Ratika Khandelwal is a woman who is deeply connected to the roots of India. She is a certified yoga teacher and a digital content creator, who makes videos on yoga, gardening, and sustainability. To add her to milestones, she is a speaker who has voiced her views on the TEDx platform.
A Sustainable Health and Living Enthusiast, Ratika Khandelwal developed the love for India’s roots. In her conversation with Icy Tales, she spoke about her journey, her love for yoga, and her favorite parts about being rooted in India.
Q) Your Instagram username is very interesting – “Roooted India”. What was it that helped you develop a love for the roots of India?
Ratika Khandelwal: I was always very fascinated by how our ancestors and grandparents used to live. The traditional food, clothing, occupation, and lifestyle, everything were interesting. Nowadays we talk about reusing a lot of things, but if you will see our ancestors, they were doing it already. So it is not something very new that we are trying to adopt.
If we start to live like our grandparents, we will eventually have a better planet. So, my username and everything I am doing were inspired by our traditional Indian living. So that’s the reason behind my Instagram username.
Q) Yoga is something that has become very popular around the world. Being a yoga instructor, tell us the importance of yoga and why is it very essential in today’s world.
Ratika Khandelwal: I support traditional yoga, right from how it is mentioned in your textbooks. Yoga is like a philosophy and it is a form of practice that can be done from anywhere. You don’t need to go to a certain place to practice yoga. Unlike gyms, where you depend on equipment, yoga doesn’t require any dependency.
And apart from that, when you practice any other physical workout, it will consume a lot of energy and you may feel tired after the practice, but that is not the case with respect to your yoga practice; rather, it gives you more energy. If you are practicing traditional yoga, so you might feel more energized and lively after practice.
Another important benefit of yoga is that, when you are doing any other form of workout, you are not completely aware of your breath. The whole motive of any workout is to build your physical strength, lose some weight, or gain some mass. But with yoga, the byproducts will come very naturally.
You will also get peace of mind and proper control of your breath. You become closer to your own body and you learn to listen to what your body is trying to convey to you. This way, you will also end up reversing many lifestyle disorders, which cannot be done in any other form of workout.
Q) What are your major learnings being a TEDx speaker?
Ratika Khandelwal: Being out there on the TEDx platform was one of my dreams and I’m very grateful that it happened to me in May 2022. It was something that came to me very naturally. So one of my followers who was the curator at Symbiosis TEDx approached me for the TED Talk.
Being on that platform and sharing my journey with the college students was very nostalgic for me because when I was in college, I was completely under peer pressure because finance is considered a very good thing and it is like, people who are into finance are very intellectual and they will have high paying jobs. I got into finance studied only because all my friends were doing it, so I had no other option.
After I spoke, a lot of them came to me and told me that they could totally relate to me. We all are going through certain things but only when you see someone making their career in their choice of things, do you feel more empowered.
With me, there were also many renowned speakers who delivered beautiful speeches. We had one ex-army officer and his story was very inspirational. He said that there may be flaws in your life, but that is just one part of your life. For me, TEDx was a very big learning and I came out more confident.
Q) How important is ‘me time’? Give us some tips to groom ourselves into being better people.
Ratika Khandelwal: We all are in this rush to upscale our professional life but we often forget to launch our personal life. We all should definitely work hard in our professional life but at the same time, we should not leave ourselves or our families behind. You can catch up in your professional life but if you miss this time with your friends and family, you might never get it again.
Our friends will grow older and everyone will go in their different spaces so it is very important that we balance all of these things. Everyone around us is talking about work, money, and success and that if we want to be successful, we’ll have to leave behind a lot of pain. But that is not the case, we need to find contentment in some places and grow in life.
There is this beautiful quote, I don’t know the Sanskrit or the Hindi version, but the meaning is that no matter how much you want it, even if you water the baby plant with five or ten buckets, the plant will only grow when the season is right and when the time is right; that is the springtime.
So, time is everything. It doesn’t matter how many times you water it or put in fertilizers or any other things. When it is not the right time, the plant will not grow. It will only bloom when the season is right. So wait for the right time, and what you desire will come to you.
Ratika Khandelwal aims to raise awareness of sustainability and healthy living. The certified yoga teacher is an advocate of the traditional Indian methods and urges people to live a happy and healthy life. Ratika Khandelwal also aims to achieve more milestones in her life and help people around her through social media.
Last Updated on by Himani Rawat
