My life: Dr Talavane Krishna

DOCTOR DOCTOR I grew up in a remote village in Karnataka state, south India. There was no doctor and hardly any roads. If you needed a doctor, someone would have to walk for 12 miles (20km) and bring one by foot, three hours each way. My mum used to be very sick, miscarriages and all; I used to see her bleed profusely. But you'd send someone out in the monsoon, leeches biting, and still the doctor would come. I remember being about six or seven years old and talking to him about healing. I wanted to be like him. It wasn't easy because my beginnings were very humble. A lot of studying was done by gas lamp because we had no electricity.

QUEST FOR TRUTH I was hung up on becoming a doctor and I worked very hard. But at around 13 I also became very spiritual, which is common in our country and culture. I started doing meditation and seeking truth; I used to go and sit alone in a stream, in a forest and read spiritual books. I met my guru, a great spiritual master, through our headmaster and he told me about Ayurveda, and how other sciences are interconnected with it. And he told me that if I studied modern medicine, one day, how to connect this with Ayurveda would come to me. But it was a long time later, (after I had) worked for nearly 20 years as a paediatric anaesthesiologist in the United States, when I heard (Indian-American alternative-medicine practitioner) Deepak Chopra and others talking about Ayurveda again, and it started to come back to me. I was 43, and had also started to encounter a lot of health problems. I started to hold discussions with Ayurvedic doctors, and I decided to move back to India.

HOLISTIC VIEW Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word that means "the science of life". It's looking at a person in a holistic way and goes all the way back to dealing with the soul; it's about understanding the connection between the astral, the physical and the causal, and gently modifying your life so these aspects are in balance. Ayurveda involves meditation, yoga, the kind of food you eat, the way you arrange your food process, even elements of astrology. There's also vaastu, which is like fung shui - how to bring harmony into your living space - but that's older and more specific. With modern medicine now, especially the latest diagnostic techniques, there is a tremendous contribution it can make, whether in surgeries, treating cancer or trauma. It can complement overall health care also by preventing disease. Medicine is the tip of the iceberg.

SECOND CHANCE My marriage to my second wife is a beautiful story. We grew up in nearby villages and I was very fond of her father. A childhood friend of mine married her, but he died about 20 years ago, and she raised two children. I didn't have any plans to marry again after I divorced but one day I went to a wedding in our village and we met there, and we talked, sparks started flying. That evening I called her and said, "Why don't we get married?" Getting remarried is not very common there. We didn't care, it was our life. After that, it was 15 days until we were married.

MIXED MASSAGE There are places mushrooming up in India (offering) Ayurvedic massage, but the way they massage can give it a cheap reputation. Others say it doesn't work fast enough - they want a quick fix without making changes to their lifestyles. I wanted to correct the misunderstanding and help to bring Ayurveda to the forefront of modern medicine with a centre par excellence. But I could not find a lot of the ingredients required, mainly the skilled human resources. Having practised and trained in Western countries, my thought process is very structured. In modern medicine, if you want to become a surgeon the learning is specific, but there's nothing like that for Ayurveda. There's no standardisation and so it is (often) not taken seriously. Training schools are not up to the mark and in the 5,000-year history of Ayurveda there have been beautiful books by great people, but they're all about the broad concept and philosophy. There's not one single manual that describes how to deliver the treatment step by step. So I developed a training programme and now that it's reached fine perfection I'm making manuals. THE JET SET Founding the (Indus Valley Ayurvedic) centre (in Mysore, Karnataka) was a learning curve. It was stressful in a completely different way to my life in the West. Word of mouth has been essential because I definitely didn't do enough marketing. I get all the ministers of Karnataka and some celebrities to tell others in their social circles (about it). Hollywood actress Yvette Mimieux stayed for a few weeks. One Australian model - married to a South African hedge-fund millionaire - has come three times. Each time her expense is millions of (US) dollars: she comes to Bangalore (about 140km from Mysore) in a private jet with an entourage of bodyguards, rents two helicopters and makes them wait for her and books the entire resort for a week. FOUND THEN LOST We aim to be socially aware. I went to villages like my own, picked up a number of high-school dropouts (who could speak) hardly a word of English and trained them to become excellent therapists. We actually started to have a huge problem with people poaching - at one point almost every hotel in the area would start a massage place and poach our staff by offering a higher salary. So I decided to start a formal training programme.

ACTIVE AGEING I recently created a new concept, called AyurHome, in which we'll create homes according to an Ayurvedic lifestyle - catered and (located) on expanses of land and with access to medical and therapy facilities. We're waiting for investors. It will be a kind of time share so people who are actively ageing can come and get this kind of boost for a few weeks minimum per year as part of a membership. The concept of ageing and wellness has been changing. People don't wait until they're 70 or 80 to check out and chill out; people in their 40s are starting to do that - go on long vacations and taking wellness holidays. We're living longer, and many of us want to prolong the quality of life. People need to take out two weeks per year to really get their toxins out and their stress levels down, and learn how to be kinder to themselves. We can only advise, not insist. But I see such a need for this.