Indian government’s “mid-day meal” program. For poorer children, the mid -day meals provide an incentive for enrolling in school and for retention. Additionally, it provides employment to women.
What is Krishna consciousness?
ISKCON devotees are required to give up meat, onions, garlic, intoxicants (including tea and coffee), and sex outside marriage.
It was interesting to see how Dasa kept bringing his science background to explain spirituality. He explained how these were necessary conditions for spiritual attainment: “Just like if you go and mix hydrogen and oxygen whichever way you want, you won't find the truth. There's a pressure, there's a temperature. Put it in the right situation, and you will discover the truth. Similarly, this body-mind, if you want to discover the absolute truth, you have to keep your body and mind in a certain state. It is not religious dogmas. Religion is like the application of science.”
He explained Krishna consciousness as beyond a sectarian divine force. According to him, this divine force constituted the supreme consciousness, and everything in existence was part of that whole.
It is the source of all happiness: each of us, he said, is originally seeking sat, chit, ananda — existence, consciousness, and bliss. When you connect with the source, it flows into you, he explained. “Just like if I have a big vessel here, and I connect a pipeline to a glass, it will get full.”
Finally, I wanted to know what this journey meant to him.
“I’m totally satisfied. Contented. Satisfied. Yet unsatisfied. Contented, yet uncontented. Simultaneously. That is the nature of Krishna. That is the nature of spiritual satisfaction,” he said, again smiling gently.
Kalpana Jain is the Director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative and Senior Religion & Ethics Editor for The Conversation US