About
Rambharat Singh
known as Critical Monk
My name is Rambharat Singh. On social media people know me as Critical Monk, and the same name sits on this website.
Both halves of it have a reason behind them. Monk comes from the path that reached me through Osho's sannyas. Critical comes from a habit I have never managed to put down: taking the questions a society argues over, the beliefs that have hardened into custom, and the things almost everyone has agreed to call correct, and looking at them properly before saying what I think.
How I came to Osho
It began with listening. I heard Osho speak, then went on listening, and somewhere along the way it stopped being something I was listening to and became the way I was looking at things.
He did not hand me answers. What he did was take apart questions I had been carrying around for years without ever examining them, and a good deal of what I believed could not be put back afterwards in the same shape. The change was not in what I knew. It was in how I saw.
Sannyas came out of that, and out of plain love for the man. I still listen to him, not as study, more the way you go back to someone you are fond of.
Sannyas has never meant turning away from the world, as far as I am concerned. What I see is the opposite of that. Someone who steps a little outside can usually see a society more clearly than someone standing in the middle of it. That is why the two words sit together in my name, and why the pairing has never felt like a contradiction to me.
The work
Writing code is my work and my temperament both. This website is a result of it. Nothing here was handed to anybody else to build; every page was written by me.
My formal education is in mathematics, not computer science. Programming I taught myself at home, by building something, finding what was wrong with it, and putting it back together. That route takes longer, and the understanding it leaves behind is not the kind a syllabus produces.
The years before that were spent with words, in writing and editing, and in learning what people are actually searching for on the internet. That experience shows up in everything I make. Before a page gets built, the first question I ask is what the person arriving on it really needs, and whether they will get it without a struggle.
Over those years I have built a number of free tools and educational resources that students and ordinary readers use every day. Critical Monk is the next step in the same work, with one difference: what goes here does not have to be technical.
The people who read and listen
More than forty thousand people follow this work across Instagram and Facebook, over thirty thousand on Instagram and over thirteen thousand on the Facebook page.
That number reads to me as a responsibility rather than an achievement. A good many of them write to me directly, some with a question, some to point out where something is wrong, and some because whatever they were carrying had to be said somewhere. I read every message myself, and I answer it myself.
This website
Critical Monk is my own space. What arrives here is either something I made or something I spent time sifting through and decided was worth keeping in one place: things to listen to, tools large and small, some writing, and the experiments that have no commercial reason behind them at all.
Earning is not the purpose of this site, and that is not modesty talking. Something built to earn gets built differently, because the decisions inside it turn on what will sell rather than on what will be of use. I would rather not build this one that way.
A few things worth saying plainly
I am not a guru. I have neither the standing nor the wish to show anybody their way. Whatever strikes me as worth keeping, I put here. What to do with it is entirely your decision.
No organisation stands behind this. The website has no official connection to any organisation, trust or foundation. What is said here is said by me, on nobody else's behalf.
Nothing has to be bought. No course, no membership, and no programme that anyone is asked to sign up for.
Technology is not the answer to everything. It is a tool, and a good one, and nothing more than that.
Getting in touch
A question, a fault worth reporting, or something you simply want to say: write to me. There is a form on the contact page if that is easier than an empty email window.
Write to
info.monkza@gmail.comInstagram, X, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn are all linked at the top of this page. Replies there take longer, because email is where I sit down and answer properly.