Most people know the feeling of going to work tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. Mental health has become easier to talk about in recent years, yet the conversation usually starts late, after someone has already burnt out or quit. Almost everyone has watched it happen to a colleague.

The scale of the problem is large. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing the economy close to US$1 trillion. WHO has also estimated that 15 per cent of working-age adults had a disorder in 2019 and it says that speaking openly about mental health at work is still taboo in many places. In practice that means plenty of people keep turning up to the office while carrying something nobody around them knows about.

Mr. Madan comes to the subject from a different direction. He is a third-generation entrepreneur and the Managing Director of Simplicity Projects Pvt. Ltd. a company in material handling engineering, where the work is about schedules, heavy loads and getting things right. He is also an author, a consciousness explorer, and the Founder of Kaliyuga Gurukul for Conscious Learning. Alongside the business, he has spent years asking questions about purpose, awareness. What makes a person change? Those questions led to the Kaliyuga Series, twelve books on awareness, choices, wisdom, responsibility, leadership, inner transformation and self-realisation drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and Indian philosophy.

The first book, Kaliyuga: The Opportunity to Walk on the Path of Gyan, treats this age as a chance to wake up rather than a curse to endure. Daily life today fits that description. It offers more than earlier generations ever had. It also keeps the mind busy from the moment a person wakes up. Indian thought has dealt with this for centuries by treating the mind as something to be understood and trained.

WHO’s guidelines on health at work point in the same direction. They warn against workloads and negative behaviour at work and, for the first time, they recommend training managers to prevent stressful workplaces and to respond when someone is struggling. That puts a demand on leaders. Mr. Madan’s view is that a leader has to begin with himself or herself because a manager who cannot recognise his or her stress usually passes it on to the team. The Conscious Leader, the book in the series, builds on this across seven areas: self, family, work organisations, choices, thought and society.

Two of the books deal with the workings directly. 7 Horses Controlling Life borrows the image of a chariot pulled by horses, where the horses are the senses, mind, intellect, emotions, desires, habits and awareness. When nobody is holding the reins, the result is what most people now call pressure. The 7 Energy Centres looks at how fear, confidence, wisdom and inner peace affect what a person thinks and does, and gives a way to work towards emotional balance.

Other books look at how people live day to day. The Silence of Shiva and The Song of Krishna set stillness beside purposeful action since many people are good at the second and neglect the first. BCD: Birth, Choices, Death rests on an idea: birth and death are fixed and everything in between is a matter of choice, including how one responds when things get heavy. Responsibility: What Life Entrusts to Us asks readers to see responsibility as something that gives life direction rather than a burden.

None of this replaces help. Anyone who is struggling should talk to a professional or someone they trust. What the books offer is a starting point, which’s to notice what is going on inside before it turns into a crisis.

This is also the thinking behind Kaliyuga Gurukul. Mr. Madan believes education should shape who a person becomes and not what he or she knows. The Gurukul combines Indian wisdom, modern education, and value-based living, and its work is aimed at teachers, parents, youth, and families. A calm home, a classroom and a kinder workplace are connected, and each begins with one person learning to pause.

Targets will keep rising. Calendars will keep filling. A healthy organisation still needs people who can think clearly, feel steady and make choices on purpose. When someone next asks how work is going, Mr. Madan suggests the better question may be how the person is holding up while doing it. That is a change but it costs nothing and it can change what people say in reply.