India, Aug. 26 -- What first sparked the idea of Saraswati? Was it the myth, or the idea of a family scattered across the world?

It was a mixture of the two. The journey began when my babaji died. His ashes were taken back to Punjab to scatter in one of the rivers, and that struck me as a beautiful tradition. But, at the same time, there were stories of rivers in India being declared dead. So, I was researching about rivers and the way they intersect, especially in India, with religion, spirituality and the climate crisis. And that led me to discovering news stories around Saraswati, where certain publications were reporting that the government might be putting money into research centres and bringing the river back. That just seemed lik...