But is that good or bad fortune all by chance?
I do not know if it is by chance or not. All I know is that there are factors that cannot be foreseen, not so much in the material world but in the world of the spirit. Why did Rajeev Gandhi pick on me to become his xxxxx? And if his brother had not died, he would not have come to politics, or if his mother had not died, he would not have become a person of consequence for another twenty years. And if I had been posted back to India one year earlier, if I had not been sent by his mother to do a job I disliked, I would not have come to his friend Arun Singh and asked him to get me out of it and back to the Foreign Service. All this is happenstance. When I put in an application, it was turned down by the Principal Secretary. So it never reached Rajeev Gandhi. I then thought it was the end of the road. But the Principal Secretary was removed two weeks later. And that opened the road for Rajeev Gandhi to ask me to join him within a few weeks. None of it was in my hands.
I can give you countless examples of things happening with no possible rational explanation. For instance, my sister. She was not married by the age of 27. My mother, deeply concerned, was told that someone in the family had killed a cat and that a special puja had to be done for nine days to make up for it. Only one person in Delhi was available to perform it. He came with another person, who noticed my sister, and offered to marry his son to my sister. And they have been married for 35 years. These kinds of things are inexplicable rationally, but they do take place.

... contd.