Dr. Priyanka Sarkar works with athletes across sports, focusing on performance and holistic well-being. By aligning personal values with professional goals, she helps athletes explore their mental strengths, overcome challenges, and achieve balance on and off the field.
Across the world, education is often seen as a passport to opportunity. But what if that passport only works if you speak the language of the West? What if the systems that define success, knowledge, and talent are shaped by one worldview, while overlooking the richness of others?
Western models still set the standard in today’s global education and career landscape. Degrees, curricula, and professional benchmarks are built around values and structures that may not fit everyone. For people from India, Asia, Africa, and many other regions, this often means having to prove themselves twice—once for their work and again just to be seen as equal.
Dr Priyanka Sarkar’s journey from working in the tech industry to becoming one of India’s leading sport psychologists is a powerful example of someone who didn’t follow the usual script. Her work helps athletes push past mental blocks and find strength in their own stories, not just in borrowed models. She shows us that true excellence doesn’t always come from Western frameworks. It can rise from lived experience, local wisdom, and deep cultural roots.
Only conversations that unsettle what we think we know, that pull at the roots of our assumptions, are worth having. If we genuinely seek a fair and inclusive world, we must first listen not to what is loudest, but to what has long been ignored. The real shift begins not with answers, but with the courage to sit with discomfort, to hear what wasn’t meant to be heard, and to value what was never meant to be seen as valuable.
In a world where Western models are often held up as the gold standard for success, we rarely stop to ask: whose success story are we telling? “What we often call ‘untapped’ is, in truth, unseen,” says Dr.
Priyanka Sarkar is a pioneering sport psychologist and the first of her kind from Andhra Pradesh.
She tells me that the East has never lacked knowledge; it has long been abundant in wisdom. Non-Western traditions’ philosophies, practices, and lived experiences have nurtured resilience, mental agility, and self-awareness for centuries, long before psychology was shaped into an academic discipline.
Priyanka Sarkar: Our frameworks don’t view the mind as a machine to hack or optimize. We see it as a space to listen to. Take pratyahara from yoga, for example. It’s an active practice of withdrawing the senses to build an inner sanctuary. That’s not escape, it’s centering. The West might call this ‘mental conditioning or mindfulness.’ We’ve called it stillness for generations.
She emphasizes that this isn’t about rejecting the West. It’s about expanding the idea of excellence and meeting it from a rooted place rather than an imitative one. “We don’t need to conform to the West’s definition of brilliance. We can meet it with our own. Not to oppose, but to complete. That’s the quiet power of being rooted.”
A Question of Standards, or Courage? Asked whether a new global standard is needed to embrace plural definitions of excellence, Dr. Sarkar answers thoughtfully. “Uniform excellence is an illusion,” she says.
In India, the paths into her profession don’t always look like the ones drawn out in the West. There, becoming a sports psychologist often requires a predictable academic track: undergraduate psychology, followed by a master’s in sports science and then an optional doctorate. In contrast, Dr. Sarkar holds a Bachelor’s in Physiotherapy (a clinical degree in India), a Master’s in Psychology, and a professional certification in sports psychology.
She avers, “In some international circles, that confuses people. I’ve even been assumed to be a quack or someone who baptized herself with a prefix,” she says with a touch of humour. “But here’s the deeper question: Who decides what counts as the ‘right’ pathway? Is it the West’s version of legitimacy—or the East’s lived reality?”
Dr. Priyanka Sarkar
Dr. Sarkar believes that multiple models of excellence must coexist through oral traditions, apprenticeship, or embodied learning: “We don’t need a new standard, we need the courage to admit that there isn’t only one.” The conversation becomes more urgent when we discuss how “emerging countries” are often treated as educationally lacking by default. “When a student from India or Thailand wants to study in the West, they must take an English proficiency test. But when a student from the West comes to study in Asia, are they asked to prove their Hindi, Thai, or Mandarin skills? Never. That’s the deficit lens in action.”
The consequences, she warns, go far beyond paperwork. “Young minds internalize this hierarchy. They start questioning their own systems, doubting their native methods, even apologizing for their accents. I’ve seen incredibly talented people shrink because their degrees weren’t Western enough.”
This mindset isn’t limited to visa applications or university portals; it echoes in job interviews, fellowships, and boardrooms. It turns centuries-old knowledge systems into “broken tools” awaiting Western repair. “True collaboration begins with unlearning superiority,” Dr. Sarkar says.
She concedes that the West has infrastructure and access. But the East brings something equally vital: emotional endurance, spiritual literacy, and a deep understanding of community care. “It’s not about East versus West. It’s about East and West sitting at the same table equally. That’s where the real work begins. In psychology and education, who decides what counts as valid knowledge?”
I asked Dr Priyanka Sarkar, a psychologist and sports psychology practitioner who is one of the few voices in India anchoring her work in rootedness rather than relentless conformity. Her answer was immediate and unflinching. “Historically? The ones with the podium, the publication, and the microphone. The ones with a Ph.D. from the ‘right’ country. But I’ve learned you don’t have to hold the loudest mic to hold the deepest truth. I challenge authority not by defying it but by not needing it. I speak from where I stand and speak in a voice my people understand. I won’t tell an Indian athlete to leave his parental home to be ‘self-reliant.’ I show him other ways. I work with cultural metaphors, family structures, and rituals. I don’t need to strip someone’s story to justify my science.”
This is no soft rebellion, but it is rooted in sovereignty. For Dr Sarkar, mental strength is not a checklist of goals or a parade of slogans. “It’s about identity,” she says. “About holding your ground when the world wants you to drift. My job isn’t to make athletes palatable to the system but to return them to who they were before the noise. That’s not the method. That’s memory.”
When asked about the ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of education and psychology, her words carry the force of lived truth: “Respectfully, when education becomes one-size-fits-all, it stops being education—it becomes conditioning. Systems love efficiency. But the soul? It asks for depth. The model might serve institutions, but it wounds individuals. I’ve seen students and athletes perform not because they’re learning, but because they’re surviving. Culturally rooted practices are slower, yes, but sacred. They allow people to learn in a language their nervous system understands. These methods don’t just teach skills. They teach selfhood.”
Dr Sarkar’s own story challenges linearity. From IT to physiotherapy to sports psychology, her path has not just defied categories—it has redefined them. “Six years ago,” she recalls, “I changed careers after watching a tennis match. It takes nerve to do that. I didn’t switch paths—I wove them together: analytical thinking from IT, body wisdom from physiotherapy, and the fire of lived experience. And to submit that fire to a foreign paradigm would be an insult to my passion.”
She recently applied for an international accreditation after three years of rigorous work. However, her application was rejected because it didn’t align with the Western framework. “The navigation never ends,” she reflects. “But to anyone caught in this tension: You don’t have to trade your roots for relevance. Your story is already coherent. The world just hasn’t learned to read it yet.”
On the matter of indigenous knowledge, Dr Sarkar is unequivocal. “We must stop calling it ‘exotic.’ Start calling it legitimate. Stop translating it into Western metaphors to make it palatable. Indigenous knowledge doesn’t need decoration. It needs dignity. That means publishing it, practicing it, letting it breathe in classrooms, therapy rooms, and boardrooms. Integration doesn’t mean assimilation. It means standing beside, not beneath.”
As someone who has worked intimately with athletes navigating immense psychological pressure, her philosophy of mental training is startlingly humane: “Mental training isn’t about engineering a perfect performance. It’s about returning someone to themselves. Athletes don’t need more motivation. They need less judgment. Spaces that recognize not just their skills, but their scars. When mental training becomes just another productivity hack, we lose the soul of it. However, something shifts when we see culture and identity not as baggage but as tools. Real strength doesn’t come from erasing yourself to fit a model. It comes from becoming so rooted in who you are that no model can contain you.”
In a time when education systems are under pressure to globalize, standardize, and digitize, Dr Sarkar’s words offer a fierce reminder: resilience doesn’t grow in a vacuum. It takes shape in memory, community, and the refusal to forget your origins.
Indeed, Dr. Priyanka Sarkar eruditely disturbs the dust of our educational temples. She does not offer new answers; she dares to ask older, buried questions: “What if resilience isn’t built in labs but in language? What if healing lies not in disruption, but in remembering? What if education is not the path to success, but the return to self?”
In a world that rushes to certify before it listens, quantify before it understands, and perform before it belongs, Dr. Sarkar offers something quietly radical: dignity without dilution, truth without translation, and strength without surrender. The real question is whether indigenous, culturally rooted knowledge can survive the global age. The real question is: Can global systems survive if they ignore the local soul?
And, if education does not lead us home to ourselves, our stories, and our rootedness, then what exactly is it teaching us to become?
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Dr. Sarkar can be found on LinkedIn. though her website and podcast on YouTube, and by email at priyaankasarkar@gmail.com.
