Tara Lamont

Tara Lamont was born in Kannur, Malabar, on the west coast of India, a land of sunsets, white beaches and swaying palms. In ancient times, Kannur was the center of the world spice trade—Arab merchants arrived during the time of the Prophet, Marco Polo stopped by in 1298. Then came the Portuguese in 1498, followed by the Dutch and the English. Vestiges of these conflicting influences are apparent to this day.

Tara grew up against this backdrop of extraordinary plurality—her mother worshipped Devi, the nuns at school Baby Jesus, her father fashioned himself as a Buddhist existentialist, and her first best friend was a Sunni Muslim. She was immersed in stories—from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, the Odyssey, from O’Henry, Poe and Guy de Maupassant—was schooled in both Eastern and Western philosophies and several religions.

By age 14, Tara had attended six schools across India, each with its unique customs and culture, and by 18, she left for the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a degree in architecture. As a mainstream architect, Tara was responsible for award winning projects such as the San Francisco Opera House restoration. She has also been privately committed to developing innovative and sustainable housing typologies for the world’s urban destitute.

Tara has been a student of non-dual Vedanta for many years under the tutelage of Swami Tadatmananda at the Arsha Bodha Center where the Sanskrit source texts of Vedanta, the Upanishads, are analyzed and discussed in detail. Tara also studies Sanskrit at the Center to gain a more thorough understanding of the astonishing discoveries of these great Indian sages, in their supremely poetic language. MOKSHA is her attempt to present these profound and astonishing discoveries in a straight-forward manner so as to be accessible to the layperson as well as the knowledgeable seeker.

Tara lives and works near New York City and is completing SAMSARA, the second novel in a three-part Vedanta series. Visit her at TaraLamont.com