I Am Water, Not the Wave by Mohit Mishra is a deeply introspective spiritual memoir that explores one of the most fundamental questions a person can ask: Who am I, really? Set across different places, cultures, spiritual traditions, and personal experiences, the book follows the journey of a young Indian expat and technologist living in the Netherlands whose carefully constructed life begins to fall apart. Yet what initially appears to be a story of heartbreak, uncertainty, and personal crisis gradually becomes something much deeper. It becomes a journey towards recognising that the person we believe ourselves to be may only be a temporary identity, while something far more constant exists beneath the stories we create about ourselves.
The central metaphor of the book emerges during a walk through a Dutch forest. The narrator hears a simple but transformative thought: “As a little wave in an ocean of waves, know that you are water, Mohit, not the wave.” This metaphor becomes the foundation of the entire memoir. The wave represents the temporary aspects of human identity, including our careers, relationships, achievements, failures, ambitions, fears, and the personal story we constantly tell ourselves. Water, on the other hand, represents our deeper nature, the unchanging awareness in which all these experiences appear and disappear. What makes the metaphor powerful is its simplicity. It does not ask the reader to reject everyday life. Instead, it encourages a different way of understanding it.
The journey becomes particularly personal after a cancelled wedding forces Mohit to confront an uncomfortable question: who is he without the story he has been selling to himself? A relationship that was expected to become part of his future suddenly disappears, creating a space in which familiar ideas about identity and success can no longer provide easy answers. Rather than presenting this experience simply as a story of loss, Mishra uses it as the beginning of an inward search. The emotional disruption becomes an opportunity to question assumptions that may have remained unnoticed during the ordinary rhythm of life.
As the narrative progresses, the author encounters several people who become what he calls “lanterns.” Each encounter illuminates another aspect of the search for truth. A Dutch couple helps him look beyond his temporary identity and recognise his deeper nature. A monk in Kerala brings ideas of karma, forgiveness, and scripture into a more personal and living context. An octogenarian in Palo Alto transforms an ordinary dining table into a space of spiritual insight, revealing a vision of unity across different religions. The journey then continues to an ashram in Rishikesh and eventually to a Himalayan camp centred around an Upanishad. Each experience contributes another layer to the narrator’s understanding, allowing the metaphor of water and wave to gradually move from an intellectual idea towards a lived realisation.
One of the book’s notable strengths is the way it brings together different spiritual traditions without presenting them simply as separate systems of belief. The memoir explores how Vedanta, bhakti, meditation, scripture, and different religious traditions can point towards the same underlying Truth. Rather than treating spirituality as something distant from ordinary existence, Mishra’s journey is rooted in everyday life. His experiences of relationships, professional ambitions, heartbreak, uncertainty, and personal questioning remain an important part of the spiritual process. This makes the book accessible to readers who may be curious about spirituality but do not necessarily see themselves as belonging to a particular religious or philosophical tradition.
The author’s own background adds another dimension to the narrative. Born in India and living in the Netherlands, Mohit Mishra is an entrepreneur and technologist who studied computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He went on to co-found a civic mobility company working with cities and public agencies in India and Europe. His professional life was focused on building digital infrastructure for buses, parking, and public transport. Yet alongside this outwardly successful life existed an increasingly difficult inner search involving heartbreak, burnout, and questions about identity. This contrast between technological progress and spiritual questioning gives the memoir an interesting contemporary relevance.
Mishra’s engagement with Advaita Vedanta is also central to the book. He regularly studies the tradition under teachers from Chinmaya Mission and has been influenced by contemporary spiritual masters as well as ordinary people he describes as “lanterns.” His practice combines Advaita Vedanta and Bhakti, while remaining connected to everyday responsibilities rather than suggesting that spiritual growth requires withdrawing from the world. This perspective gives the memoir a grounded quality. Spirituality is presented not as an escape from life, but as a way of seeing life differently.
The book ultimately moves towards the idea of freedom. Its closing formulation, “God + Desire = Man; Man − Desire = God,” captures the philosophical direction of the journey. The idea suggests that true freedom does not necessarily come from getting everything we want. Instead, it comes from reaching a state where completeness is no longer dependent on desire. Freedom, in this understanding, is not simply the ability to choose what we want. It is the absence of the inner need to become something else in order to feel whole.
I Am Water, Not the Wave is therefore more than a memoir of personal transformation. It is an exploration of identity, desire, relationships, spirituality, and the possibility of discovering something permanent beneath the changing circumstances of life. Mohit Mishra’s journey from technology and entrepreneurship towards Vedanta and self-inquiry gives the book a distinctive contemporary setting while keeping its central questions timeless. The metaphor of the wave and the water remains at the heart of the experience: we may constantly change, succeed, fail, lose, love, and begin again, but perhaps the deepest part of who we are is not the changing wave at all. It is the water beneath it.
